Lash it in, sure

Today is all about Irish brewers playing about with odd ingredients. Though some more unusual than others.

To begin with the more avant-garde offering, Jack Cody's Duxie is billed as a grapefruit tea pale ale. The smallprint further elaborates that pink grapefruit, lime and earl grey tea have been employed. I came to it on a warm afternoon after mowing the lawn, in need of quite serious refreshment. It's a dark gold amber colour and with the fill level a little low on the bottle I had to coax a head on it as I poured. And it's not as thirst-quenching as I'd hoped. The earl grey really stands out prominently as an almost harsh smoky quality and rather drying. The citrus behind this is again sharply bitter and there are no softer fruit or malt notes. My only other experience of earl grey in beer was the IPA that Marble and Emelisse made together and I wasn't a fan of that for similar reasons. Full marks for daring here but I think I'd prefer a trade down to Lyon's Gold Blend or the like.

Not a tea person? How about coffee instead? The Brown Paper Bag Project's latest bottle is a collab with Kompaan, brewed at Gadd's with input from Dublin coffee pioneers 3FE. It's called Black Coffee IPA but is really a coffee black IPA: 6% ABV, pouring like black silk and topped by a café crème head. There's the bathsalts aroma often found in black IPAs but a hint of just-walked-in-to-the-coffee-place too. And the coffee is even more up front on tasting: outstandingly fresh and smooth with the flavour-bearing oils really working their arses off on a molecular level. The bitter, vegetal hopping sits alongside this, not interfering but not really integrating either. I get a flashback to Arendsnest and some non-specific Dutch beer, possibly De Molen and possibly Mout & Mocha. But that was pitched as a stout and I think there's the right level of bitterness and roast for this also to be viewed as a stout, albeit a very assertive old-fashioned one. All style witterings aside, this is a fine beer which gets great mileage from its ingredients.

And from possible stout to actual stout. I've had a couple of examples of home brewed chocolate orange stout, all highly enjoyable, but James Brown Brews' Chocolate Orange Stout is the first commercial one in Ireland. It's also the company's first beer and was brewed at Brú Brewery. All is normal at the outset: 5% ABV, pouring a dense opaque black with a pale beige head. The aroma is mostly dry roast with a bit of extra sweetness but nothing that hints at the unusual ingredients. You have to wait and taste it before they come through, and they're only barely there. The chocolate is smooth and not overly sweet while the orange is little more than a suggestion, a fleeting tang at the back of the palate. Of the three beers tasted, this one makes the least use of the additives, but I don't know that that's necessarily a criticism. What you're left with is a damn decent Irish stout, balanced between dry roasted grain crunch and a softer chocolate quality. The whole thing slips down very neatly without too much fuss.

I'm a little surprised to find Duxie is the one that suited me least out of these three. Perhaps the robustness of darker beers offers a better canvas for recipe playfulness.

The big Bux

Buxton Brewery from Derbyshire were a newcomer to Borefts and I confess I was quite sceptical when I first saw their presence listed. Groundbreaking revolutionaries like Kernel and Thornbridge are one thing, but what is this run-of-t'mill northern micro doing there? How many Dutch beer geeks can you wow with a 1.038 brown bitter? How wrong I was: I don't know if it was their A-game that Buxton brought, but it had the beatings of many others there.

The highlight for me was Tsar Bomba, a 10% ABV imperial stout. Its origins lie in a bottle of 1978 Courage Imperial Russian Stout, sent to the lab for analysis which showed that the only thing still living in it was Courage's hungry and deathless strain of Brettanomyces. Buxton cultured it up and fermented Tsar Bomba with it. My first thought on tasting it was "Oh, Orval has made a stout." The Brett funk is right up at the front but it's not overpowering: there's enough chocolate smoothness to hold it in check, providing a residual dark sweetness that not even this beast of a yeast could chomp through. And just on the end that assertive tang of hops. A strange and challenging beer, but in a quite delicious way.

Beer name of the festival goes to Smokey and the Band-Aid, a dark ale that is apparently quite deliberate in its phenols: the name suggests to me an attempt to deal with customer expectations when something has gone wrong but I'm reliably informed that's it's an adaptation of a homebrew recipe of the head brewer. It's actually quite subtle in its smokiness, though the phenols are clear as a bell: Laphroaig or TCP coming in loud and clear while the underlying sweet 7.5% ABV stout is just about detectable beneath. It's quite a full-on experience, but still balanced and nothing to be afraid of.

Buxton also produce a terribly impressive black IPA in the form of 7.5% ABV Imperial Black.This tastes like it has been hopped every which way, being powerfully greenly bitter and also succulently fruity. Only a tiny, missable hint of roast at the end suggests dark grains, otherwise this just tastes like a really really good IPA. For those who think that the style is simply a kind of hoppy porter, this is the one to change your minds.

Two paler ones to finish off with Buxton: Wild Boar is a hazy gold blonde ale of 5.7% ABV featuring fantastically sharp and zingy hop aromas. It's more rounded on tasting, melding flowery hops with toffee malt to form delicious perfumed caramel. I'd place it broadly in the category of English IPAs which includes White Shield and Bengal Lancer, but it tastes more modern than either. For something a little stronger there's Axe Edge: leaning more heavily on the hop side of the scales, this has a heady spicy funk to it, mixing up the soft fruit and astringent medicinal character of different hop strains but providing enough of a malt base to carry them off without unbalancing the flavour altogether.

Overall a quality performance from Buxton and I'll be looking out for more of theirs.

The last British beer I had was operating covertly at the Emelisse stand. The Dutch brewery was a collaborator on Earl Grey IPA but it was brewed at the Marble Brewery in Manchester. It's a fizzy pale gold beer, just under 7% ABV but quite plain tasting. The added flavourings give it a pleasant summery honey and mandarin nose but on tasting it's more scented soap than posh tea, but barely even that.

While we're at the Emelisse bar we may as well see what else they've got. A Red IPA? How jolly! This is a nicely balanced chap, quite heavily textured but neither cloyingly sweet nor particularly hopped up. Taking a bit of a liberty with the IPA designation there, but they're hardly the first brewery to do so.

And just a quick sideways hop over to Belgium to round off this post, and a visit to the mental experimentalists of Alvinne. Some of this brewery's output can be hard to handle but I struck gold with the three I tried at Borefts, all wine-barrel-aged. Undressed is a dark ruby ale in the Flemish red vernacular and has that wonderful mouthwatering tartness that makes the style an ideal thirst-quencher. The barrel adds an even more quenching tannic quality so, despite the acetic tang on the finish, I could happily neck this in indecent quantities. But we move on to Wild West, a headless orange-amber beer with powerful lactic sourness reminding me of the most assertive lambics. Deep underneath this there's a trace of Lucozade sweetness trying to make itself heard. It has just enough of a sparkle to make it refreshing, though I couldn't say what effect the red wine barrels have had on it.

Lastly, Cuvée d'Erpigny was billed as a barley wine, but was a similar ruby-brown to the Undressed and possessed the same sort of sour Flemish red aroma. It's not sour on tasting, though, due in part I'm sure to the Montbazillac barrel it was aged in. This has imparted a distinct botrytised sweetness which, combined with the smooth and heavy texture and 13% ABV, immediately conjures Tokaji or eiswein. This combines effortlessly with the caramel malt and an unequivocal hop bite to make a beer that should be a complete mess but all works together in a fascinating way.

And just when I thought things couldn't get any more strangely delicious, we come to the last two breweries at the festival...