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.

Low hopping on leap day

My first post with this datestamp, and a couple of bottles from West Yorkshire's Saltaire brewery.

The chocolate one was my primary target but Saltaire Blonde was on the shelf next to it to I figured I may as well give it a go while I'm at it. It's good, if a little bit solidly by-the-numbers: balanced between the bubblegum malt and the gentle, very slightly metallic, hop bitterness with the hops announcing their presence as soon as the cap came off. It uses Saaz and shows off a little of the golden syrup flavour I always enjoy in Budvar and have met in another Yorkshire blonde: Black Sheep's Golden Sheep. Mostly, however, it's understated and sessionable summer drinking.

The main event was Triple Chocoholic and they're cheating a bit here in trying to get one over on those southern jessies at Wells & Young and their merely Double Chocolate Stout. In fact they're both made with cocoa and chocolate syrup, with Sataire cheekily claiming a chocolate bonus point for the chocolate malt, which Wells & Young also use and which, of course, involves no actual chocolate.

It's a fizzy beer, giving the candy sweetness a dry carbonic bite. There's also a considerable bitterness on the finish as well. While the chocolate provides a gooey candybar middle, the bitter tang and the dry fizz predominate. I don't think I'd take this over Young's Double Chocolate, if given a choice.

Hopefully there's more impressive beer than these in the Saltaire line-up.

Double Trouble

I've been drinking it fairly regularly all month, so apologies for only getting round to telling you about Trouble Brewing's Dark Arts porter now. It made its first appearance at the Food & Wine Magazine fair in the RDS a few weeks ago, followed by an official launch in the Bull & Castle on 30 November.

It's an unfiltered dark brown session porter of 4.4% ABV which starts out quite roasty and dry but follows this with a long-lasting chocolate and caramel sweetness. Just on the end there's a nip from the hops adding a bitter, slightly sour complication.

Dark Arts is a beer of marvellous balance: light enough for session drinking, but properly warming as well. It's on tap at the Bull & Castle and L. Mulligan Grocer for the next while.

In addition to this and Ór, a third beer comes to us from the Trouble kit, though its origins are rather more obscure. Last year Dublin pubs Sin É and Dice Bar began selling beers badged with old Dublin Brewing Company brands: D'Arcy's Stout and Revolution Red, names that hadn't been seen since DBC went under in 2004. Word around the campfire was that these were Young's Double Chocolate Stout and Bombardier, imported from the UK. And then, just a few months ago, I spotted a new poster outside Sin É proclaiming that Revolution is now brewed in Ireland. Investigations led to Trouble where, I'm told, the management rent out the kit to Revolution's owners and leave them to it.

The beer is quite good too: very sweet, with lots of toffee and smooth caramel. There's a nice roasted element to the flavour as well and just a tiny bit of hop aroma. A well-rounded Irish red, basically: not going to set the world alight but quite enjoyable to drink. And while it's quite possible that it's not terribly different from the kegged Bombardier, I really like that they see "brewed in Ireland" as a significant enough selling point to actually go to the bother of arranging it. Well done them.

British Summer Time

I'm weekending up north at the moment and staged a minor beer raid on a local supermarket. Not Sainsbury's, so I wasn't actually expecting to find much of interest, here where a certain tonic wine from Devonshire is the tipple of choice for many. But there behind the stacks of alcopops and a veritable Aladdin's cave of tramps' brews ("I say, Jeremy, shall we go for the Tennents Super or the Carlsberg Special this morning?" "Why not something delightfully continental, Tristran, from the extensive Polish selection?") there was a well-chosen core collection of English ales: the best of Fuller's, plus Black Sheep, Young's Double Chocolate and the like. Hardly ground-breaking, but there was nothing like this when I lived in these parts. However, nobody wants to read more "Northern Ireland is making progress" headlines, so I'll stop.

There was an old favourite of mine, Bateman's XXXB, but I passed on it to try another from the same brewery: Combined Harvest. It would usually take a lot for me to pick an English golden ale out of a line-up, but a beer made from barley, wheat, rye and oats presented just enough of a gimmick to pique my curiosity. Unwisely, it's presented in a clear glass bottle, but there was only the very faintest whiff of skunking on opening. It pours to a limpid orangey-gold, with a big head that dispells quickly leaving just a light skim of foam. Marmalade is the governing feature here, both in the aroma and the foretaste. Big, tart, zingy orange notes turning to just a hint of citrus hoppy bitterness at the end. The fizz, while far from overpowering, is just right to add to the refreshment power of this beer, and I'm delighted to discover another member for that tiny pantheon of good, interesting, English golden ales. An instant beer-garden classic.

On Friday, before I left Dublin, I nipped in to the Bull & Castle to give another recently-arrived English summer beer the once-over. Raspberry Grand Cru is from Meantime, a London brewery I have a lot of time for, and whose darker beers I've particularly enjoyed. This one wrong-footed me from the outset with its pale orange hue. I was expecting something, well, pink, like a Belgian raspberry lambic. But they haven't gone for fruit here, preferring instead to aim for the sourer flavour I associate with mature fruit lambics, and Cantillon's Rosé de Gambrinus in particular. But really there's not enough of either characteristic for my liking. The sourness finishes up as dry, without any real lip-smacking tang, and the fruit flavour is on a par with that found in an ice lolly. These miniflavours are buried under a massive 6.5% ABV for which there is no excuse, not with this rather thin and gassy body. More Meantime beers have just arrived in Ireland, and I'm really hoping they've made a better fist of them than this one. Expect reviews soon.

Still, where UK summer beers are concerned, one out of two definitely ain't bad.

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.