Giving the people what they want

For some unfathomable reason, my posts about Aldi's off-brand lagers are perennially popular with you lot. Never above a bit of click-bait, I filled a basket with ones I hadn't tried on a recent restocking expedition and then dared myself to tackle them. At one stage there was a grand plan to try them blind next to the brands they're aping, as I did with the Peroni one, but it started to look like too much fizz to get through, so these will be judged on their individual merits alone.

We begin with the Budweiser twins. I'm sure there's a very good reason for Aldi offering two different Bud lookalikes, though can't help thinking it must be confusing for a target demographic not used to making choices when it comes to beer. It could be that there's a transition afoot. Breysers is the legacy brand, one which has been around for ages. "100% premium quality ... authentic American style beer ... made in France" is all the essential data Aldi wants to get across to us. In the glass it's a proper pilsner gold with decent head retention, so therefore nothing at all like Bud on that score. There's a slightly metallic tang in the aroma, which does say American light lager to me, but at least suggests the possibility of hops. In the flavour, hops came there none. It's a surprisingly thick and sweet affair, very much unbalanced to the malt side. An initial hit of candyfloss and barley sugar tails off into an unpleasant musty damp-grainsack twang. The upside of all this residual sugar is a big and fluffy Helles-like texture, which is nice and süffig, but very much not the crispness that Bud drinkers will be seeking. This is a poor effort overall, a dismal beer and nul points for resemblance to its originator.

The new kid is Brookston, though they've gone more old-school in their blatant theft of Budweiser's image. This time the can gives us no clue as to the beer's origins, though does tell us it's "premium" four times on the front. Methinks the lager doth protest too much. Maybe it's my imagination because the photos are very similar, but I thought that this bore a closer resemblance to Budweiser: a slightly paler shade of golden. The sweetness has definitely been dialled back but that horrible sackcloth staleness remains, with a weird ready-salted savoury bite. Alongside the extra crispness, there's an accompanying watery quality, making it feel like something has been cut out of it. Some bonus points for tasting and feeling a little like Budweiser, then, but none for being actually enjoyable.

Next on the list for the homage treatment is Carlsberg, and Karlskrone is the Aldi answer. As with the previous two, the ABV is 4.3%, matching the Irish versions of the mainstream brands. It looks well in the Carlsberg glass: the right shade of bright and shiny gold. The aroma is innocent: weighty malt and a mild noble hop grassiness. All very promising. As with Breysers above, the malt leads the flavour, but it's not quite as intensely sweet. There's a certain level of crispness, and no off-flavours. Although it could be accused of being bland, I think there's enough character on display here to tip it into acceptability. I don't know that I would consider it an acceptable substitute for Carlsberg, however -- it's still too heavy and sweet for that. If you don't mind your lager being a little on the sugary side, I would almost recommend this. It's the first one of the sequence to offer actual value for money.

I didn't realise Staropramen had a sufficiently high profile to warrant a clone, but here one is. Strana is a little different to the others in that we are told the brewery of production, and its none other than my old mucker Pearse Lyons of Dundalk. Close followers of the own-brand lager scene will know that Lyons makes an excellent Czech knock-off for Tesco, called Manislav. Strana is the same ABV (5%) so I'm guessing the recipe is at least somewhat similar. It comes in a green bottle, too, so was giving off skunky vibes even before I brought it outside. That's really only in the aroma, however. The flavour is a flawless mix of crisp grain and grassy hops -- hallmarks of a classic Saaz-based světlý ležák. Definitely a cut above the others so far. Shame about the UV-permeable bottle, though.

Finally, what if San Miguel, but cheaper, asked nobody. San Marcos is Aldi's answer. "Tradicional cerveza especial ... brewed in Italy" says the label. It's a little lightweight compared to the real thing at 5% ABV, and looks somewhat pale by comparison too. I'm not at all a fan of that Spanish lager so no points will be awarded for similarity here. It's cleaner, drier and easier to drink, and more appropriate to warm weather. But there's a nasty element too; a plasticky tang that prevents it from being clean, bland and decent like the Karlskrone. The extra strength means it probably works OK as a food beer, where other flavours will mask the flaws. As such, if you're looking for something cheap and relatively cheerful for Mediterranean food -- Spanish or Italian -- this is worth a punt.

A couple of diamonds in this particular rough, then. I haven't decided yet whether I'll tackle the remaining clones. The Corona and Heineken ones are only sold in multipacks and that's a commitment I am not yet ready to make, even for the clicks.

Desperation

Edinburgh Airport. Servisair lounge: the shitty one for passengers of loser airlines. Only five bottles of Efes Pilsener remain among the plentiful Beck's, Carlsberg and Kronenbourg. Maybe the previous passengers know something I don't.

I last encountered Efes a dozen or so years ago in the beautiful surrounds of Istanbul. It was a lot more forgettable than the city and I had no memory of how it tasted. With a few minutes before the Dublin departure was due to be called, I took the opportunity to refresh my memory and anything else the Turkish lager was capable of reaching.

As befits a hot-country lager, it's a very pale yellow colour, thinly textured with lots of prickly fizz. There's a strange candy-sweet aroma putting me in mind of the hard white sweetie cigarettes I rotted my young teeth on. Tastewise, it's properly pilsenerish to begin with, all green spicy nettles, if rather waterier than any German equivalent. Then the sugar starts to assert itself: sweetcorn, rising to candyfloss, and getting worse as the beer warms even slightly. By the end I was finding it a little difficult to drink, though I did stick it out.

On the way out I wondered if the stock was low because the airport is phasing it out. Let's hope so, for the sake of the travellers. Next time I'm having a Beck's.

All beers to all people

I mentioned in passing recently that Molson Coors's operations in Ireland seem to be ramping up somewhat, after three of years of light-touch beer distribution. It really hit home in the weeks that followed and as a result I've ended up with three sets of free samples from the company, which I guess represent three aspects of the Irish beer market.

The PR firm charged with promoting it all sent me a six-pack of their new lager Molson Canadian. From the full-spectrum advertising it's getting this appears to be pitched squarely at the mainstream drinker, a segment in Ireland which seems already to be at saturation point with beers such as Bud, Coors Light (licensed to Heineken), Miller, Carlsberg, Stella, Beck's Vier and Heineken itself, the brand leader. It's a little strange that they figured there was room for another, but there you go. The accompanying marketing material says Ireland is the first territory outside Canada to get Canadian, while the packaging says it's brewed in the UK. It seems unlikely that they're making it across the water just for us, so presumably there are plans to put it on the British market too at some point.

Unusually for this sort of beer it's a mere 4% ABV: 4.3% is the normal strength for these, demanded by the Irish market to such an extent that AB-InBev brew a special version of Beck's Vier at this ABV just for us. I welcome more lower strength beers, but it still seems kinda risky to me. Pouring revealed a pale gold lager topped by a healthy fluffy froth. It must also have knocked quite a bit of the gas out as it was beautifully smooth on the first sip, and nicely sweet too, akin to the better class of Munich helles, with a hint of dry grain husk. It all unravelled pretty quickly after that, however. The sweetness unfolds into a nasty sweetcorn flavour and is joined by a horrible metallic saccharine tang where the hop bitterness ought to be. By the third mouthful, that metal was all I could taste and only the low carbonation stopped it from being completely undrinkable. Quality pilsner it most definitely isn't.

For the casual drinker of "craft" beers, yet another seasonal from Blue Moon, this one called Valencia Grove Amber. The name suggests someone thought that what Blue Moon needed was more orange, but it's actually got less of a sticky fruit thing than usual. Instead the amber malt flavour is to the fore: an intensely sugary biscuit character that builds as it goes down with no hop bitterness or yeast spices to balance it. The finish is a dusty, musty burlap with possibly a vein of coconut through it. 5.9% ABV would suggest a heavy beer but it's not really, and the residual dark sugars reminded me of the sort of effect you get with England's less pleasant heavy brown bitters. Whoever this is aimed at, it ain't me.

It's hard to know whether to take the final two beers seriously or not. They come from a genuine small brewery -- Sharp's of Cornwall -- are of robust and flavoursome styles and are presented in very sober wrappings with thin san serif text and a graphic of the brewer's signature. But then they also arrived with a matching branded bar of chocolate each.

I opened the Honey Spice Tripel first. It's one of those beers that magically transports me straight back to Belgium on the first sip: that beautiful yeast-derived spicy warmth is present from the outset. There's a lovely honey perfume in the aroma and it drinks smoothly, without too much spicing or heat, despite a whopping 10% ABV. The flavour tails off quite quickly, however, leaving a kind of lagerish watery fizz on the end. Not very complex, but tripel doesn't necessarily need to be. Perhaps a bite of the lemon meringue white chocolate would open it out. Nope! The chocolate is delicious but massively overpowers everything else. The intense sugar and lemon zest completely coats the palate and it's impossible to taste anything through it. I began to worry if I'd ever experience another flavour again, and ended up using the remains of the tripel to try and wash it off. When that didn't work I reached for the water biscuits. Lovely chocolate, but not a match for beer or anything else.

To the Quadrupel Ale next, a reddish brown beer, so a little pale for the style, I think. It's also 10% ABV. The aroma is quite, quite beautiful: fresh C-hops in abundance giving an amazing mango and sherbet effect, like the best American amber ales. This is not a beer for aging. It tastes powerfully fruity, full of prunes in particular, but with elements of dates, figs and similar dark chewy loveliness. After a few sips I began to find the sweetness a little bit jarring but the peachy hop echo in the aftertaste makes it worthwhile. The chocolate is a 70% cocoa dark one and is a stroke of pairing genius: the bitterness counteracts the sweet malt perfectly, without interfering with the hops and actually helps clear the palate, something chocolate is not normally known for. With the prunes subdued, the more vinous qualities of the beer come out and I begin to see why the marketing bumf suggests this as an alternative to port as a digestif.

Molson Coors may not be supplying the best beers on the Irish market, but they certainly can't be faulted on the variety.

Familiar territory

Haven't we done this topic before? Matt from Hoosier Beer Geek is hosting March's Session and the topic is "What makes local beer better?" Quite an assumption, there, Matt. Plus, I'm reminded of the June 2007 Session when we were asked to go and get a beer from the nearest brewery to where we live.

I avoided my local brewery for that one, but second time round I think I'll give them a chance. So here it is, to help determine the truth or otherwise of Matt's topic title, a beer hitherto unreviewed by this blog and which, as far as I know is produced a little over 3 kilometres from my front door.

It's called Carlsberg and is one of several different beers brewed in Diageo's St. James's Gate facility. They do move production of many of their beers around between breweries in Dublin, Dundalk and Kilkenny, though that will be coming to an end in the next couple of years as all operations are consolidated in Dublin. If this particular can wasn't born over in Dublin 8 -- almost within visual range of my bedroom window -- millions exactly like it were.

The pour gives us a beer of purest gold topped by a head which is shaving-foam stiff at first, subsiding quite quickly into adolescent patches of white. An intense sugary aroma greets the nose and there's an element of white sugar on taking the first pull. There's not much else to the flavour, mind: I think I'm getting a tiny hop bite right at the very finish, but it's not much. The centre ground of the beer is dull and more than a little watery. It has me wondering what the legend "Exclusive aromatic hops" on the can is supposed to mean. What were the people at that meeting actually drinking?

Still, at least it's not super-fizzy and there are no off-flavours: bland consistency is how my local brewery measures its success.

Is their beer better, though? Well, they employ more people than any other brewery in town and their economies of scale mean that their beer is probably much more environmentally friendly compared to the vast majority of other, less local, breweries. Most things considered, this local beer probably is better, as Matt says. It's just a shame it's so lacking in taste.

Cheap Shep set sesh

For as long as Lidl keep bringing out cheap Shepherd Neame specials, I'll keep buying them. Some day they'll produce something as good as Bishop's Finger or 1698. But that day is yet to come. There were three in the latest round, labelled as the "Master Brewer's Choice", all 4% ABV and on sale for the totally-worth-a-punt sum of €1.49 each.

The most promising of the three was called Tapping the Admiral but the anticipation was short-lived: when the cap came off there wafted out an unmerciful stench of lightstruck hops. Open a window and don't nobody smoke: something's crawled into this beer and died. Of dysentry. Ignoring the stink, the beer is an attractive gold colour, but that's it's best feature. Amazingly there's no trace of those pungent hops in the flavour. Instead there's a woeful sickly cheap-chocolate sweetness. This is apparently supposed to evoke brandy, but offers no heat, no wood and no fruit; just a box of Milk Tray from three Christmases ago you found at the back of a cupboard. Avoid.

Autumn Blaze was next. It looks the part, all auburn and russet and the other adjectives from that shelf in the hair dye section. There's no assault on the olfactory nerve, though up close it has a sort of maple syrup woody stickiness. Nothing really jumps out in the flavour: a little bit of roastiness but there's nothing more than fizzy water behind it. Put it on cask to bring out the malt more and this would perform adequately as a workhouse brown bitter. As-is it's perfectly drinkable, but so laid back flavourwise as to be comatose. Your granddad will like it.

Palest of the lot is 4-4-2, with its daft claim to use ten different hop varieties. Using up leftovers, were we? This made its first appearance during the World Cup and my first impressions on tasting it is that they've gone straight for the lager-swilling demographic. Rather than the cascade (see what I did there?) of multitudinous hop flavours it has a vaguely grassy Germanic feel to it. Beneath that there's slight toasty malt and lots of fizz. If the aim was to produce a clone of Beck's or Carlsberg then they've done a bang-up job. But as a tasty pale ale it's a poor show.

And there you have it: two beers that are so-so in their own way and one absolute (literal) stinker. In all honestly I can't say if there's better beer going for €1.50 a half litre in Dublin. Maybe the Franziskaner next to it in Lidl. I'm actually slightly intrigued as to what the Shep-Lidl Alliance is going to throw at us next. I dub this game "Kentish Roulette".

Festival season

It's been a busy few days, beerwise, involving some thorough investigations into the new wave of Irish beers on the scene right now. It began with the kick-off of The Porterhouse Independent Irish Beer & Whiskey Festival on Thursday. This year, joyously, the range is too big to squeeze onto one bar so it took trips to both Central and Temple Bar branches to get a taste of all the newcomers.

Pale ales are something of a theme at the moment, and alongside Carlow's heavy O'Hara's IPA, Whitewater have produced Copperhead: a 3.7% ABV sessioner. It's the dark gold shade of Budvar and gives off a peachy fresh-hop aroma. After an initial strong and waxy bitter hit, it provides punchy citric notes, all on a smooth and very easy-to-drink body. I love this beer, and especially the way it crams so much flavour into a low level of alcohol, guaranteeing the first pint is followed by a second, no matter how many new and interesting beers are on the bar next to it.

At the opposite end of the scale there's Golden Otter, a new one from Franciscan Well. A distinctive, vaguely familar, aroma leapt out of the cloudy brown liquid and continued to dominate the flavour on tasting. It took me a few minutes to figure out what it was, but I eventually pinned it down as Marmite: that sharp, almost beefy, yeast flavour that tends to indicate beer which has been left fermenting too long. I couldn't help but think that this is more a beer for spreading on your toast than drinking. Additionally there's a barnyardy funk to the flavour as well, adding up to an ale perhaps most kindly described as "rustic". Not one I'll be ordering again.

White Gypsy have three newbies out and about at the moment. One, Bruinette, is described as an Irish red and as a Scottish export, depending where you read. It's definitely darker than the typical Irish red with next to no carbonation, leaving it feeling a bit thin. Yet the lack of fizz allows lots of malty flavours come through uninterrupted. I got chocolate, raisins, cherries and some dry roastiness too. Bruinette appears simple but actually packs in a lot if you take your time over it.

On the lighter end of the colour spectrum there's White Gypsy Emerald, a cask IPA. The Porterhouse had this on gravity at Temple Bar where it poured really quite lifeless and dull -- perhaps not yet ready for consumption. Across in Galway, however, The Salt House are serving it from their handpump with a super-tight sparkler ensuring the beer comes to life and performs for the drinker as the brewer intended. Its density means a long wait for it to settle, but when it does you're left with a beautifully clear pale amber ale topped by a firm and lasting blanket of foam. The hoppiness is quite subtle: it's bitter but not intensely so; fruity without being zingy per se. In short, Emerald is a solid, enjoyable sup of the sort that wouldn't elicit any special remarks in Northern England but is fantastic to encounter in an Irish pub.

Last of the Templemore three is Amber, a simple deep gold lager with the smooth body, bubblegum fruitiness and no-nonsense drinkability of a quality blonde ale. This won the Best Lager category in The Porterhouse's competition, and rightly so. I'm not generally a fan of Ireland's microbrewed pale lagers, but this is one I would keep coming back to. For the record, the bottled version of Porterhouse Oyster won best beer overall: not necessarily my choice, but a very fine beer indeed.

There was just one new black beer in the line-up: O'Hara's Easter Stout. It's not a radical departure from the flavours in O'Hara's usual stout, or their cask Druid's Brew: only the emphasis is different. Easter Stout, perhaps appropriately, is all about the chocolate. It's rich, dense and smooth: like concentrating two pints of regular O'Hara's into a single glass. Yum.

I mentioned above encountering Emerald in The Salt House. This was on Saturday in the run-up to the Irish Blog Awards. The Award Fairy passed me by on the night, but landed in the seat to my right when Nine Bean Row deservedly took the gong for best newcomer. Congratulations to 'Neen, and to the dedicated team of staff writers, photographers, researchers and editors whose tireless work makes her blog the success it is.

Meanwhile, back at the pub, James has dealt more blows to industrial swill since my first visit to The Salt House, ditching the last few bottles of Heineken from the fridge and removing the Carlsberg tap, leaving Guinness as the only remaining factory-produced Irish beer in his bar. For now. In addition to the hand-picked import lagers on draught, there's now Galway Hooker Pils. As it happened, Aidan the brewer was in The Salt House late on Saturday evening, and he said it's not an especially inspiring recipe -- more a workmanlike made-to-order job. I have to say I quite liked it. Its best feature is a lack of fizz which makes it smooth and very easy-going. Nothing in the flavour really jumps out, but one interesting feature is a lemony fruitiness before it fades to a dry grainess, just turning slightly unpleasantly to must at the end. Still, no harsh bitterness and no funk: as a pale lager it does actually work better than most brewed around these parts.

And that's the end of the Irish beer for the moment. Festival season reaches a crescendo next weekend with The Franciscan Well's annual shindig in Cork. This year it's not only debuting new Irish beers, but also two brand spanking new breweries helmed by regular commenters on this blog: Cormac and Co's Dungarvan Brewing, and Thom, Paul and Stephen's Trouble Brewing. I'm so excited I'll hardly be able to demand my free samples.

Beer in the park

I've been going to Taste of Dublin for the last three years. It's an annual highlight on my calendar and generally involves a large group of friends and some superb food. I don't think it's just my perception that the event has been getting beerier -- appropriate, perhaps, given that the venue was once the Guinness family's back garden. As with previous years, many of the country's big importers were there, but there were some interesting new additions. The Porterhouse were sporting their new design livery, plus a bigger range of beers than before: I was very happy to be able to get a pint of the marvellous Wrassler's XXXX. They also had some very cool looking mocked-up bottles on display, a hint that we may not have to wait much longer for bottled Porterhouse beers? None of the other Irish micros had a presence, though I did meet Kay and Seamus O'Hara from Carlow Brewing, there in an unofficial capacity.

The biggest beercentric event was the Beer Naturally Academy, organised by the macrobreweries' campaign to promote beer and food matching. They had flown in beer guru Marc Stroobandt to run the half-hour seminars, and he did a pretty good job of it, especially considering the tasteless materials he had been given to work with: Carlsberg, Heineken, Paulaner, Smithwick's and Guinness, matched with cheddar, chili prawn, smoked sausage, cheese tartlet and Belgian chocolate tart, respectively. Thom gives a full run-down of the gig here. It's easy to be cynical at this sort of thing, but there's a lot to be said for driving home the message of beer and food, and the emphasis on cheese and chocolate was particularly welcome. Stroobandt knows his stuff and is well able to deliver it in an entertaining way.

I missed getting to taste the Mexican chili lager one of the stalls was enthusiastically pimping, but I'm sure I'll get round to it eventually. It looks horrible. Instead, I hot-footed it from the Jaipur stall to California Wine Imports and announced "I have curry; give me beer!" Jonathan presented me with one of his newer arrivals: Black Diamond Amber Ale. "British Inspired" it says on the label, which explains why it's not as incredibly citric as the likes of Speakeasy Prohibition, say. What the English hops lend it is a gentle, tannic, very slightly metallic bitterness, sitting on a beer that's very much malt-driven: smooth, big-bodied and well-balanced. Jonathan also gifted me a jar of Sierra Nevada Stout Mustard, something else he's bringing into Ireland. I look forward to trying that -- it sounds brilliant. He also raised the possibility of adding the Stone beers to his range. That would be nice. Very nice.

And that was Taste for another year. Thanks to Jim and Liam from the Porterhouse, Dan from Beer Naturally, and the California Wine Imports team for their generosity. The variety of beers available was truly heartwarming, and here's hoping for even more beer goodness next time round. Perhaps another Irish micro might want to take a stall?

11,894 miles

I do love the Google Maps street view thingy. For this month's Session we've been asked to talk about a beer from the furthest brewery we've ever been to -- a topic hand-picked for a checklist beer tourist like me -- and Google Maps lets me wander up and down Rattray Street in Dunedin, home of the Speight's Brewery which I visited back in 2006 and is the most distant one I've been to. Look: you can even see the free water fountain to the left of the front door which the brewery provides for the townsfolk.

It's just a shame that the beers made by Speight's (a division of all-conquering antipodean drinks giant Lion Nathan) are mostly not very good. I really enjoyed a couple of them though -- the Old Dark and Chocolate Ale -- but all you ever see here is the flagship Gold Medal Ale.

New Zealand must be one of very few countries in the world -- alongside Ireland and the UK -- where the default beer style isn't lager. Instead it's a bland, light red ale generally called "Draught". Like Irish reds, I assume that there is a full flavoured English pale ale somewhere in its ancestry, but big brewing interests have shaped the national taste to their own nefarious ends, and New Zealand Draught is the cold, dull result.

It took a fair bit of effort to track down a bottle in Dublin, but the redoubtable Deveney's in Dundrum was able to meet my needs. Mind you, since this is brewed in factories in Christchurch and Auckland as well as the headquarters down in Dunedin, I can be fairly sure that the particular bottle I had did not actually come from the brewery I visited. I hope that doesn't put me outside the Session rules.

My abiding memory of the beer, as recorded after first meeting it, was that it tasted like Carlsberg. Now, nearly three years later, I think it's actually worse. It's very watery and slightly musty, despite being several weeks inside its best-before. There's a trace of a caramel malt sweetness somewhere at the back, but it's gone in an instant. It may be an ale on a technicality, but this is far closer to generic world lager than the ale it probably once was.

For me, however, the pleasure of travel is far more in the anticipation than the memories. I've drank beer on all but one of Earth's inhabited continents; only South America has eluded me so far. To get a little bit of a vicarious thrill from a far-away brewery, I picked up two beers from a Brazil's Cervejarias Kaiser. First up is Palma Louca, their pale lager. Not much by way of a head on this one and the fizz is fine and balanced. I thought I detected a whiff of vinegar from it on pouring, but I may have imagined it as it is fairly odourless and as light in the taste department as it is in colour (very). But I have to say I quite liked it. It could easily have been an overly fizzy, sugar-laden monstrosity, or a watery concoction that barely resembles beer, but despite some scary E-numbered adjuncts, this is an easily quaffable no nonsense hot-country lager. If it's left to get warm, a hint of green apples appears, but letting it get warm is really not what this beer is about. It was slightly out of date so I paid €1 for it in DrinkStore and, drinking it on a stiflingly hot evening earlier this week, I couldn't help but feel I got my money's worth.

Xingu is the name of the brewery's black lager, also €1, but I don't think I did as well here. It looks attractive enough, with its tan head and dense brown body, and I think there's a pleasant, mild-like light coffee roastedness hidden in there somewhere. But for the most part it's as tasteless as the lager, and the little bit of flavour that does come through has a rather unpleasant brown sugar stickiness to it. Again it's far too bland to be actually considered bad, but it leaves you searching for the taste, and when you find it you feel you wasted the effort.

Like most of the world, I expect South America to be a mixed bag, beerwise. And isn't that half the joy of intercontinental beer travel? I wouldn't have it any other way.

Fit for a prince

Yeah, just pretend you didn't already read Thom's bit on Fürstenberg last week, eh? That way, this'll all be new to you...

The first time I ever heard the word "reinheitsgebot" I would have been about eight or nine. It was in a TV ad for Fürstenberg lager, a beer which Guinness (as they were then) had recently acquired the licence to brew and were promoting heavily. By the time I was old enough to drink, it was still clinging on at the budget end of the Diageo range, next to Harp and Satzenbrau, while Bud and Carlsberg claimed the premium spots (yes, I know). Then, at some point in the late 1990s, it vanished leaving only thousands of give-away steins as evidence it had ever been here. Warsteiner now occupies then took over (see comments) the same odd place in Diageo's five-lager Irish portfolio.

In the meantime, Fürstenberg was acquired by Heineken, and has now re-appeared on the Irish market in bottled form. Perhaps the new distributors are hoping for the nostalgia factor, and that punters will dust off those long-empty steins. Tesco are stocking it at the knock-down price of €2.19, and I decided to give it a go.

There's actually quite a decent aroma from it, a proper hoppiness which is very attractive. The body was the next thing I noticed: there's enough here to lend it that almost-creamy texture that marks out quality German pilsner. But that's where the plaudits end. The actual flavour itself is rather uninteresting. Still, I was drinking this with a vindaloo, where the full body was of much greater benefit, taking on the chilli heat and dampening it. Fürstenberg, then, is a decent but ultimately boring quaffing lager. If that's your bag I'm sure there are better uses for €2.19.

While I was at it, I also picked up a bottle of Hofbräu Original, from another blue-blooded German brewery. The pour is a lovely limpid gold and the gentle carbonation gives it the smoothness characteristic of a Munich helles. Again, we have quite a big body, but here the sugary origins of it are very apparent. It's way too sweet and slides into cloying towards the end of the glass.

I'm a little surprised to find myself preferring the sharper, drier Black Forest lager to the full and malty Munich variety, but there you have it. Not that either of them was any great shakes, but I'm using the tall German bottles for the IPA I just made (à la Russian River), so it's still a win for me.

Love lager

When it comes to beer, Ireland is pretty much synonymous with stout. As far as I can tell, this is largely down to Diageo's marketing power rather than what anybody actually drinks. The latest figures , from 2006 (p.12 here), say that 63% of all the beer sold in Ireland is lager (stout is most of the rest, with ale a mere 5%). The typical Irish pub certainly offers a dizzying array of locally brewed lagers. You'll find Bud, Carlsberg, Heineken, Miller and Coors Light side-by-side on almost every bar. More upmarket places will also have draught imports like Stella Artois and Beck's Vier, and bottles of Sol, Corona and Tiger as well, while pubs serving a less affluent clientele will have local Amstel and Fosters bringing up the rear.

When Ireland's first lager brewery closed up shop in the summer of 1893 after a meagre 19 months in business, I'm sure Mr Stoer who owned it never dreamed that the daring new style he found in Bavaria and the US would one day rule supreme in Irish beer. Yet when the latter-day beer pioneers Oliver and Liam set up The Porter House in the 1990s, it was inevitable that lager would be a key component in their success. The first brews were called Probably Lager and WeiserBuddy, each with its own distinct and individual branding.

Of course, the multinational which holds the licence to brew Carlsberg and Bud in Ireland threw a fit, and the beers were hastily renamed. I've already covered the Porterhouse's Bud clone back here and today I'm looking at the other two lagers they make and sell: Temple Bräu and Hersbrucker. And yes, I'm well aware that by writing about fancy-pants microbrewed beer I'm breaking my own Session rule on plain everyday lager. Sue me.

I got my first sip of Temple Bräu in just before the rain started and we had to leave the beer garden of Porterhouse North. I hadn't tasted it in a long long time so had basically no expectations, other than what you see here: a fizzy yellow lager aimed at the mass market. I was still surprised, however. It's nice. The body is quite full and comes close to the creaminess you get in the best German pilsners. The aroma indicates a definite hop character and it tastes pleasantly bitter with a long aftertaste. All is not completely rosy in the beer garden, however: there's a bit of a metallic tang as well, right in the middle of the whole thing, though not enough to spoil the enjoyment. Despite its flaw, Temple Bräu remain a tasty quaffer for sunny afternoons.

Inside, I moved on to Hersbrucker. Once upon a time, this was Mrs Beer Nut's regular tipple but she quit a couple of years ago, citing an unpleasant change in the beer. I had never been a fan so was very much on the alert as I took my pint back to the table. Rightly so, as it happened. Hersbrucker, slightly darker than Temple Bräu, is damn near undrinkable. The only thing that saves it is its watery hollowness. The flavour starts with nothing but is followed by a massive disinfectant flavour: pure essence of hospital. Sharp, tangy and unpleasant. I did, in its defence, finish the pint, but I couldn't help thinking that I might have been better off with a pint of Carlsberg, sadly.

I was going to leave this post here, but the guilt about drinking microbrewed lager got the better of me. I had to go back to my roots.

It's very hard to find a pint of Harp in Dublin. It was still relatively common in the mid-1990s but pretty much disappeared soon after. Diageo brew it in Dundalk and just about all of it heads north across the border. Fortunately (or not), there are a couple of hold-outs around town, one being O'Neill's of Suffolk Street, a vast pub that seems possessed of the desire to stock every draught beer that exists anywhere on the Irish market. They have a Harp tap. Since it's the beer I drank most when I started drinking beer, I felt I owed you all a pint.

And it's not awful. I was astounded at how unawful it is. It's not in the least watery and has quite a sweet foretaste with a bit, but not much, of a bitter kick at the end. To be completely frank I doubt I could tell this blind from your typical pale Czech lager. In fairness that's probably more a damning indictment of what the multinationals have done to the established lagers of Prague and Plzeň than any kind of kudos for Diageo, but still: I could actually drink Harp without complaining. That's an eye-opener for me.

And that's all I've got to say on the yellow fizz of Ireland. Post your linkages somewhere on here, or e-mail me or whatever. A round-up will be forthcoming some time in the next week. In the meantime, I'm off to Belgium for the weekend where I won't be so much as tempted by a Jupiler. I'll likely be Twittering my way through Cantillon's public brewday tomorrow, but unfortunately won't be able to read your jealous howls until I return.

Villa of the Damned

Travel arrangements not of my making have landed me in Cyprus for the week. The whole island is a permanent building site and the cement is barely dry on the villa I'm staying in, but there's wireless broadband, so I'm surviving. I was here before, several years ago, so was perfectly aware that beer is not one of the island's strongpoints. Therefore it is in the spirit of determined and pointless tickerism that I here present these offerings.

The dominant local brand is Keo, from a manufacturer in Limassol which pumps out wine, spirits, "sherry" and this maize-laden pale lager. It's a very light and limpid shade of yellow and as gassy as you might expect. It's bulked up with maize, and I suspect quite a lot of it too: the flavour is very sweet and very corny. There's also a severe lack of body so the finish tails off into wateriness where the hops bite ought to be. I'm not a fan.

Carlsberg is the other ubiquitous brand on the island, and it's been brewed here since 1966. Certainly it's one to turn to for a bit less sweetcorn and a bit more hops than Keo. The brewery is owned by drinks magnate, property developer, financier and all-round Big Cheese Photos Photiades. His minions churn out another beer under his own brand, called Leon. It shows that the people brewing this have been making Carlsberg for nearly half a century: it's a very heavily carbonated golden lager, with a decently full body and just a hint of bitterness. Carlsberg tend to be quite proprietorial about their yeast and hops, according to their hype. Leon makes me wonder how close an eye the lads above in Copenhagen are keeping on their licensees at the opposite corner of the continent.

I should get another post in before I leave. No, there won't be any good beer in it. Probably (as Mr Photiades might say).

Time for a ruby?

Beer and food? That's a no-brainer for me and means curry every time. Historically speaking, the beer should be Carlsberg, the first lager to be associated with Indian food back in the 1920s. In general, however, I tend to drink Cobra. Yes I know it's made with maize and is about as Indian as I am, but I don't care.

In the halcyon days of the Dublin Brewing Company, my curry would always be accompanied by Maeve's Crystal Weiss, a spectacular spicy weissbier which sat beautifully with Indian food. It's gone now, though another Irish craft wheat beer is almost as good, namely Curim from the Carlow Brewing Company.

For this post, however, I'm going with a new "slow-brewed" lager called Time. This appears to be another one of the plastic paddies I ranted about over on Hop Talk last month. "Born in Ireland" says the label, and "Brewed in the European Union". The web address given is dead and the company address is an office over a boutique in central Dublin, also the address of several marketing and communications companies. It all adds up to contract brewed abroad and passed off as Irish.

Time, incidentally, was a brand formerly used by Smithwick's before it was taken over by Guinness. If Diageo still owned the trademark, no doubt they would have had it made at one of their Irish lager factories in Kilkenny or Dundalk where they make Harp, Satzenbrau, Bud and Carlsberg. However, I'm told the "Time Brewing Company" acquired the name when the trademark lapsed and they're having this brewed in England.

The beer itself, I'm pleased to report, is quite decent. It has a fairly light carbonation for a pilsner, which is a plus point when it comes to curry, and a bold malty flavour which cuts through the vindaloo sauce beautifully. At the end there's a little bit of a dry hops bite, but nothing too severe. It puts me in mind of Beck's, and if I had to guess a country of origin I would have placed it in Germany. All-in-all, Time passes the curry test with flying colours.

However, what with the vast range of eastern European lagers now available at bargain prices, I find it bizarre that someone would try and push an Irish-themed premium-priced lager onto the market. This sort of money will get you a bottle of Flensburger or Augustiner in any decent off licence. Why would a punter, either here or abroad, be attracted to this?

Dispatch from Denmark

I spent the long weekend in Copenhagen and managed to pack quite a range of beers into it. The brewery scene is unsurprisingly dominated by Carlsberg and its subsidiary Tuborg, and another big brewery, Royal Unibrew. They each produce a number of lagers and red ales. Bog-standard Carlsberg pilsner, I found, is largely the same product as is brewed under licence abroad. I was expecting it to be different the way Heineken is different in the Netherlands, but I guess Carlsberg take better care of their global identity. On the ale side, Carlsberg make Carl's Special which I found quite vapid and flavourless, much like the American Killian's Red. Slightly better is Carlsberg Dark, which has a sweeter, more caramelly flavour. Both of these suffered from being served very very cold. I had to let them stand several minutes before I could taste anything.

Another surprise was that Tuborg, the lesser brand in the Carlsberg stable, is more prevalent in restaurants and bars than the flagship product. The basic Tuborg Green is very dull and tasteless, reminding me of Budweiser. Tuborg Classic is a fuller pilsner, reminiscent of Carlsberg in taste, though somewhat darker coloured. Finally, Tuborg Gold is a deliciously sweet lager and very easy to drink. Probably the best lager in Denmark, in fact.

Royal Pilsner brings us back down to the Tuborg-Green-level: nothing to write home about. Royal Export is a lager with a bit more oomph. It weighs in at 5.6% and feels every bit of it. Stella is probably the closest approximation. Finally, Royal Classic is a red ale and the best of the genre in Denmark. Even though it is also served too cold, the sweet, rich taste comes through it. Royal Classic is one of the best mass-produced draught red ales I've tasted.

On then to the microbreweries, and I managed to squeeze in visits to three in Copenhagen. BrewPub is one of the newest and seems to be still finding its feet. I didn't see any signs of any brewing apparatus, for instance. I tried the William Wallace 80/- and rather enjoyed it. It's much less fizzy than any of the mass-produced 80/- I've had in Scotland from the likes of Tennant's or McEwan's. I also had BrewPub's IPA which turned out to be really light and I reckon rather good as an accompaniment for curry.

The Apollo microbrewery is next to the main entrance to the Tivoli gardens. There is a distinct Austrian character to both the pub and the beers. Only two were available on Saturday night: a dark and cloudy pilsner with a quite sharp taste, and another IPA: cloudier and tastier than BrewPub's, but still lighter than any of the IPAs I know from England.

The best microbrewery of the three, in my opinion, is Nørrebro Bryghus. It's a bit further out of the city centre than the other two but well worth the journey. It is in a cellar which is divided between the bar and the brewery, giving the clearest insight into the brewer at work of any brewpub I've been to. There's even a small but select library on beers and brewing. Like the other two microbreweries, it only sells its own produce, and there is a substantial variety. Of course, not everything on the menu was available at the time. What was on tap had a Belgian theme running through it. The Abbey-style golden beer did a very good impression of Westmalle tripel: very full-flavoured. The S:t Hans Dubbel was also a worthy imitation: dark and sweet and sticky as a dubbel should be. They also, uniquely for a microbrewery of my experience, did a framboise beer. Belgian brewers add fruit (raspberries in this case) to gueze beer to take away the worst of the sudden dryness that some find unpalatable. However, this version doesn't seem to be based on gueze, and instead there is just the raspberry flavour and not much beyond it. An interesting novelty, but not something I'd make a habit of drinking, and I don't think it's part of the regular house beer selection. Nørrebro Bryghus is somewhere I look forward to going back to when I next happen to be in Copenhagen.

But there are plenty of other places to go without covering my tracks. I took advantage of Copenhagen's rail link to Sweden and scooted across to Malmö to try out the beers of another country for an afternoon. Åbro Original is another one of the plain, bog-standard lagers, though better than Tuborg's effort described above. Åbro also make a premium lager called Bryggmästarens which is deliciously sweet and fruity, similar to Tuborg Gold and to another Swedish lager called Spendrups. The Spendrups brewery also makes Mariestads lager. I found this to have an unpleasant dryness that hits the back of the throat, a bit like Red Stripe.

Just one more beer completes the Scandanavian experience, although it's German. No trip to Copenhagen would have been complete without a visit to Christiania. In the Nemoland bar I discovered a German hemp beer called Turn. It certainly has the green vegetable taste I'd expect, and was quite enjoyable, but having already tried the hemp beer they make in 7 Stern in Vienna I know it can be done better.

So there we have 21 new beers, which is not bad for a trip that lasted less than three days. They say that Copenhagen is an up-and-coming destination for beer tourism, and it certainly seems to be heading that way. I suppose if you're bored with the usual places (how anyone could get bored of beer in Brussels is beyond me) it's worth a quick look, though beware of the prices: in this the cheapest Scandanvian capital you'd be lucky to get a pint for less than €6, and for the microbrewed stuff it's possible to sail towards €8-9 for 40cl. Priced for the connoisseur, I suppose...

Weiss of the North

I never thought I'd see the day when Hoegaarden was easier to get on draught in Belfast than in Dublin, but there you go. Things have certainly changed in the city where beer was recently limited to Guinness and Harp/Smithwick's or Tennent's/Bass depending on who controlled the supply to that bar.

Amazingly, in the Duke of York, where one can get Hoegaarden, Stella, and Carlsberg (among others) on tap, people were still drinking Harp. What's that about? Still, people were also drinking alcopops so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised it's a low-taste zone.

On the higher-taste front, while in Belfast I discovered an English beer called Curious Brew. It's a strange little dark lager, with distinct yeasty-aley overtones. One to be savoured (and not chugged down in the hotel bar at the end of a ten-hour session and after everywhere else has closed, ahem).

And just for the sake of completeness (which is what this blog is about), I also added Eisbrau Czech pilsner to my list of beers tried (something I will actually add to the side panel one of these months). It's passable, in the mould of Budvar. And, er, that's all I have to say about it.

Cheap 'n' fizzy

For all my ravings about craft-brewed this and complex-flavoured that, I do like to keep a supply of easy-drinking fizzy lager in the house for everyday drinking. My beer of preference for this is Euroshopper lager from Superquinn, which I took a shipment of last night.

Euroshopper beer has a bit of a bad press, having a dodgy name, being dead cheap and the favourite of Dutch al fresco alcoholics. But this reputation is ill-deserved.
The case for the defence:

1. It's Dutch. Imported from the Netherlands: a nation who know how to make beer and expect much of it (though why Heineken allow their name to be used on such dreadfully vapid lagers brewed under licence around the world is beyond me. It might possibly have something to do with the money).

2. The can, though not designed by a team of psychologically-trained marketing experts, features a list of ingredients (and there's nothing there that shouldn't be there). Listing ingredients ought to be mandatory and it would certainly help to show people in this country at least what shite goes into the beers made by the big industrial breweries.

3. It's drinkable. A lot of the cheap lagers we get taste awful. Dutch Gold, for instance, is made from and tastes of, sweetcorn. Harp, Carling, Fosters and the other less-than-premiums all have something wrong in the flavour department. Euroshopper, however, is at least as good as Carlsberg and Heineken and significantly better than Bud. I think the reason for this goes back to point 1.

4. It's full strength. The premiums weigh in at around 4.2-4.3% ABV. Euroshopper is the full 5. Why pay more for less?

5. It's cheap. At €1.15 per 500ml it's close to half what you'd pay in a supermarket for Budweiser, Carlsberg, Heineken or Miller. That €1.15 pays for the beer that's in the can and the journey from the brewery. It does not pay for TV advertising, sports sponsorship or all the other expensive stuff the big guys use to get us to buy their mediocre beer at hyperinflated prices.

Having said all that, I notice that DBC's Beckett's lager is now being sold for €1.29 a bottle. I'd trade up to that in a heartbeat if I could find a way of buying it in the quantities I want.