Baby got backlog

Before I went on holidays in September I made a concerted effort to clear as much as I could out of my beer fridge. This post represents that hurried few days' swigging -- an express train through some of the bottled Irish beers new to me in autumn 2016.

I started with a refreshing witbier from Wicklow Wolf. Belgian White is a fizzy beast, taking a few goes to pour and resulting in a true-to-style hazy pale orange body topped with a crackling white head. It smells of fizz too: a hard carbonic bite, backed up by coriander herbs. I was expecting a hard prickle in the mouthfeel but the bubbles are surprisingly big and the texture of the beer nicely heavy and rounded, moreso than might be expected at just 5.2% ABV.

The label description mentions bananas and I get that estery fruit thing running right through the beer from foretaste to finish. There's a substantial higher-alcohol heat as well, bringing a certain element of acetone to the taste. A lacing of juicy citrus and a dry wheaty finish do a good job of providing balance and keep the whole thing from getting too hot and heavy. You'd probably need to drink it colder than I did to get any real refreshment from this guy, but as a weighty and complex take on wit it works quite well.

Red ale with Sorachi Ace hops is a new one on me, I think, but that's what Wicklow Wolf's Sorachi Red is. It's a clear dark copper colour, almost more brown than red, and topped by a stiff off-white head. The two sides of the equation are present right from the aroma, showing lots of toffee but also the distinctive lemon rind and powdered coconut of Sorachi Ace. There's a very Irish red sort of burnt roast in the flavour, something that successfully pushes against both the crystal malt sweetness and the obstreperous hops.

It's almost classically traditional, if a little strong at 5.1% ABV, and only at the finish is there that cheeky pinch of lemon. Definitely not a mad banging craft beer oddity, but rather a fun modern twist on a quite old fashioned style. Grandad's bought a fixie. Good for him.

Combining witbier with the east-Asian theme brings us to Thai Wit, new from Dungarvan Brewing. It's a whopping 6.4% ABV and rather dark for the style, a kind of amber brown. There's a lovely sweet Thai perfume, the lemongrass particularly prominent. It's rather more style-typical on tasting, the coriander coming through loud and clear on top of a dry wheatiness with lots of fizz. I'd swear I can taste the orange peel but no orange is listed on the ingredients. Perhaps it's the kaffir lime leaf giving it that citrus quality. The herbal finish lasts long, an oily coriander residue left on the lips.

It's a fun and interesting version of the style, not startlingly different but ramping up the flavours and offering a few extra bells and whistles. I didn't have any Thai food to hand but I reckon it would work very well as an accompaniment.

I'm writing this in the aftermath of the 2016 Irish Craft Beer Festival at the RDS and one of the stars of that show was Western Herd on their first visit to a Dublin festival. Apparently, anyway. I didn't get around to actually visiting their stand -- more fool me. I do have a couple of their bottles in the backlog, however, and I'm starting with yet another witbier: Back Beat.

This is a more orthodox orange colour. I had the option of leaving the yeast out but thought to hell with it and dumped the lees in as well, so you can add hazy to the appearance description. The fruit is off the charts in the aroma: bananas at first, then jaffa and mandarin, like a fruit salad (the dessert, not the chewy sweet). It's rather drier on tasting, with a sulphurous note I tend to associate with immature wheat beers. The coriander brings soap, the yeast an earthy grit, and all the lovely soft fruit from the aroma has evaporated. In the end it's a rather harsh beer, perhaps needing to be served very cold to smooth it out. It's complex, sure, but not in the right ways.

The other one of theirs I picked up in DrinkStore is Blue Jumper IPA. At 6.2% ABV a bit of poke was expected and it delivers in the aroma all right, a smack of fresh grapefruit with a definite heavy crystal malt toffee sweetness behind it: American-style IPA the way your momma used to make it.

It's extremely thick, to the point of being almost difficult to pull from the glass. At first there's a harsh and raw vegetal flavour but this opens out shortly after into zestier orange sherbet before settling back into the earthy tones of Cascade, with a more grapefruit and a metallic edge to remind you that this hop is descended from Fuggles.

Poke? Yes, it has that. This beer is extremely hoppy, in way that went out of fashion a couple of years ago but is genuinely fun to drink, as a 33cl serve anyway. The pencil sharpener finish is a bit much, but that gooey orange-toffee centre more than makes up for it.

Some more IPA to go on top of that? Sure why not. Amarillo is number four in Eight Degrees's series of 5.7% ABV single hoppers, each of which has gone all out to show the hops at their banging and bitterest best. This guy is no exception. I had a bit of a cold when I got to it so I think the full effect of the aroma was a little bit lost on me. It didn't smell of all that much anyway, just a faint candy-citrus that could be any hop.

However, there was nothing wrong with my flavour sensing apparatus: one sip brings a dense orangey oiliness, the exact same sort of hop density and intensity found in the beer's companions. Where you'd normally expect the malt to sweep in and spread the load, it doesn't. Instead there's a dry and quite tannic bitter finish, bringing Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter incongruously, but pleasingly, to mind. An acidic greenness hangs around on the palate afterwards, waiting to be swept away, temporarily, by another gush of citrus. Like the Galaxy and Mandarina Bavaria versions before it, it's a bit strange to have hops normally associated with juiciness bringing such a hard bitter edge to a beer, but also like those two, it's wonderfully invigorating and at the end of the bottle I was wishing I'd had a pint.

And finally, with the bags packed and the taxi booked, DOT's Sour Cherry Apricot Ale. It's a muddy brown colour with an odd sort of aroma: over-ripe squashy summer fruit and an enticing Orvalesque funk. Though it looks weighty it's only 4.5% ABV, with a corresponding lightness of texture. The flavour is quite light too and I sat perplexed at the keyboard for the first few mouthfuls, trying to find something to grab on to. The apricot is certainly there, as a sort of candied fruit flavour, then there's a kind of cherry skin bitterness and behind it the melanoidin biscuit flavour of the Belgian malt, and also a quite Belgian gritty yeast flavour. It all tails off quickly, leaving just a faint trace of that cherry bite.

It's definitely a disconcerting beer. Unsettling, even. Part of me wanted the flavours to be bigger and bolder, but I also wouldn't want it to be a hot sugary yeasty mess, which I'm sure would be all too easy to do. At the other end it has too much going on to be a refreshing quaffer, nor is it clean enough. So no constructive criticism from me, but I do think the recipe, while promising, needs work.

Draught picks

Time for an overdue look at some of the random stuff showing up on tap around Dublin in recent months.

We'll start with Galway Bay, and their Solemn Black double black IPA has been at large for a couple of months now. I found it when it was still brand new, in The Beer Market. 8.5% ABV and €5.40 for a 33cl glass are your vital statistics. The aroma is convincingly zesty for such a dark powerhouse of a beer: there's a citrus quality which is lighter than grapefruit, offering more of a lemon and lime thing. On tasting, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's sweet at first, the dark malts infused with lemon sherbet. Then there's a rush of harder bitterness: the tar, cabbage and molasses that are standard issue for beers like this. Amazingly, despite the resinousness of its hop bittering, none of it sticks to the palate and the aftertaste returns to that light and effervescent sherbet effect. It's a very impressive beer: super-serious but with a lovely spark of fun to it.

Galway Bay's subsequent release was Acid Mother, billed as a lime gose, and quite substantial at 5.4% ABV. It arrived looking forlorn and headless, a moody dark gold colour. Perhaps in keeping with the name, the first sip gave me a vivid and unsettling flashback: Rose's Lime Cordial, the sticky green stuff that used to come in the glass bottle with the embossed lime leaves on it. That. It's not subtle and comes through so loud and brash it almost doesn't taste like it's part of the beer; like it was squirted in as an afterthought. I got a rough, papery, oxidised twang in the finish, while in the middle a massive punchy sourness. A token saltiness is barely present and you can cancel any plans you had to taste coriander. This rather severe and unrefined beer doesn't meet the stylistic points for gose for me, nor is it relaxing or particularly enjoyable to drink. Loud and spiky, my time with it was spent wishing it would calm down.

Moving away from the brewery, but staying in its pubs, a pint of Trouble Brewing's Hello Sunshine session IPA in Against the Grain. Though a mere 3.7% ABV this is a deep and rather lurid Lucozade orange. As usual when trying a new Irish pale ale I made the correct incantations to appease the beer gods and ward off yeast bite but I must have got the words wrong because -- bleuh! -- yeast bite. And it's one of those beers which is a real shame to find pouring dirty, because behind it there's a lovely balance of sweet mandarin juice and invigorating grapefruit and lime bitterness. It's not thin or watery either, which is all to the good. But that raw savoury overcoat in which the whole thing is wrapped really spoiled it for me. There was very little sunshine in evidence on my barstool.

White Gypsy also had a new one on tap at AtG recently, a 7% ABV stout called Old Smoke. When the pub tweeted it was on I made a beeline. I have very fond memories of the supremely peaty stout that Cuilán brewed at Messrs Maguire in 2007 and I harboured a flickering hope that this might be a recreation. But it's not; it's much more subtle and mature and I doubt any peated malt was used. The base is a very good, full-bodied, export-style stout -- soft, comfortable and rounded, even on keg. Smoke wafts around the edges of this, grazing the lips and sides of the tongue. Some sweeter caramel and molasses are present and just a tiny hint of Laphroaigish phenols. Though not hot, it's plenty warming but in such a way that isn't too much, even in a busy pub on a summer afternoon. Overall, Old Smoke is balanced, complex and drinkable: an all-round class act.

The final two beers for now are parts two and three of Eight Degrees's latest Single Hop Series, following on from the Citra one I mentioned back here. Representing Europe in the sequence is Mandarina Bavaria, arriving across the counter in 57 The Headline disguised as a Rascal's beer. Like the others in the series it's 5.7% ABV and, unsurprisingly, orange features big in this beer, starting with the colour. It's quite sticky with hop resins and a lot of the flavour coming out of that is intensely oily orange skin. As this builds I found it shifting sideways into the coconut flavour more usually associated with Sorachi Ace hops. There's a reminder of Mandarina's German roots too, in a very noble herbal flavour as well. That sticky quality means that the finish is a long one, the exotic oranginess hanging around on the palate for ages. For all its foghorn loudness it's a lovely beer and you come away from it with a very clear grasp of what this hop variety is and does.

Unsurprisingly, many of the same qualities can be found in Eight Degrees Galaxy which I located at Bar Rua a few weeks ago. Galaxy is another hop I'd tend to associate with juicy orange fruit, but seemingly not when it's ramped up to the intensity that the brewers have here. This guy is supremely dank, so thick with resins you could tapdance across the surface, creating a bitterness that sucked the malt out of my neighbours' pint glasses. This is a hoppy beer. When some flavour eventually emerges from under the bitterness it's grassy green at first, and then a zesty pith which lasts long, once again, into the aftertaste.

Part of me was disappointed that it didn't really taste of Galaxy, the way that the previous two, intense as they also were, tasted very much of their signature hop. At the same time, however, this edgy and uncompromising IPA stands on its own feet as a beautifully rendered face-stripping hop bomb, and it's nice to give one's palate the occasional shock.