Unshore

This blog turns 13 today, and anyone who has been reading it for a while will doubtless have noticed that I write more about Diageo beers than I used to. The reason, of course, is that there are simply more of them these days, since the Open Gate Brewery came on stream. For the record, I have always sought out and written about anything the multinational has released locally: you'll find reviews of The Brewhouse Series from 2005/6, Guinness Black Lager from 2010, Smithwick's Pale Ale from 2011, and so on. Hell, I've even taken notes on Harp. It's easy to think that The Brewers Project and Open Gate represented a turnaround in how the company sees the market, but of course they weren't, merely an extension into another segment of it.

And so it is that the latest Diageo release, Rockshore, is pitched at a whole different audience. It was developed at Open Gate Brewery, just like all Diageo's beers, but it doesn't bear its name, nor even that of Guinness. It's a 4% ABV lager of unspecified style. I haven't yet seen it for individual sale in the off trade -- eight cans or six bottles seem to be the only options. A pint it was, so, at the airport. "Best served ice cold" said the branded glass, and the bar definitely tried to optimise my experience, nearly giving me frostbite in the process. That produced a sensation very similar to the Coors Light experiment I ran a few years back: the beer is thick; syrupy and sweet. The first hit of flavour was ripe red apples, a lot like a sugary alcopoppish cider. That does fade quickly, but there's absolutely nothing behind it, for good or ill.

In its favour, it's not watery, it's not harshly carbonated and it does taste of something. In the minus column what it tastes of is not beer, isn't pleasant, and the thickness strips it of refreshment power, which I'd have thought would be one of the aims.

Two thirds of the way down my pint I discovered I had grown accustomed to the apples, and by the end I could see how someone would be happy to drink another straight afterwards. Not me though. Not when there's Galway Hooker on the bar and 40 minutes before my flight is called.

Shiver me tinnies

We’d love to send you something, do you have an address that would suit to send it to?

That's all the e-mail said, but I could see it came from the company which does PR for Heineken Ireland. I like surprises so I gave them my address without asking further questions. A couple of hours later a parcel arrived containing eight half-litre cans of Coors Light. My lucky day. Less than a month out of the brewery, too. It wasn't just a random gift, however: they were promoting a gewgaw which comes free with sufficient purchase of the beer. This affixes to the bottom of the can, keeping it extra-cold while it's being consumed. From, presumably, the can itself. Swish.

While all this is outside the regular programming at The Beer Nut, I don't actually have a review of Coors Light here. Not that I've never tasted it; indeed I stumbled into the official launch of the draught version back in the summer of 2000. It was in Dakota on South William Street. There was an ice sculpture. Anyway, here I am with four litres of a beer I've never reviewed so it would only be proper to do some experimentation.

First, to give it the treatment every beer gets. The first can was kept in my beer fridge at 10°C. As the picture shows, the can is "cold", but not "Rocky Mountain cold". It's a very pale yellow and there's masses of fizz. The head subsides most of the way but a thin white mousse remains, constantly topped up by the busy bubbles. The aroma offers an odd mix of tin and ripe apples. That sweet fruit thing is the opening flavour but it disappears quickly, replaced by... nothing. There's a huge void right where you'd expect the main part of the taste to be. It's not watery -- the texture is actually quite slick and heavy -- but no identifiable malt elements and certainly not even a whimper from the hops. There's maybe just a tiny metallic buzz on the side of the tongue. Boring beats awful every time, but I really didn't think it would be hard to find things to say about this beer. Quite an achievement of the brewer's art.

So if it's this bland at serving temperature, what's the point of having it cold? To find out, I stuck a can in the freezer to earn that extra blue stripe, and I froze a mug as well, for good measure. Served this way, it's cold. It burns. It feels almost flat, which I guess is an unintended consequence of the solubility of CO2 at low temperatures. The slickness is even more apparent, though is perhaps more of an icy slipperiness now. The appley fruit is almost gone but there's still a bit of a tang from the metal. The glass contents disappeared quite quickly and thoughtlessly: the beer equivalent of popcorn. Plain, unbuttered, unsalted popcorn. The cans left after this experiment will likely be put to use in this way, with the Saturday night curry.

So much for the drinker's preference. How does this beer stand up served the way the PR company intended? I reached for the gewgaw -- a "Chill Puck" to give it its proper name in scare quotes -- frozen per the instructions, and dutifully affixed it to the can. It's just as flat consumed this way, and tastes exactly the same. The most annoying thing about drinking straight from a frozen can is how cold it it is to touch -- a handled mug is definitely the way to go if very cold beer is what you're after. Whether the device does actually help keep the second blue stripe lit for longer is not something I can confirm or deny in this limited experiment which didn't involve drinking an unadorned can, but it seems likely that it performs some sort of service, the thing itself remaining completely cold to the touch throughout proceedings.

It's easy to scoff at beers like Coors Light. It's fun too.

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.

The coming-soon and the never-left

The striking similarities between California and Northern Ireland are too many and obvious to bother listing. Any of you with even a passing acquaintance of both will have noticed this time and again over the years, while the sheer number of tourists who mistake Strabane for San Diego should silence any doubters. So when Colin from Dublin's California Wine Imports told me he was about to begin bringing two of Hilden's bottled beers across the border I hardly batted an eyelid. It is, after all, the next logical progression. Both beers are from Hilden's College Green range.

I'd met Belfast Blonde a couple of times in the past, on keg, and I've always loved it. It's a light, easy-going, golden ale designed for the skittish lager-drinker but packing in bags of flavour. From the bottle it's marginally fizzier than the draught edition with just a gently sherbety zing up front, followed by a long and satisfying candycane aftertaste. The icing on the cake is the nose: brimming with zesty succulent fruits like mangoes and melons.

I'd never allowed Belfast Blonde to warm up before -- it's a definite quaffer -- but when this got a few degrees under its belt it developed some marvellous fruit complexity, mostly peaches, as well as the signature chalky flavour I've found in Hilden's other pale ales and which I really rather enjoy. That got me thinking about the next bottle in front of me -- surely a mineral character like that would work great in a stout?

My previous experience with Molly's Chocolate Stout was less positive (unlike my encounter with the eponymous lady of Hilden herself, pictured right, who is a delight). The beer is made with chocolate malt rather than any actual chocolate and I've always found it a bit thin when poured from the cask. It goes into the glass a very pale shade of ruby-brown: among the least stout-like of stouts I've ever seen. Little bits of sediment demonstrate, in case you missed it on the label, that it's bottle-conditioned. The nose is sour and acidic, followed by a foretaste which is extremely dry and quite sharp. The chocolate malt may have given the beer its name, but there's very little trace of it in the flavour profile.

With the cask version, thinness is the flaw; without that cask smoothness you get a jagged and jarring stout. If your tastebuds are up for a challenge, this is the session stout for them.

(Incidentally, readers in Ireland can see me, and Colin, and Laura and Séan and Kieron in the July/August edition of Food & Wine magazine, out now.)

While I'm on the subject of Irish beers, here's a little bit of an enigma. Last year I was compiling a list of every beer currently brewed in Ireland for the Irish Craft Brewer Beer of the Year Awards. The inclusion of Satzenbrau on the list drew remarks from several people who hadn't realised it still existed. This ersatz German pils is brewed by Diageo and was heavily advertised in the 1970s and '80s before the big Irish brewers decided that contract brewing American big-brand lagers was much more cost-effective than running their own. And yet umlautless Satzenbrau survives, mostly in those parts of rural Ireland where the ladies have yet to convert to Coors Light. Behind the bar it comes in a 33cl long-neck, but in the off trade it's almost always presented as a 50cl can. I realised recently I'd no idea how it tastes, and resolved to fix that.

I could, of course, just have read the can:
Sounds great, doesn't it? But ever the empiricist I went as far as to open it and pour it into a glass. First mistake...

Satzenbrau is strikingly thin. The wateriness is such that I could well believe they didn't bother with any malt to get it up to 5% ABV, they just loaded it with white table sugar. The smell is quite distinctive: hoppy, almost to the point of skunky, and really quite accurate for a German-style pils. There's also a carbonic odour from the gassiness. So far so poor, and I won't even tell you what happens if you allow it to get warm.

There's a reason even the likes of Diageo aren't doing much to promote this. I reckon they're hoping it'll eventually go away on its own.

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.

One for the road

The time has come for the second part of my Sunny Islands With Bad Beer series, or at least the research end of it. This time I won't be blessed by the gods of wi-fi so you'll be spared the real-time details of my agony. I'll just be concentrating it into one or two posts in a fortnight-or-so's time.

My send-off beer this time round came from an off-licence I complained about last year: D Six in Harold's Cross. A year on, they've definitely put the effort in on their beer selection. It's not Redmond's class, and the friendly staff clearly wouldn't know Kwak from Coors Light, but the selection is some-way decent, and they deserve credit for that when so many others just go for tray-upon-tray of Heineken and Bud.

The beer in question is 1488, another one from the enigmatic Traditional Scottish Ales Ltd of historical FK7 7NP. Associations are drawn on the label with the Tullibardine distillery, in whose oak casks it is matured, but once again there's no clear indication of where the stuff's actually brewed.

As Thom said, it's a beer of contrasts. I acknowledge and repeat his accurate detection of a sherry flavour in amongst the oak and malt. There's very little gas and a sweet/sour Jack-Daniels-and-lime sort of aroma. What Thom describes as a lactic tang I'd say is a tartness, resembling the more involved sort of lambic. It engenders a mouth-watering lip-smacking finish which rounds off a very smooth and flavourful beer which sinks surprisingly easy given the 7% ABV and the hard liquor associations.

So that's my lot for now, as the darkness falls on this sunny island with limited quantites of good beer.

Schleswig schwingtops

A phrase to terrify the beer shopper perusing the off licence shelves in search of a new thrill: "Mild & Frisch". And I would have passed on the Flensburger Gold if it wasn't one of a matching pair, the other of which looked genuinely interesting and it didn't feel right leaving this one behind. But more of that below. Gold comes in a dinky 33cl swingtop and shows off its pale gold hue through clear glass. Unsurprisingly, then, there's a definite lightstruck whiff from it. It has a characteristic German smoothness but little by way of flavour, with just a hint of graininess at the back. Enjoyable in its own little way, but there are much better German lagers out there. Somehow I can't see it stealing market share from the other popular 33cl bottles of pale lager: the Coors Lights and Coronas of this world.

It was the Flensburger Winterbock that attracted me to the pair in the first place. The red label had me expecting something much darker than what I got: the sort of orange an IPA would be happy with. I think the dark, smoky bocks of Norway may have spoiled me for bock in general. This one certainly has the raw, sweet malty notes of a German bock and the thick sugary mouthfeel, though the bock flavours aren't as strong as they could be and an odd gassy dryness, almost like a pilsner, comes in behind it. It all has me craving something heavier and stickier. From the branding -- red with snowflakes --I assume that this is meant to be a fireside warmer, but I'm sitting by the fire now and I'm just not feeling the love.

Just as well winter's nearly finished, eh?

...a place to sit and soak in sanit'ry conditions

The village inn, the dear old inn,
So ancient, clean and free from sin
wrote Betjeman in his pre-CAMRA rant about the loss of England's pub heritage. Well, my local village inn, Brady's in Terenure village, is usually pretty clean, but I doubt if it's ancient, and this post largely concerns one of its sins in particular. I'm in there every few weeks for the carvery lunch. From the macrobrews on offer I'd generally have a Guinness. Mrs Beer Nut, a lager drinker by default since she doesn't like stout, kegged ale or Erdinger, has been pitching around for a new regular and decided to give the Beck's Vier a go. Strange sort of beer this one: it appeared in the market a couple of years ago and is made by InBev in Germany exclusively for the British and Irish draught market. Presumably because of the varient "normal" beer strengths in both countries, it's an even 4% ABV in the UK, 4.3% over here. Concentration brewing is great, isn't it? Just add water...

Long story short, Beck's Vier is extremely dull. Yes, you can detect a hint of that maltiness which is the Beck's hallmark and which, I have to say, I quite like. But there's really nothing else going on: they've taken away the flavour and replaced it with water and gas. There's no doubt that Ireland's bars are oversupplied with lager taps. However, following events during the week, our Big Three brewers are now a Huge Two, and when the merger goes through Heineken in Cork will be paying people to make and market Heineken, Amstel, Coors Light, Miller, Foster's and Kronenbourg 1664. Something must give, but I'd say InBev Ireland, and Beck's Vier, will weather the storm.

To the other end of the pub spectrum, then, and the Bull & Castle. A shipment of Maredsous 10 arrived recently. Last year I complained about the tastelessness of Number 6 (be seeing you). Its big brother still lacks the bold flavours I'd expect from a tripel. However, it's smooth, honey-like and very very easy to drink so I think I can just about forgive it. It doesn't have the character of stablemate good old Duvel, however.

And that's me done with pubs for a while. Back to proper beer...