Year-end pints

This month makes it ten years since Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg suggested categories that beer bloggers might like to use for an annual run-down of the best in beer. I've stuck with it steadfastly since, even if I do change my criteria for the winners each year, and sometimes during the process of writing that year's entry. It's not meant to be taken seriously or considered meaningful, is what I'm saying.

2019 has been a dramatic year in beer, in Ireland and abroad. To mull it all over I've chosen something with a bit of wintery heft: Abbaye de Vauclair Biere Ambrée, a large bottle I picked up for loose change in Lidl. They're not lying about the "ambrée", it's a very ambrée hombre indeed: a beautiful clear polished-copper colour with a generous head which expertly laces the glass. I wasn't prepared for how sweet it is; it is extremely sweet, suggesting treacle, muscovado sugar and similar cake-baking ingredients you're not meant to eat raw. I was a few sips in before I noticed the balancing factor: a dry and slightly bitter tannic twang, which I'm guessing has both a hop and malt component. It doesn't stop the sugary onslaught but it does make it manageable, rendering the beer drinkable as a result. The sum total is a beer that's quite light-bodied for 6.1% ABV and tastes like a cup of very sweet cold tea. I quite liked it, but it's not one you can rush, which suited my needs perfectly. And so...

The Golden Pint Awards 2019

Best Irish Cask Beer: Porterhouse Yippy IPA
The decision to replace heavy, resinous Hop Head with pale dry Yippy was not without controversy. For the record I still miss HH's clean punchiness. To begin with, I treated Yippy like a newborn younger sibling, resenting its usurpation. It was some months later that I first encountered it on cask at Porterhouse Temple Bar and finally got it. I suspect the brewery has sneaked a Yorkshire bitter onto the Irish market dressed as an American. On cask it has that same blend of honeyed pale malt and waxy hop bitterness. It's clean, elegant, moreish and generally a fiver a pint. 5% ABV is a bit too high for a proper guzzlable session beer (bring back TSB!) so you have to pace yourself, but the result is very rewarding.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Land & Labour Coolship (2018)
The sour and the funk may become a bit of a theme in this year's edition as some Irish brewers are getting extremely good at this sort of thing. This one, sampled at this year's Hagstravaganza, was damn near lambic-grade and a very clear indication that local brewers are approaching that standard. There was also a blueberry version showing just how easy it is to mess up something this delicate. Steer your Coolship straight and true, and everything will be OK.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Wide Street Saison Sunday
It's their only bottle, but still the best beer they've released so far. I reviewed it here only a couple of weeks ago, but I hope I can avoid accusations of late-year bias by pointing out that I drank relatively few bottled Irish beers this year now that the can is king. I can see this category becoming the purvue of barrel aged beers. That said...

Best Irish Canned Beer: Wicklow Wolf Pointy Shoes
The canned Golden Pint has to go to a dark beer as we have had a slew of worthy examples from various local breweries in recent months. Larkin's Morrigan, White Hag Festa Nuda, Lineman's Astral Grains and Wicklow Wolf's own Apex and Locavore all deserve a share in this prize. But Pointy Shoes, brewed to mark Wicklow Wolf's fifth anniversary, and as the valedictory beer from the Bray premises, went beyond what any Irish stout barrel-ager has managed to create thus far.

Best Overseas Draught: Ca' del Brado Û baccabianca
Chasing the grape ales has become a travel pastime for me, one which doesn't always land great beer. I hit the jackpot in Billies in Antwerp, however, with this one from Emilia-Romagna. Ca' del Brado is a brewery now firmly on my drink-on-sight list.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: 3 Fonteinen Cuvée Armand & Gaston 2018
Every year should involve ticking a few things off the list, and I was happy to realise an ambition I'd had since the 2017 Toer de Geuze to go to 3 Fonteinen's tap room on an ordinary day and drink some beer there. And I did, and it was this, and it was very impressive. How much of that was down to the occasion? Who cares.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Crooked Stave Sour Rosé
I had to go all the way back to the start of the year to dig this one out. It's another super-complex mixed fermentation job, this time from the US. And it's permanently available in, among other places, the 4-for-€12 fridge at Stephen Street News. You're in a much better position to argue with me about this one than the previous two, but you have to buy it first.

Best Collaboration Brew: Jackie O's/Cycle Anything And Everything And Nothing At All
The runaway standout beer at the Fidelty beer festival during the summer. You think you've tasted everything that's possible to achieve with barrel-aged imperial stouts, and then along comes this. Fascinating and delicious in equal measure.

Best Overall Beer: Û baccabianca
I know. I'd love to have given this to something local, or to something readily available, but I look back on the finalists and think of my reaction to first tasting each of them, and this was the one that induced the cartoon-character-in-love effect. A-wooo-ga!

Best Branding: O Brother
The brewery's Off The Wall series of collaborations with graffiti artists began last year and has now clocked up two dozen beautifully designed cans.

Best Pump Clip: Five Lamps Tilted Drum
I liked the badge Five Lamps came up with for the Convention Centre's house beer, blending the building's distinctive shape with a beer keg.

Best Bottle/Can Label: YellowBelly Bushido
Well of course it was going to be a YellowBelly one. In picking a pastiche style for this black IPA, artist Paul really excelled himself. The beer was pretty damn good too.



Best Irish Brewery: Third Barrel
This was a tougher call than usual, with quite a few breweries doing amazing work. I'll save a special mention for Larkin's who've had some real stunners coming out especially in the latter half of 2019. But Third Barrel has really been putting the graft in. This year was the first time I found beers to impress me released under their Stone Barrel brand: Slammer and Awesome Sauce in particular. Third Circle's Needs More Cowbell and fruited Brett IPA were highlights, and then all the hyperactive hop activity under the Third Barrel label itself, as well as launching The Format, Pleasuredome and other client brewers. I'm exhausted just writing it down. I hope the pace is sustainable.

Best Overseas Brewery: Tilquin
Our dalliance was brief, but I had a lovely couple of sessions at the Tilquin blendery during this year's Toer de Geuze trying all their various experiments. They've never struck me as a particularly playful producer and perhaps it's the market that's pushing them into doing new things. Regardless, they're generally very good at it, that maple syrup lambic notwithstanding.

Best New Brewery Opening 2019: Wide Street
The promise of this all-wild-fermentation brewery in Co. Longford is enormous and the beers, in general, have been great so far.

Pub/Bar of the Year: La Venencia
Since I first visted this Madrid pub in 2009 it's been a firm favourite. I was actually apprehensive on going back last October, for fear it would disappoint. It didn't; it's still amazing. The best feature is that it doesn't serve beer, only sherry, so I get to put my notebook away.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2019: BrewDog Outpost Dublin
I've only been once and I haven't written about it yet, but I respect the sheer commitment of BrewDog in taking on 1,100 square metres of bar and restaurant space in the Dublin docklands and adding an in-house brewery to it. It's a big place and big things are expected.

Beer Festival of the Year: Fidelity
As usual I feared the worst: big queues and braying edgelords. But Ireland's first all-inclusive beer festival, organised by Whiplash and The Big Romance, was quite chilled in the end. There were lots of amazing beers and, if you didn't spend too long chatting, it was quite easy to get one's money's worth.

Supermarket of the Year: Fresh, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7
It's not what it used to be though I have found myself increasingly coming back to the beer section here, often finding things I couldn't source anywhere else. Supermarkets in general seem to have done away with continuously updated beer ranges -- it mustn't have been sustainable for anyone. Fresh is clinging on, though. Turnover isn't as rapid as you'd find in an independent, though I rarely leave empty-handed.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Redmond's of Ranelagh
I always have to make a special effort to go over, but it's always worth it. The exclusive beers created with DOT are what tipped it into the winners' enclosure for me this year. Shouts-out, of course, to my regular haunts DrinkStore and Stephen Street News.

Online Retailer of the Year: The White Hag
They sent me a free case to test their website, which was nice. It arrived very quickly after I ordered it, which was also nice. And the beer was good. Other than that, I had no cause to buy beer online this year, as usual.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Pierre Van Klomp Says No: Life, Death and the Meaning of Beer
Another default award this, being the only beer book I read this year, and that was in ten minutes over breakfast on the morning it arrived. It's still a beautifully put together piece with evocative photos as well as earthy Belgian wisdom. Thanks to Pierre's literary agents Boak & Bailey for sending it to me.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Food For Thought
You may have noticed the occasional snarky morning tweet from me about the drinks industry. And the occasional genuinely interesting industry news story. Many of these are fuelled by the daily email from FFT, so this is just by way of thanks to the team there for all the hard work they do collecting and presenting Ireland's hospitality news.

Simon Johnson Award For Best Beer Twitterer: @BeerFoodTravel
Liam has been a bit quiet on the long-form front recently, but his snippets of Irish brewing history throughout the year have been enlightening. He takes a good beer photo too.

Best Brewery Website/Social Media: Galway Bay Brewery
I don't think I've ever given the pub taplists on the Galway Bay website a nod, and they deserve one, even if they're not always up to date (has somebody lost the keys to the Against the Grain page?). The Black Sheep is generally spot on, I get a Twitter notification when something new is tapped, and I find that very useful.


And that's another year over. Thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.

Third time's the charm

Just the one post from me for Hagstravaganza 2019. I was flying solo for this the White Hag Brewery festival's third outing in Ballymote, although that was offset a little by the extra hour of drinking time thanks to a change in the Sligo to Dublin rail timetable. With this 7.20pm departure, Irish Rail, you have us spoilt!

The brewery's barrel stores are really filling out the vast space where the festival is held. That constrained the bar a little this year, but it still had the full complement of 60 taps, with breweries from Ireland and further afield.

I opened my account with one of the new releases from the hosts: Hopstravaganza, a New England-style IPA of 6.2% ABV. It's a properly murky yellow with a greenish tint. The flavour divides neatly into a vanilla side and a garlic side, and the combination is oddly pleasing. While I found it a little shockingly sweet at first, the dank burps it engenders help to counteract that. On the one hand this is nothing special: very much a true-to-style typical NEIPA; while on the other, it delivers exactly what the style is supposed to, without any of the off flavours which too frequently come with it. In the few weeks since the festival I've seen tall cans of this out and about. They're well worth your while when fresh.

As usual there was also a barrel-aged festival special. Hagstravaganza 5 is a bourbon-aged barley wine which they were serving directly from the oak cask. It looked rough: a murky red-brown and completely headless. But it turned out to be beautifully smooth, with gentle toffee, a buzz of espresso and a classy port oak finish. Despite the massive 13% ABV there's no heat, just richness. I suspect it spent a long time in that barrel as the only thing resembling an off flavour I could find was a dusting of autolytic umami, though barely noticeable. This was definitely one to have late on in proceedings and I'm glad I didn't miss it.

Otherwise, regarding Irish beer, I kept it sour and funky. That's where the really interesting things are happening. Boundary isn't a brewery I would associate with microbial creativity, but here was 2019 Cuvée. No information was provided beyond that it's mixed fermentation and, from the name, presumably a blend. It's a pale and hazy yellow colour with a bright yet funky farmyard aroma. The flavour mixes juicy white grape and peachy Brett with dry wood, finishing on a pinch of white pepper. The sourness is teeth-squeakingly clean. It's only 5.1% ABV and that seems to have left it a little thin; allowing the intense acidity to unbalance it slightly. It's still very decent overall, and shows a brewery well in control of this genre of beer.

I had an unprecedented three beers from Land & Labour. The fact that they're so rare has a lot to do with that. First on the board was Panta Rhei, a foudre-matured saison. Hazy yellow and sharply sour once again. This one has some extra spicing -- all saltpetre or gunpowder. A cool green-apple-skin bitterness finishes it off. It's an unusual set of flavours but works incredibly well.

That was followed by Coolship 2018 Blueberry, a bright red-coloured 6.3%-er, spontaneously fermented. I found it convincingly kriek-like, with the right level of dry funk and sweet fruit. Vanilla oak complements the latter, and then there's a slightly harsh vinegar burn at the end. The distinct blueberry flavour is missing from it, however: that could be any of several berries. I liked it, but it's not up there with the best of blueberry lambic by any means.

Just before leaving I managed to catch the unadorned Coolship 2018 for comparison. This is much better. The funky flavours are cool and refreshing; the oak spice adds an extra-quenching spritz. Its sourness, meanwhile, is restrained and refined. Above all this is accessible, showing all the great features of this style of beer, but in a gentle and balanced way. Not that it's a lightweight: 5.8% ABV gives it plenty of substance. I would love to see something like this in regular production at an appropriately accessible price.

We'll transition from the funky Irish beers with a funky foreigner: Azimut's Barrel Brett IPA. This is a pure golden colour and has a gorgeous honey texture. From this there follows luxuriously sticky-sweet apricot and a huge farmyard funkiness. There's just enough hop character to qualify it as an IPA, but I'm not complaining about the Brett being in charge. The brewers of the wild-fermented stuff really did well at this festival.

A downgrade to a basic kettle-soured beer next, Garden Brewery of Zagreb's Kiwi Sour. It's still pretty good, though, with a real and distinct kiwi flavour at the front, turning to a juicy roundness in the finish. The satisfying mouthfeel is aided by 5% ABV. There's just enough tartness to make it interesting and refreshing, while the Citra hopping both balances the fruit with some bitterness, and complements it with lemon and lime flavours. This is an ice lolly more than a full meal, but great fun to drink.

My second Pressure Drop beer that month, and indeed second ever, was Ida, a Berliner weisse promising added raspberry, elderflower and basil. Well, the raspberry is there: it's never a very shy fruit when used in beers. But elderflower and basil? Nope. There's a vaguely sweet herbal tang, but nothing distinct or identifiable. Worst of all is the texture: horribly thin and watery. Yes it's 3.8% ABV so was never going to be a chewer, but this is just offensively dull. At least it wasn't much effort to drink: I'll give it that.

Several people recommended an alternative sour pink beer: Amundsen's Cosmic Unicorn. No messing here: they come right out and describe it as a "pastry sour". I shuddered and went ahead anyway. It's not watery, at least, but it's horribly sticky, like drinking a glass of raspberry jam. There's a concentrated and cloying vanilla flavour too, while the strength is an unreasonable 6.5% ABV. I suppose if you like very sweet fruit beers this will work for you, and as I said, it certainly had its fans there on the day. But it wasn't for me, and I dearly wish brewers would stop using the word "sour" on beers that aren't remotely sour.

Time for another IPA, then. It was great to meet the representatives from Pilot in Edinburgh, and their sales patter landed me a glass of their India India double IPA. The special ingredient in this dark amber 8.5%-er is jaggery and that adds a definite brown-sugar density to it. And I'd say it was plenty dense enough already, being a big and chewy west-coast job, packed with resinous hops. This certainly isn't built for fans of the modern juice-bomb approach to double IPA, but I liked the wintery stylings of it; the warming alcohol making for refined sipping.

Compare and contrast with Higher and Betterer, a double New England-style IPA from Brasserie du Grand Paris at the same strength. This is the appropriate opaque orange colour. The aroma is worryingly funky but its flavour is bright and clean; spritzy with mandarin and satsuma. Here the alcohol is very well hidden. While great fun for the first sip or two, it is a little one-dimensional, offering little beyond the initial citrus. A beer of this strength should have more going on.

With the train home beckoning it was time to score some imperial stout. My first was called Imperial Cosmic Cocoa, coming from Sibling Revelry in Ohio. As the name suggests, it has chocolate in it, and this was the bourbon barrel-aged version. While dense looking it's quite light of texture, reflecting an ABV on the low side for this kind of thing: 8.5% again. There's some good pastry complexity, however: wafer biscuit, gooey caramel and Turkish delight all feature. I don't think they got their money's worth out of that barrel, but the end result came out fine.

The big finish was a Cloudwater job called The Act of Chewing. The blurb said this was nitrogenated, but if so it didn't take, pouring with only the thinnest of loose-bubbled heads. Though 10% ABV it had very little heat going on. The main flavour was a lovely liquorice bitterness of the kind found in too few modern imperial stouts. It could be that my palate wasn't up to tasting any further complexity at this hour, but I'd still have thought I'd get more from a bruiser like this. No matter; it was enjoyable and carried me out of the brewery and onto my train.

Another great show from the White Hag team. The whole event was handled efficiently and professionally, crucially keeping the service moving even at the busiest times. All going well I'll be back for the 2020 gig.