The week that's in it

We had a couple of goings-on of beery significance in Dublin last week. Thursday saw 57 The Headline host the local launch of St. Mel's Brewing. St. Mel's in Longford Town may be a very new operation but it's helmed by Liam Hanlon, previously the head brewer at Carlow and the creator of the beers that went on to become O'Hara's IPA and Leann Folláin. He's operating on a 15hL Irish-built brewkit now, producing three bottle-conditioned beers to begin with.

Funny thing, bottle conditioning. Staff at The Headline were handing out the half-litre bottles with a 33cl glass -- perfectly normal practice in the Irish pub, but not ideal when you have beers that work best in a single careful pour. The samples at the event were in small tasters and after the first round I thought somebody might have to take the brewmaster aside for a talk about quality control. It seems just to have been an unlucky pour of concentrated dregs, however. Another taster later on was much better, and enough to convince me to trade up to drinking entire bottles. So what's in the range?

Interestingly, St. Mel's have opted for a Brown Ale over a red or stout, possibly the only one in permanent production in the country. It's a substantial 5.2% ABV though the texture is light and the taste crisp, prickled by quite a busy fizz. The centre is all chocolate, of the dry cocoa-powder variety. It's also dry-hopped, which lends it not so much a fruitiness as a green vegetal bitterness which lasts long into the finish. St. Mel's Brown one of those quite serious, solid beers, but very enjoyable for all that.

St. Mel's Pale Ale is a little lighter at 4.8% ABV and pours a clear shade of deep orange-gold. Cascade hops are doing the heavy lifting here, imparting a gentle flavour of ripe juicy peaches and some light herbal grassy spicing. Its best feature is the texture: a pillowy softness with a sherbet effervescence which leaves it exceedingly drinkable. Overall a well put-together and accessible pale ale.

Finally for the first round of releases there's St. Mel's Helles Lager. Not exactly Munich-grade, but there's a wholesome grainy flavour and some pleasant fruit ester sweetness. Plenty for lager drinkers to enjoy here.

Liam says that distribution of draught beer is likely to remain mostly local once that's up and running, but bottles should hopefully be easy enough to get hold of all around the country.

Also on Thursday, The Porterhouse kicked off a ten-day festival of pale ales across the chain. The line-up includes much to like from British and American luminaries Thornbridge, Camden, Founders, Sierra Nevada, and the promised first appearance of Magic Rock beer in this country. The centrepiece, however, is a new permanent addition to the Porterhouse range: Dublin Pale Ale, essentially a re-working of last year's Pale Face special edition brew. (I'm probably the only one sad enough to note that the name "Dublin Pale" has been used previously, being the cask bitter produced briefly by Messrs Maguire in the late '90s). Dublin Pale is on keg, at least for now, and is 4.2% ABV, hopped with Admiral and Styrian Goldings. The flavour is unsurprisingly very English: big thirst-quenching tannins at the front and a coppery tang in the finish. The crisp bitterness reminds me a lot of its cask sibling TSB. For those occasions when TSB is absent and Hop Head would be just a hop too far, this is a welcome addition.

Among the early guest beers in Porterhouse Temple Bar was the new black IPA from Eight Degrees. It's named after the single variety of Australian hop it uses, Vic Secret, and is 6% ABV. It arrived a dense black colour, showing hints of red at the edges, and density is a theme. It's very thick and extremely tarry, with lots of bitter roast coating the palate. Set against this is a gaudy galah of bright tropical flavours, starting with mango and pineapple in the aroma, bursting out into bitter grapefruit and concentrated peach nectar on tasting. It's an incredible experience and it's hard to believe that all that colour comes from just one hop variety. The finish is long and bitter, and I honestly couldn't say if that's a result of the big hops or the roasted grains, or both. Either way, it's another hoppy winner from the Mitchelstown brewery.

And there's yet more new Irish beer to come later in the week.

JW Sweetman: an appraisal

A bit over eight years ago I wrote a post called "Messrs Maguire: an appraisal", a diatribe on Dublin's only brewpub composed in my usual high-handed snobby style, disappointed that what should be a jewel of the beer scene in this beery city was not living up to its potential. The root cause, I guess, was the Master of the Universe whose name was on the deeds of the building. He was one of the property élite during Ireland's boom years, and Messrs Maguire opened its doors in the closing years of the 20th century, just as the Celtic Tiger began to stretch its legs.

We can consider ourselves lucky that the Georgian frontage of 1 and 2 Burgh Quay, overlooking O'Connell Bridge, survived at all in the often corrupt and heritage-hostile development environment of 1990s Ireland. The original planning application dated 7th September 1995 called for the complete demolition of the buildings and their replacement with "new four storey public house/restaurants and ancillary services over a self contained basement nightclub". The drawings are not available online but I suspect that the monstrous O'Connell Bridge House next door gives us an idea of how the character of the quay might have been changed. Thankfully, Dublin Corporation refused the application. The subsequent submission, made on 7th February 1997, was no longer a demolition but "Restoration and renovation", keeping the number of main storeys to the original three.

Whether a microbrewery was always part of the plans I cannot say. And how they manoeuvred it inside is another mystery. The kit still bears the boilerplates of beer engineering supremo Brendan Dobbin and the vessels are of a size which suggests the walls and floors were installed around them. The showpiece mashtun and kettle are on display in the front window while the more functional stainless fermentation vessels sit below the pavement above, peekable-at from the basement bar.

Near neighbour The Irish Times makes its first mention of Messrs Maguire in the weekend supplement of 7th November 1998, in a scattergun piece on beer, brewing and food written by the late Michael Jackson of Beer Hunter fame. He cites it -- "opening in the next few weeks" -- as an indicator of the flavour-driven revolution happening in Irish beer. It's probably safe to assume that the grand opening of Messrs Maguire was in time for Christmas 1998. The 'Times's end-of-year review published on 29th December poignantly marks '98 as a good year for "super-pubs", boasting that "Zanzibar, Pravda, Life, Messrs Maguire and the Odeon in Dublin continue to give the now passé night-club scene a run for its money". All were casualties of the overblown economy, mostly early ones too. Only the Odeon survives at time of writing, though it has spent more time closed than open in recent years.

The Irish Times, 6th February 1999

I don't remember my first visit to Messrs Maguire, only that I would not have left a new Dublin brewpub unvisited for very long, especially since I was living 200 metres away at the time, in the Front Square of Trinity College. My dominant memory of the early days were of Dublin Pale -- a so-so brownish orange ale which fascinated me solely because it came from a handpump like what you get in England. I also recall a lending library made up of first editions of great Irish works of literature, available free to customers on payment of a deposit. The cask ale and the library, like my enchantment with Messrs Maguire, didn't last very long. It soon became clear that the owners had little regard for the brewing side and though there was always at least one house beer on tap, it was otherwise just another loud and uncomfortable swill-slinging Dublin drinking barn. Which is where this blog came in in May 2005.

A lot of water has passed under O'Connell Bridge since then. There was a brief experiment with bottled beer in 2007, never to be repeated and doing nothing for the pub's reputation among beer fanatics. The brewery spent its tenth birthday on hiatus following a decision by its second incumbent -- Cuilán Loughnane -- to swear off the nightmare daily commute from Tipperary and open his own brewery closer to home, choosing to produce Messrs Maguire beer there instead. This was followed by a short renaissance a couple of years ago when the neglected kit was fired up again under new brewer Mel, and a genuine effort was made to turn the place around. Unfortunately, this effort did not even have time to peter out properly as the macroeconomic tide which bitchslapped Ireland in 2010 hit home on Burgh Quay two years later.  Our absentee plutocrat had all of his toys rounded up and taken away by the government, leaving him with the shirt on his back and, bizarrely, the Messrs Maguire brand name.

Fortunately for us the drinkers, the pub didn't stay closed for long and its new state-sponsored management seems determined to make the obvious use of it that we've so long been wanting to see. The current head brewer is Rob Hopkins (with his new Dunkel, right), who made a name for himself under his Barrelhead brand, a pale ale which is always a welcome sight when it shows up on the festival circuit. I thought it was only fair to give the brewery a bit of time to establish itself,  hence the delay in writing about any of its beers.

(The JW Sweetman name, incidentally, is taken from one of Dublin's many defunct breweries, though there's no other connection. The "Est. 1756" on the new logo seems based on nothing other than a juvenile nose-thumb at central Dublin's other brewery a mile upriver.)

Though the brewing strategy doesn't seem to have quite dovetailed with the printing of menus, it seems that the plan at the moment is to have four permanent house beers plus a seasonal, and guests from other craft breweries. The macros haven't gone away but they seem to be getting rather marginalised and look like very poor value against the €4 house pints.

Nothing much to frighten the horses in the permanent line-up: a tasty crisp pale Weiss brewed with Weihenstephaner yeast is the token yellow beer. It balances nicely the dry grain and sharp fizz against some softer and sweeter banana and clove rock. The Red is a pumped-up muscleman version of this often insipid style, laying on thick unctuous strawberry paste and toffee. The brewery has plans to nitrogenate this when the equipment arrives but I think that would be a mistake -- it's just on the drinkable side of sticky as-is and making it denser will only make it worse.

The top seller, and with reasons beyond those of beer style fashion, is the Pale Ale. This is a dark amber beer and more in the marmaladey English IPA style to my mind than anything zingy and American. The texture is rounded and smooth, supporting gentle notes of mango from the hops and nursery sweeties from the caramelised malt. I'm reminded strongly of the aforementioned Barrelhead Pale Ale, and I think I'd have accredited it as one of Rob's beers without knowing he was involved. The one that really took me by surprise when I first met it, however, is JW Sweetman's Porter. It's a crazy fruit bomb with a highly complicated mix of lavender, liquorice, chocolate, rosewater and coffee -- exactly the sort of flavour combination that makes the dark beers from The Kernel best of breed. I'm stunned to find something of that calibre on my doorstep, though I really shouldn't be. Rob was making scary noises about taking this off and replacing it with a permanent stout, so beware: it may not last. Relax into a few pints of it while you can.

The brewery staged an open house recently for the launch of the newest seasonal on their rotation. It's called Dunkel and is a dark wheat beer. There's an interesting mix in the 5% ABV dark red affair: it has a similar subtle banana flavour to the Weiss, having been brewed with the same yeast, but there's also a major dry roasty character to it, lending it some of the profile of a schwarzbier. It's a little too fizzy to drink quickly, but when the gas is swirled out of it a bit you get something a cut above most of the commercial dark wheat beers knocking around. A few of us hangers-on also got a sneaky taste of the new seasonal, still in the tanks. The working title is Kölsch, though I don't know if that's what they'll eventually go with. It's properly crisp and grainy with a slight sulphurous nose and, other than a lack of the smoothness, only a mild appley flavour makes it less than an authentic-tasting experience. Still a good beer, however, and likely to improve with a little more age.

With great value beers across numerous styles and of a quality ranging from good to excellent plus decent food, enthusiastic staff, and a central location, JW Sweetman is doing pretty much everything you'd want from a city brewpub, which is just as well since it's the only one in Dublin. Long may this current incarnation continue.

This post is offered on foot of Irish Craft Beer Week and as a contribution to Boak and Bailey's long reads unproject. Please note that this paragraph is to be included in the computation of the minimum acceptable word count. So it is.

Munster mash bash

The Irish beer calendar is a short one and mostly concentrated in the latter half of year, with Hilden in August, the GIBF in October and CAMRA NI's Belfast festival in November. The main event, however, is the first of the year and happens on Easter Saturday and Sunday at the Franciscan Well brewpub in Cork. This is where the nation's craft brewers gather to sell their wares side-by-side and meet the drinking public. This year there were stalls from Hilden, Hooker, Carlow, White Gypsy, the University College Cork Pilot Brewery and the 'Well itself. Whitewater had just sent some bottles along, and The Porterhouse phoned in a keg of their Oyster Stout but left it to the hosts to serve it. Unfortunately there was a supply problem with the new Dingle brewing company (Beoir Chorca Dhuibhne) so I didn't get to try their beers.

For the second year, the Irish Craft Brewer contingent among the festival-goers used the opportunity to award prizes to the best beers available, and this year the top gong went to a cask version of the Franciscan Well's Purgatory pale ale. I had it in its kegged incarnation last year, and quite liked it. On cask, however, I was blown away. It was superbly balanced with big mandarin fruit flavours sitting comfortably next to a sherbety hoppy bite, all attached to a full smooth body. A deserving winner and hopefully we'll get to see more of this.

A runner-up award went to Messrs Maguire Imperial, which I have already raved about at length. The MM brewer is about to launch his own range of bottled beers under his new White Gypsy brand. He says that, the market for Irish craft beer being what it is, most of this will go straight to export. It's a shame, but I'm depending on the usual suspects in the retail drinks trade to get hold of at least a few cases of these for the locals. This stand was also selling MM Best, a beer which does the festival circuit in the UK and beyond, but is rarely seen in Ireland. The pub where it's made used to have a regular cask ale (called Pale, if I recall correctly) but it, and its beer engine, disappeared some years ago. Best is a light-bodied golden session ale with a slightly astringent bitterness. All of the cask beers were being served through sparklers and I used this one to decide my opinion in The Great Sparkler Debate. Having tasted it with and without the plastic tap attachment (picture, right), I confess to not being able to ascertain much difference.

Third place went to last year's champion Galway Hooker. As the only winning beer produced on a year-round basis, Hooker clings to its premier position in the pantheon of Irish craft beers. Still daring and still fresh even after a couple of years on the market. As I mentioned on Friday, their Irish Coffee Porter was made for this event and it was available in both keg and cask varieties. I didn't try the kegged one to see how it worked with the right gas mix, but the cask one was definitely a different beer to the one I was drinking in the Bull & Castle. The foamy head carried all the coffee essence that I thought was missing from the keg version last week. Fuller, smoother, and altogether more flavoursome. It could be that there's some truth to this notion of cask beer being somehow better than keg...

Another cask beer walked off with the prestigious Beer of the Festival award, decided by popular acclaim rather than any formal voting procedure. This was Carlow's Druid's Brew, made especially for the Easter festival each year and modelled here by the lovely Cormac. It's a powerfully bitter stout with a real back-of-tongue dry tanginess in addition to bags of full-on stout roastiness. Its texture is fascinating, being very similar to the sort of creamy smoothness you get with nitrogenation. This, I guess, is the effect the Guinness scientists were going for when they developed nitro beer back in the '50s.

UCC's Pilot Brewery had two beers on (though not when this picture was taken). Frithjofs is a lager which looks for all the world like a Belgian witbier: cloudy and pale yellow-green. It has you thinking of lemons before even taking a sip. In reality it's not really lemony, but it does have a tangy fruitiness to it, to my mind more like a light German weiss than anything else. It's also quite dry and crisp and probably works well as a summer refresher. The other tap (eventually) dispensed UCCinator, a dark bock, though a bit light-bodied to count as a doppelbock, despite the name. It has quite an overpowering sweet-and-sour character, reminding me more than anything of boiled sweets. At 7.4% ABV it's probably just as well I couldn't drink much of it.

As well as their own beers and the festival visitors, the 'Well also had a small range of Belgian beers on tap in the upstairs bar. I tried the Barbar Winter Bok, a deeply dark brown lager brimming with sweet sweet fruity flavours and concentrated essence of banana. Another one not to be taken lightly, but good in its own sweet way.

The Festival continues today but I'm back in Dublin, my cup having truly runnéd over with Irish craft goodness. The buzz among the brewers mentioned the possibility of a Dublin beer festival along similar lines. Going to a beer festival then home to sleep in my own bed would certainly be a pleasant novelty.