Choc around the Lough

Not a wet week after I reviewed that series of extremely tasty stouts from Lough Gill, they're at it again. Two more stouts today, a little less full-on, though both including chocolate as a key ingredient.

"Irish Chocolate Stout" is the straightforward description on Ben Bulben, a 6% ABV job whose blurb promises a "sumptuous" and "intense" experience. It doesn't seem so to begin with, looking a bit thin as it pours, with a poor score on head retention. The aroma does say chocolate, though, or at least bang-average drinking cocoa. I was not braced to be impressed. And that's fair enough -- it's not a big and flouncy chocolate stout, but a solid and reliable one, reminding me a little of the Porterhouse's Chocolate Truffle and a lot of Young's Double Chocolate. It is solidly drinkable and pleasingly clean for a chocolate stout, with quite a high carbonation to scrub the palate before the candy grease descends on it. The finish is clean too, leaving a dusting of cocoa powder and a mild hop bite, but no sticky sugar. I expected something much more sickly and was very pleased by what I got instead. For €3.50 it's a bargain. Buy a few.

The next one was rather spendier at €6, though it is 10% ABV and brewed with a fancy collaborative partner in Alewife of New York. With Sometimes You're A Nut (indeed, sometimes I am) the visuals are altogether better: a sleeker black colour with a creamy Irish-coffee head lasting all the way down. The name references both coconut and almond in the flavour, though of course only the former shows up in the aroma. I was immediately playing Hunt The Almond. The flavour has warmth and smoothness and plenty of coconut for a dark-chocolate Bounty effect, but nothing I could pin as almond. Oh well. It's still very good though, retaining the balance and approachable quality of the previous one, but adding a rich sippable quality commensurate with the strength. Like the previous set of archaeology-themed beers (one of which is the Irish brewers' beer of the year), this is pure class and effortlessly integrates novelty ingredients that often feel jarring when other breweries do it. One can argue whether "best pastry stout brewer" is a true position of honour, but Lough Gill definitely holds it for Ireland.

Despite the commonalities these are two very different beers. I think that means that Lough Gill can keep churning out chocolate flavoured stouts and I can keep drinking them and still say I'm tasting a broad spectrum of beers. Great! As you were.

Green and black

Always one for smashing national stereotypes, I'm writing about Irish stouts this St. Patrick's Day.

As it happens, there's a plethora of them about. When I started planning Monday's general Irish beer round-up I noticed the black seam running through it and decided to separate it out. And here we are.

For two of them I didn't have to even move barstools in The Black Sheep. A pair of their cask beer engines were dedicated to stouts, one of them an intriguing collaboration between our own Trouble Brewing and prize-winning Danish brewers Coisbo. Coalition, apparently, is mainly destined for Denmark and is a milk stout with added vanilla, at 5.6% ABV. It goes for chocolate in a big way, bearing a strong resemblance to the excellent Porterhouse Chocolate Truffle Stout which itself has just made its annual return to the taps across the Porterhouse estate. Coalition adds in a full-fat milky wholesomeness, in texture as well as flavour. It's a long time since I last came face to face with a bowl of Coco Pops, but this beer really went Proustian on me. Searching for the vanilla turns up a custardy crème brûlée lacing running through it. There's a deft bit of balancing going on here, between the childishly fun dessert effects and an elegant, silky-smooth drinking stout. I thoroughly enjoyed all of its aspects.

One pump to the right there was Ulster Black, a new oatmeal stout from Monaghan's Brehon brewery which also turns out the excellent Shanco Dubh porter. The aroma had me expecting another chocolate bomb: a huge sweet and creamy hit from the get-go. But, bizarrely, there's none of that on tasting. Instead it wrong-foots the drinker into a serious burnt -- almost carbonised -- bitterness, tasting purest black with notes of tar and coal dust. Once I was over the initial shock I found a warm blanket of oatmeal in behind, offering a kind of porridge or Ovaltine winter's day comfort. Nobody will mistake this for a kiddie's breakfast cereal: its pleasures are very much grown-up ones.

JW Sweetman, meanwhile, has been tearing through a batch of cask Stout lately on its shiny new beer engines. The sparkler is optional (I went without) and the beer is pretty much much bang-on for an Irish session stout. A tweaked version of the Barrelhead Dry Stout first produced in 2014, this retains a dry, crisp, dark roast smacking the back of the palate, but up front there's an altogether more cuddly chocolate and coffee flavour. And then a surprise pinch of light sourness which I can only (but shouldn't) describe as Guinnessy. While deliciously complex it is, gloriously, not a sip-and-consider beer but one to be poured into the face in quantity, as our grandaddies intended, post-1961 anyway.

And finally, the coup de grâce and pièce de résistance: O'Hara's Imperial Stout, brewed to celebrate the company's twentieth birthday. I'm sure you all remember my post about their tenth anniversary stout exactly, err, eight years ago today. I never thought that there'd be an event for the twentieth, and certainly not that I'd be speaking at it. But so it was on Tuesday evening, in the venerable surrounds of Neary's, a panel discussion on stout in general and O'Hara's in particular, ably hosted by Wayne and including founder Seamus and head brewer Conor. We got the first taste of the beer, so fresh that the bottles weren't quite ready for uncorking so emergency large bottles from the brewery were substituted in. At its heart, O'Hara's Imperial is a typical Irish stout: there's the classic coffee-like roasted dryness right in the centre. Its prodigious 10% ABV is noticeable most in the warming vapours of its aroma. And the hops have plainly been piled in as a green, slightly metallic, tang finishes the flavour off. However the different flavour elements don't quite gel together, or at least not yet. I think this will age nicely and should be in fine form by the time we celebrate ten years since the tenth anniversary beer was released. A cask of this is due to be tapped up tomorrow evening at the Irish Beer & Whiskey Village in the RDS. The blending effect of cask serve on the flavours will have a positive effect, I reckon, so give it a go if you see it.

For my part, I'll be at the festival this afternoon, just as soon as I've shovelled an enormous fried breakfast into myself. All in the spirit of the day, of course.

... and the rest

Galway Hooker isn't the only brewery I've been getting in the way at lately. I attended the brew day for Beoir#2 at Trouble Brewing last month, nosing around the sizeable facility they now have in Kill. As well as their own beer, Trouble does a bit of contract brewing and a look at their whiteboard reminded me of a few available in Dublin that I had yet to try.

And so on coming back from Galway the other week I dragged Séan and Ronan into Pantibar on Capel Street. As I'm sure is usual on a Saturday night it was heaving and there was just about space to stand at the bar. Panti's Pale Ale is the one Trouble produces for the place, on sale for just €4 a pint. On the dark side for a pale ale, shading towards amber, it's not exactly as flamboyant as its patroness. There's a solid malt core and then a vegetal green bitterness on top for an English bitter effect, though much tastier than bitter tends to be on keg. Overall it's easy drinking and not a beer that's going to interrupt the conversation. Coupled with the price, that's pretty much exactly what you want from a house beer.

Trouble has been brewing the revived Revolution Red Ale for Big Hand since 2010 but I only recently became aware that it has a stablemate now too: Augustine Dublin Steam Lager.

I dropped by the shabby-chic bohemian hangout that is Dice Bar, Big Hand's only outlet these days, to give it a go. It's 4.7% ABV, a bright pale gold and has a strange corn husk sort of flavour. This grows into a buttered popcorn effect which may perhaps be typical of the steam beer style but just didn't work for me. The overall impression was of a wonky, adjunct-laden mass-market industrial lager, even though that's not what it is. Revolution is a much better bet if drinking at Dice Bar.

There's also a new one in the O'Shea's range of budget ales that Carlow produces for Aldi: O'Shea's Traditional Irish Golden Ale. You know, like all those other golden ales Ireland is traditionally known for. It's 4.1% ABV and yes, definitely golden, so at least they got that right. The aroma is rather dry and husky with sweet golden syrup overtones which isn't very promising. But - surprise! - there's a lovely spiciness in the flavour, really taking the edge off the sugar. The grain husk remains, so we end up with a rather dry and serious golden ale, with a little marmalade shred bitterness, and I liked it for that: none of your bubblegum or fabric softener here. Very nicely put together for something that costs buttons.

Five Lamps is also at the contract game now, producing a house beer for the Pitt Bros barbecue joint on South Great George's Street. House Brew is a very straightforward Irish red ale of 4.7% ABV, comedically overpriced at €5.80 for a 33cl bottle. Of course it makes sense to have this kind of thing in this sort of place: the toffee and caramel really do complement the roast meats, and pulled pork in particular, but a big trayful of barbecue delights requires, I think, at least a pint of beery backing. They should have this on draught. Sipping it to try and make my €5.80 last to the end of the meal wasn't a fun experience. A fun experience was going straight to The Beer House afterwards where they had pints of Five Lamps Blackpitts Porter for €4 a throw: same brewery, nicer beer, well under half the price.

I was back at The Beer House on Friday at the end of Saturday's cross-town bimble in the company of Wayne, Janice, Ian, Sarah and Steve. It was a pleasant surprise to find the newest Five Lamps beer, a late winter seasonal called Phoenix Dark. It's a rich dark brown and tastes as luxurious as it looks, full of sumptuously smooth chocolate and caramel with a roast edge to prevent it from getting sickly or cloying. There's no sign of the strength either so I definitely could handle this a litre at a time, Munich-style.

Two more beers released under their maker's mark to finish with and the latest in a sequence of strong special edition beers from Offaly's finest is Bo Bristle Milk Chocolate Stout. It's all of 7% ABV but hides that well, especially when arriving cold from the keg. I had to leave it perched on one of 57 The Headline's radiators while I soaked up the atmosphere. Even with the flavours masked, the texture is appropriately rich with a real creamy feel of milk chocolate. And while this is present in the flavour (eventually), it's understated -- a light sweetness rather than, say, the full-on Dairy Milk effect of Porterhouse Chocolate Truffle Stout. There's a distinctly stouty dry bitterness too so don't expect a candified sugarbomb. In short, a damn decent strong Irish stout with a lacing of chocolate that may not be strictly necessary.

Wild Irish is something of a curveball. A modest 4% ABV, red-gold in colour and quite thin, which isn't surprising given the strength. The flavour opens with a firm bitter bite and finishes on a long, slow acidic burn. Rumours abounded that it's unhopped, but Dave the brewer has cleared that up: a bittering addition of hops was added, but the rest is all locally foraged elderberry, hawthornberry, ginger and rowanberry shrub. These are all active at the centre of the profile as a tartness and light meadowy herbal notes, no ginger heat though. The low gravity means it doesn't taste full of residual sugar as can sometimes happen with low-to-no hop beers. Wild Irish is an absolutely solid beer in its own right and not just a gimmick.

Bo Bristle seems to be having fun while everyone else is playing things pretty straight, by the looks of it.

Loaded at the docks

Finally, the event space down at George's Dock in Dublin's financial quarter has been given a use worthy of its potential. I've reported before on the so-so Oktoberfest that happens down here, and last weekend Irish beer got a look-in for the first time as the Carlow Brewing Company put together the first St Patrick's Craft Beer Festival.

Most of the independent Irish breweries were represented at the long festival bar, with a mix of regular and seasonal beers. I was along on Thursday, Friday and Sunday with my hit-list, as well as to represent Beoir and talk to punters about Irish brewing history whether they wanted to learn about it or not.

First and foremost we had the welcome return of Porterhouse Chocolate Truffle Stout after a two-year absence. And it's in superb form: bursting at the seams with smooth real chocolate sweetness, tempered by just the right level of dry stoutiness. I'll be having plenty more of this before it runs out, and earnestly hoping we won't have to wait as long for it again.

Knockmealdown Porter

This was also the first I'd seen of Eight Degrees Knockmealdown Porter on draught. With low-to-no nitrogenation it was every bit as good as the bottle. All of the liquorice bitterness, sticky burnt molasses and the tangy hop bite were present and correct, made all the better for coming in a grown-up serving size. (There's now a tap at the spanking new WJ Kavanagh's on Dorset Street: get down there).

Other familiar favourites included the all-too-rare cask editions of O'Hara's Leann Folláin and Curim Gold, plus the dark amber hop epic that is Messrs Maguire American Pale Ale. The latter was badged anonymously as "Seasonal Special", which hopefully kept the riff-raff away from it and ensured it was available all weekend.

MM APA's moment in the sun is fading, I believe, and they also had its replacement lined up: the new version of Messrs Maguire Porter is a decent and quite dry effort, but not terribly exciting. It probably warrants some closer analysis when it eventually shows up in its home pub.

The hosts made much fuss about their new ale, billed as a "dark IPA" and named, following a public competition, "Perfect Storm". This is an experimental blend of Leann Folláin and O'Hara's IPA (how very Mikkeller!) and it's a battle that the stout is winning: a big sweet chocolate hit dominates the taste with only a mild fruitiness backing it up. For the next iteration I'd suggest seriously ramping up the IPA levels in the blend, and then dry-hopping in the cask (but I would say that).

It was great to see Hilden's Twisted Hop making one of its first appearances south of the border -- it was also on at The Black Sheep where I snapped its picture on Friday night. This pale ale started out as a special but has become a regular, the way good specials often do. It's a golden-coloured pale 'n' 'oppy affair, offering a light white pepper piquancy rather than a full-on alpha-acid burn, as well as some gentle peachiness in both the aroma and flavour. Very sessionable, all-in-all, and I hope we'll be seeing more of it.

Warning: may start spraffing
about Manders Brewery

Irish accents seemed a bit thin on the ground when I was at the festival, and I met a fair few serious beer geeks from the US, the UK, Italy and Sweden. Having an event like this to show the diversity of Irish beer to the visitors who have come to Dublin for our National Day is not just nice: it's important. I really hope this becomes a permanent feature despite the seemingly endless red tape the authorities appear to have put in its way.

And the festival calendar rolls on, with little over a fortnight to the Easter festival at the Franciscan Well. If you're planning a visit to Ireland this spring, it'll be worth your while to fit that one in. No-one will even try to talk brewing history to you.

A drop of Irish

The wife and I took the day off on Friday and headed down the coast to Bray, a town we hadn't visited in several years. This is where The Porterhouse began, before the building of their (now dismantled) Temple Bar brewery, and it still retains a more traditional vibe, with Guinness and Heineken on tap. The annual Belgian beer festival is on across the chain at the moment, and in addition to some lovely draught Belgian ales (Abt 12, Tripel Karmaliet, et al) they've brewed up a new batch of their wonderful Chocolate Truffle Stout normally only seen in the spring. Chocolate, Belgian: geddit? A couple of pints of that in the front yard, overlooking the sea, made for a fine start to the weekend.

Saturday was brew day at home: an uncertain attempt at a dubbel. After the clean-up we headed for the Bull & Castle where the cask of the moment is Carlow Brewing's Curim Gold. I've never really been a fan of this in the bottle: it's a little bit bland and soapy. They'd never casked it before, but did so on request from the Bull & Castle who wanted something light and summery for the handpump, after a succession of stouts. Good thing they did, because it was fantastic. Belgian witbier is the closest approximation, and it has that spicy yeast character on top of refreshing zingy lemon flavours enhanced by some supreme sparkly conditioning -- so good you'd nearly think it was from a keg. Between four of us, we had the barrel drained by closing time.

There was just one deviation to the wheatiness -- a recently-arrived strong red ale from Hilden called Cathedral Quarter. It's the second in their series named after districts of Belfast, and I have to say I wasn't keen on the first one -- Titanic Quarter. However, the pour from this 5.3% ABV beer was promising, offering up summer fruit aromas and more than a hint of a Fuller's-esque toffee effect. The first sip was a major let-down, then. Stale, musty and cardboardy: a shame because there's clearly a good beer under it. As I drank, I found it mellowed a bit and the toffee returned accompanied by milk chocolate and butterscotch. I was getting quite into it by the end, though Níall who was drinking one beside me was less impressed. Can't really recommend this, I'm afraid.

It can be a bit swings-and-roundabouts with Irish beer sometimes, but with a gorgeous chocolate stout and a delectable cask wheatbeer in exchange for a musty red, I reckon I'm still up on the deal.

Mixed feelings

A chat with Séan and Laura at the bar of the Porterhouse made me realise how odd the whole thing is: we have no problem accepting that everyday drinks like tea and coffee can be mixed with other things to make them more palateable. Cocktails and kirs are classy. But somewhere along the path to industrial homogenisation we decided that beer had to be just beer: consumed as it is poured. The very notion of putting something else in there tends to garner weird looks. And yet, our draught stout was once a blend of stale and fresh beer, the abolition of which led Guinness to invent their pointless two-part pour in the 1950s. Is there anything to be gained from thinking of beer as something other than ready-to-drink?

This month's Session is hosted by Beer At Joe's, and is on the subject of Beer Cocktails.

I chanced upon my subject by accident. It was at the Easter Festival in Cork a couple of weeks ago, to which the TheBeerGeek brought along a bottle of Firestone Walker XII for disposal. It's a wood-bomb; a powerful brown ale which simulates the sensation of licking the inside of a bourbon barrel. There was more than a hint of cough syrup about it and I found the whole thing a bit sickly and hard to drink. As it happened, I was holding a half of Porterhouse Chocolate Truffle Stout when Chris poured me the Firestone Walker. It made perfect sense to dump the woody dregs in with the smooth bittersweet Irish stout. And it worked quite beautifully, I think: the overpowering bourbon barrel character was smoothed by the mellow chocolate notes, while any nitrostout blandness got a firm kick from the rich boozy vanilla flavours. Result: a harmonious mingling of two very different beers into a deliciously balanced cocktail.

And I was going to leave it there, until a week later when I returned to Cork for the ICB Brew It Yourself gig. The aftershow pub crawl took us to the dinky bar above the Abbot's Ale House where I spotted an oddity on the blackboards: Picon Beer €5. Whatever could that be? When it was explained that it was a cocktail of Bavaria lager and a French orange liqueur, I can't remember if it was Dave dared me to order it, or the other way around, but I didn't need much encouragement.

It works really well: you get the clean refreshing fizz of a pint of lager, but there's also a sweet rich orangey flavour too. The liqueur is only 18% ABV so a dash isn't going to make your pint dangerously alcoholic -- just more interesting. When I got home I went in search of more information on the stuff and was rather surprised to find it is actually intended as a beer additive.

So, positive experiences all round on the beer mixing front. It's not something I plan on making a habit of, but there are times when it just seems like the right thing to do.

To the barricades!

Oliver Hughes was in campaign mode on Monday night, telling war stories of his time as a start-up brewer in Blessington in the 1980s and how difficult -- impossible, in fact, as it turned out -- it was to break into a beer market dominated by massive foreign-owned, brand-driven macrobreweries.

He noted that things have changed a bit since then, with Ireland now home to a number of small independent breweries, including his own Porterhouse. Yet even from his established position of owning the largest independent brewery in the country, with a tied estate of five pubs in two countries, Oliver sees that there is still a battle against blandness to be fought. And with the recession making itself felt in every sector of the economy it has never been more important to ensure that our beer money ends up in the hands of Irish brewers rather than the shareholders of British and Dutch multinational corporations.

To these ends, today marks the beginning of the Porterhouse's Independent Irish Beer & Whiskey Festival (a slight misnomer on the whiskey side since there is only one Irish-owned distillery in operation, and the Irish brands owned by Diageo and Pernod Ricard are also represented here -- booo!). Almost all of Ireland's craft brewers, from both sides of the border, will have a range of their beers available at Porterhouse outlets in some form or other over the next eleven days. Among them is the new one from Galway Hooker.

Galway Hooker Dark Wheat Beer is in something approaching the German dunkelweiss mould, though with a very Irish plain flattop, rather than a big fluffy Bavarian foam dome. Underneath it's an opaque dark brown and the aromas are definitely banana-esque, but not overwhelmingly so. Weizen fruitiness is not top of the flavour agenda. Instead there's a crisp spiciness -- more the kind of thing you might find in an altbier -- mellowed by a smooth caramel toffee sweetness. I had been sorely disappointed by the absence of this character in the last dunkelweiss I had, Paulaner's Hefe-Weissbier Dunkel, so I really welcomed it here.

There's a lot to like here, and much for the Erdinger/Paulaner drinker to enjoy. If it became a permanent part of their line-up and gets a fair crack at the market (never a guarantee) it should do very well. Another daring-yet-accessible beer from Aidan and Ronan at Hooker.

The Independent Irish Beer & Whiskey Festival continues at all Porterhouse branches until 5th April. Other highlights include Clotworthy Dobbin -- a kegged dark ale with an amazing hoppy nose followed by the usual fruit-and-nut chocolate flavours. There are also new editions of Franciscan Well's Purgatory (very orangey and English this year) and Porterhouse Chocolate Truffle Stout (darker, bitterer, stoutier than last year), plus yet another new cask for Ireland, albeit temporary, in the form of the decent, solid, Hilden Ale.

You'd want a really good excuse for continuing to drink Heineken and Diageo's vapid offerings.

Sneaky taste

Today is one of Ireland's national prohibition days, when no alcohol may be sold and all the pubs shut. Christmas is the other one. In general, the Thursday before Good Friday is one of the busiest drink-buying days of the year, with booze flying off the supermarket shelves like it was about to be banned permanently.

So I was expecting The Bull & Castle to be jam-packed yesterday evening, but it wasn't too crowded. What brought me there was the unveiling of the second beer from the Galway Hooker lads: a seasonal (I assume) brewed especially for the Franciscan Well Easter Beer Festival which kicks off tomorrow in Cork.

They've called it Irish Coffee Porter and it's a very odd creature. For who-knows-what reason, they've decided to serve it nitrogenated, but due to a gas snafu at the pub and the removal of the holey disc thing the beer is supposed to run through, it came out sort-of nitrogenated with a big foamy head that quickly shrank down to a thin skim. The mouthfeel was good, though. Properly prickly and none of that nitro smoothness. It was way too cold though, and I needed to sit with my hands around my pint to bring it to a temperature where any flavour could be detected.

I don't believe in quibbling over nomenclature or beer style semantics, but this isn't a porter. It's a remarkably pale shade of red, only just darker than your typical Irish red ale. The aroma is great, though promising chocolate more than coffee. The flavours are complex but understated, with nothing really bold or attention-grabbing. Again there's chocolate malt to begin with and a sweetness that reminds me of The Porterhouse's Chocolate Truffle Stout which was particularly sweet this year. The slight coffee notes arrive later and there's a hazelnutty finish.

At 5.5% ABV it's not a quaffer, but it does slip down very easily and pleasantly. However, after a couple of pints of understated chocolate and coffee notes my tastebuds welcomed the full-on flavour assault of a regular Galway Hooker.

I'm not a believer in the trite adage about doing one thing and doing it well, and I certainly welcome more Irish craft beer to the market, even if it's only a special edition. However, this recipe needs some beefing-up if it's to become a classic like its stablemate.

Choc-tastic

Last month I posted a review of Meantime Chocolate (here). Since then the Porterhouse reintroduced their Chocolate Truffle Stout as part of the March stout-fest so I thought I'd do a quick round-up of Chocolate Beers I Have Known.

I won't repeat my Meantime review: just to say it gets points for being different, but isn't a patch on normal chocolate stouts. My usual fallback in this genre is Young's Double Chocolate Stout, which is about as rich and creamy as bottled beer gets, and carries a big chocolate kick in the foretaste.

Yet even Young's pales in comparison to the Porterhouse chocolate stout. I'm not sure what the "truffle" element adds to it (about 500 calories, at a guess) but this seasonal stout is utterly sublime: very smooth, very heavy and very very chocolatey. It is definitely one of my favourite beers: a sure sign it's about to be discontinued.

And happy birthday to the Beer Nut Blog. One year and seven countries done: much more to come.