Expectations

I don't remember exactly where it was*, but I have a recollection of being warned off Mongozo Coconut as being, objectively, The Worst Beer In The World. The other ones in the range -- from off-kilter (and often not in a good way) Belgian brewery Huyghe -- aren't up to much so I never troubled myself seeking out the coconut one.

And then a few weeks ago an invitation came in from Fade Street Social to try out their new beer offer. On Monday nights you can go up to their rooftop winter garden and get a variety bucket of five beers for 20 quid. It's a varied and mostly quite decent range, covering a broad range of styles and strengths, from Ireland, the UK, Belgium, Germany and the US. You can pick your own or let the staff make recommendations. All very jolly, not to mention educational. So, on the evening in question a group of us from Beoir dutifully trooped along not quite knowing what to expect, and out came the beer. The full range, in fact. A fair bit of horse trading went on at the table, with bottles migrating towards the drinkers who preferred them and some being outright sent back to be exchanged at the bar. But amongst all this, there was Mongozo Coconut. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to try it.


The colour was the first shock: the milky translucent white of coconut milk. It's questionable whether it really counts as a beer at all based on the appearance... and on the taste: massively sugary, as one would expect, and roaringly unsubtle with the coconut. If you ever wondered what a tin of condensed coconut milk would taste like, your answer is in this bottle. Here's the thing though: Mongozo Coconut is not actively unpleasant, at least if you have a high tolerance for sweetness in beers, as I do. I'm actually kinda glad I found that out: thanks Fade Street Social!

I thought I was done with Belgian coconut beers, and the last place I expected to find it again was in Hopus Primeur 2013. The branding reeks of a knock-off of Duvel Tripel Hop, though while the latter specifies what it has been hopped with each year, the Hopus just boasts of dry-hopping and says no more than that. Going in for the smell I got... coconut! A massive hit of it in the aroma, though thankfully absent from the taste. Otherwise it's very Hopus: sharply bitter, astringent, with a nasty washing-up liquid tang. Nothing that suggests the fresh hop aromas one expects from a bottle with the words "dry hop" plastered all over it.

I probably should make a recommendation on which of these two very different beers is better than the other, but I think I'd feel dirty either way.

To finish on a cleaner note, the star of the show at Fade Street Social was Lindemans Cuvée René. I had the kriek version last year and was surprised by how good it was. The straight gueuze is of a similar quality: not quite as full on, nor as subtly complex as the more artisan lambics, but streets ahead of most of the ones turned out by the bigger breweries. Properly sour and mega refreshing because of it. Thanks once again to our hosts for endearingly allow us to swap the lesser lagers (and the occasional Belgian fruit beer) for more of this.

[*most probably here. Thanks Bailey!]

All of Belgium, all at once

Another national beer festival, another aircraft-hangar-like space crammed with beer stalls and punters. The 2013 Zythos Beer Festival at the Brabanthal on the outskirts of Leuven wasn't quite on the same monolithic scale as the Great British Beer Festival when at Earls Court, but was certainly bigger than the Irish equivalent at the RDS last September. Just over 100 stalls had beers for sale, usually four or five each. The parsimonious trappists shared one austere bottle-only stall between six of them while A-B InBev sulked in a corner wondering why nobody wanted to buy its Leffe Royale. The show-offs were Struise and Alvinne, boasting a massive menu board on their neighbouring booths, side-by-side at the entrance.

Top of my hitlist was a beer I've been meaning to get hold of for years but never managed to: Duvel Tripel Hop. The 2013 edition has been given the Sorachi Ace treatment and the aroma from it is spectacular: a massive burst of fresh nectarine and passionfruit. The flavour is rather spikier, the soft fruit turning to sharp lemon pith which is a little overpowering. Still, worth it for the smell. I see that Kill enjoyed it too. Also on the long finger was Slaapmutske Dry-Hopped Lager. This wasn't as impressive as I'd heard, being a passable full-bodied hazy pale lager with a slight sharpness but mostly smooth and drinkable.

Of the IPAs on show I was especially impressed by Hopjutters Triple Hop. Its aroma goes past fruit into an intense eye-watering perfume though the flavour is much more restrained with big succulent peaches in abundance. 7.2% ABV yet dangerously easy to drink. I hope we'll be seeing more from this outfit soon. De Dochter van de Korenaar did something entirely different with their IPA Extase. So Intense You Won't Be Able To Taste Anything Else For Half An Hour!! squealed their poster. That's nice dear. Extase is a dark hazy orange colour and quite heavy and hot. The hop flavours lean towards the medicinal: eucalyptus and menthol notes in particular. I'm not really sure if I liked it or not but I've never tasted anything like it from a Belgian brewery, so it has that going for it. The wooden spoon of the IPA section goes to Green Cap, brewed by Belgian brewery Gulden Spoor for Dutch brand Butcher's Tears. There's a decidedly unBelgian blast of toffeeish crystal malt at the centre of this; behind it little more than a citric tang and a sharp finish, but it's very much malt driven, and one-dimensionally so.

One brand whose hop prowess I've been impressed by in the past is Troubadour and I almost succumbed to another hit of their sublime Westkust black IPA. But, stuck for time as always, I opted instead for Mundus Vetus, a 9% ABV rye tripel, produced in association with Anchor of San Francisco. It's dark for a tripel: much more amber than gold, and pulls off a stunning balancing act between the yeast based spiciness of tripel and the almost peppery piquancy you get from rye. There's a lot of vegetal leafyness going on but balanced against some purely Belgian candy sweetness. And speaking of sweet, Ecaussinnes's Ultramour is one to mark For My Palate Only. It's insanely sweet, almost to saccharine levels. No right-minded beer drinker could possibly enjoy a concoction like this. There's a great big raspberry on the label but the dominant flavour I got was cherry: a concentrated syrupy cherryness which brought me back to my first ever kriek experience, with Bellevue, a beer I still have a soft gooey spot for. It's fine: you just leave me and Ultramour alone for a while and go and drink something else. I'll join you in a minute.

It's always nice to see a bit of gimmickry going on with lambic. Timmermans had a limited edition Oude Gueuze on offer. It's straight-up sour, which is unusual for Timmermans. It even leans a little bit towards the vinegary side of the house but fortunately doesn't quite go all the way there. Tilquin had their Gueuze on the handpump and it was really fascinating. Sour: yes, completely, but not in any way tart or sharp. Instead it's a weird sort of smooth sourness, with that heady brick-cellar spice. It was also almost totally flat which helped make it ridiculously sinkable. I'd love to settle in for a session on this some time.

The Gimmick of the Festival award goes to Girardin, and again it was an Oude Gueuze they were serving. Only somewhere they'd managed to get hold of your actual Randall The Enamel Animal, still bearing the Dogfish Head logo on its exterior. The tube had been stuffed with Nelson Sauvin and it had a wonderful effect on the dark gold lambic, adding a whiff of white grape flavour to proceedings along with a tiny extra acidic bite. The possibilities created by this sort of thing are immense. Let's get more Randalls into the hands of lambic producers.

And that brings the festivities to a close. I liked ZBF: not so vast as to be heartless but still with bags of choice from Belgian breweries of all sizes making every kind of beer. What a national beer festival is supposed to be, in short.

A measure of excellence

I spotted a neat little addition to the offer at Against the Grain the other week. The pub's place as the premier source for exotic draught beers in Dublin remains unequalled in my view. Of course the downside of this is the prices that tend to get attached to such strange and rare creatures. The £10 pint of Odells IPA I nearly-but-didn't buy in London early this year remains a high point, but Dublin can sometimes be not far off the mark when it comes to these things. And there, on the row of taps in AtG were Flying Dog's Raging Bitch (a favourite) and Wildeman (never tasted). Thankfully the pub is always up front about its pricing (other establishments take note!) and a glace at the blackboard was all I needed to find out whether this tick was going to be worth my while. And there I saw something which surprised and delighted me: rather than try and force these into pint (too dear) or half (too small) measures, they're selling it as standard in a 375ml glass for €4.50. One of each, barkeep, please. At nearly €7 for a pint I probably wouldn't have bothered.

I'm sorry I don't have a picture of the glass, we had just dropped in on the way home from dinner and I was without appropriate image capture apparatus, but they're lovely little stemmed thistle things which show off the beer really well. So... Wildeman then. It's described as a "Farmhouse IPA" and named after the legendary Amsterdam pub. There's definitely a big Belgian influence here, with the 7.5% ABV making itself felt in a boozy fruity kind of way. Like in Raging Bitch, this melds quite beautifully with the juicy peachiness from the American hops. The big difference comes with the triple whammy of dryness: the grassy rye gives it a fairly arid base to start off with, then the saison yeast has done its best to clear out any residual sugars. Finally there's a big carbonic bite from the incredibly busy fizz, putting yet more of an edge on it.

I imagine (though am probably totally wrong) that Duvel Tripel Hop tastes something along these lines: that mix of tartness and fizz coupled with fresh hop zest. It's definitely one to take slowly. Comparisons with Raging Bitch were interesting: while that's all smooth and rounded, Wildeman offers a raw, high-impact pith buzz. I wouldn't have wanted a pint of either, but they were perfect as postprandial sharpeners.

I'm looking forward to more odd specialities like this at Against the Grain.

And while we're in the pub, don't forget that today sees the start of the second Bord Bia Farmhouse Cheese and Craft Beer Weekend, running through to Bank Holiday Monday. The full listing of cheesy-beery  goings-on around the country can be found here.