Flashing the lights and sweeping up

And so we bring down the curtain on 2022 with the year's final post. It wasn't a bad one for me, all things considered, and I was able to get out and about more than in previous recent ones. This was the year beer festivals returned, and I was lucky enough to get to attend them in three different countries. While I tot up the particular highlights, I'm aided by something suitably strong and wintery.

Kinnegar has substantially re-jigged its sweet stout Winterland for its second outing. Now it's gone imperial, with the ABV up at 9% and coconut as the added ingredient. Is that Christmassy? Christmassy enough, I guess. It's thick in the glass, shimmering black under a tan coloured head. The aroma is sweetly floral, suggesting rosewater or cherry liqueur to me. They haven't gone overboard with the coconut, and before that arrives it's a roasty and bitter old-fashioned stout, perhaps more in the Foreign Extra genre than imperial. There's a slightly unctuous quality, giving an early impression of super-strong filter coffee and leaving that as residue in the finish. The coconut makes an appearance in the middle where it's very much dry and toasted rather than fresh and moist. This tones down the novelty factor and complements the dark grain well. Despite the slight severity of the bitterness this fulfils its role as a cuddly winter beer very nicely.

So I am positively aglow as I face into...

The Golden Pint Awards 2022

Best Irish Cask Beer: Brehon Black Hills
Options around Irish cask beer have been severely limited this year and it didn't feature at any of the Irish festivals I went to. On the plus side, JD Wetherspoon has a new commitment to Irish cask, making arrangements with Brehon and Dungarvan to have at least one of theirs on the handpumps at any given time. I've not yet seen Dungarvan's Black Rock stout in the wild, but have had the pleasure of Brehon's excellent Black Hills (aka Ulster Black) oatmeal stout and it really sings in this format. Do not pass it up if you see it.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Third Barrel Funk's Old Brother
This aged Brettanomyces-fermented red ale showed up at the Fidelty festival over the summer where it wowed me with its endlessly unfolding complexity.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Land & Labour Bière de Rhubarbe
Ireland's spontaneous-fermentation guru would be claiming a few spots if this were a top ten instead of single winners. However, this was the one I thought most accomplished of the offerings so far, and was a highlight of the Mullingar Wild Beer Festival where there was plenty of competition.

Best Irish Canned Beer: O Brother Opus One
We have not been short of big stouts this year, with Lough Gill, Larkin's and Wicklow Wolf all releasing multiple versions. Opus One, a 12.5% ABV job given a gentle whiskey barrel treatment, was my favourite of the lot. Everything to enjoy about the style was ably demonstrated.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Eik & Tid Barbar
When I'm compiling these, I try as much as possible not to refer to notes. I'm looking for the memorable ones. This Norwegian sour ale I found on tap at BXLBeerfest was one of the year's showstoppers for me. I don't remember exactly how it tasted, but I remember how it made me feel. A close second place goes to the mighty Keesmann Herren Pils, and drinking it at source in Bamberg was one of my year's beery achievements.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: HORAL Oude Geuze Mega Blend (2021)
I've had a few vintages of this and they haven't all been brilliant. This one, however, was utterly magnificent, even by the standards of high-end oude geuze. A  nine-way collaboration seems like a recipe for watered-down mediocrity but instead they've made something better than I've had from any individual producer.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Hoppin' Frog T.O.R.I.S. the Tyrant
It was fun going through all the B.O.R.I.S. variants back in February, and it isn't often that such a variant would outshine a classic original. T.O.R.I.S. did, though, simply by bigging up what was already there. Fair play.

Best Collaboration Brew: Otterbank/Third Barrel Time Will Tell
Like our Irish Keg winner, this was another heavy red ale given the Brett 'n' bugs treatment with spectacular results. It arrived in April as the first in a collaboration series which then went no further. Was the brew day that bad?

Best Overall Beer: HORAL Oude Geuze Mega Blend (2021)
The fact that I drank this in early January and I'm still thinking about it means it's the obvious candidate for the top prize. I have another bottle too, so you may be seeing it here again.

Best Branding: Larkin's
Brightly coloured cartoons of anthropomorphic animals aren't just a sound financial investment, they also look good on beer cans. I've been enjoying the most recent Larkin's rebrand, especially the action foxes on the imperial stouts.

Best Pump Clip: Ca' del Brado Cerbero
I went through my photos for the year and found very few pumpclip images. It seems cool bars and festivals don't use them much any more. I liked the shaggy purple doggo on this old ale from Emilia-Romagna's finest, however.

Best Bottle/Can Label: Whiplash Chimes
Second year in a row for Whiplash, which I doubt anyone familar with the brewery's can art will be surprised at. Chimes is a pale ale produced for the Bunsen chain of burger restaurants. "Let's put a burger on it, which is also a bunsen burner". Simple, a bit daft, but it amused me and that's what counts.




Best Irish Brewery: Galway Bay Brewery
I'd be prepared to give them this on foot of the return of Märzen To The Fire alone, but we also got new Two Hundred Fathoms, a West Coast IPA that actually means it, a bunch of stouts and some fun tinkering in the broad Belgian farmhouse genre.

Best Overseas Brewery: Moersleutel
The Dutch brewery graduated from one whose beers I enjoy when I find them to one I actively seek out. It was all imperial stouts until this year's Borefts Beer Festival where I tried a double IPA they'd made and it was at exactly the same high standard. They're occasionally available in Ireland, if you want to find out what the fuss is about.

Best New Brewery Opening 2022: Original 7
This was a tough one. 2022 has been much more about breweries closing than opening. We said goodbye to Metalman and St Mel's, and are watching with concern as Eight Degrees slips into a zombie half-life while the stupid multinational that acquired it tries to find a buyer. There have been rays of light, however, especially up north, but nothing that I've actually been able to drink. I haven't had any beers from Cork's Original 7 either, but I'm giving them the award for what they represent: the spirit of independent brewing after Molson Coors has come in and absolutely trashed the brand you built previously. Let's hope for something similar for Eight Degrees.

Pub/Bar of the Year: Foeders
It has taken me far too long to find my way to this geeky heaven in Amsterdam, very much one of those for-people-like-me bars. An excellent beer line-up and lovely service. If they gave the floor an occasional sweep it would be nearly perfect.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2022: UnderDog @ The Legal Eagle
"Will it / won't it" was the talk of Dublin's beer scene since version one shut up shop during the throes of the pandemic. Consequently there was proper elation when Dublin's only beer-first pub found a new home, where the winning formula of constantly rotating high end beers and first rate service has been reinstated with more legroom and actual windows. Most pleasing of all is that fact that the regulars are back and once again we have place to pull up a barstool and set the beer industry to rights with whomever is there to listen. There was a late contender for the title with the arrival of Fidelity on Queen Street just last week. More about what's going on there early in the new year.

Beer Festival of the Year: BXLBeerFest
So many great candidates but I'm picking this one because it was the most me of them. The range of beers and breweries wasn't the biggest, but there was a theme of wild and funky running through it which I wasn't expecting but valued hugely. The atmosphere was upbeat, the seating was plentiful and at the end you got to go drinking in Brussels. If all that seems like the kind of thing you might enjoy, stick it in your calendar for late August.

Supermarket of the Year: Polonez
There wasn't a whole lot of special interest beer at my usuals, but I did enjoy the occasional foray into the eastern European supermarket chain for exotic items, mostly of the lager variety.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Mace SCR
I usually go in for something specific and come out with a bag bursting at the seams. Serendipity, thy name is the Mace on the South Circular Road, at the back gate of James's Hospital.

Online Retailer of the Year: Craft Central
Can't argue with the numbers here: I bought more beer from Craft Central than anywhere else in 2022. The system is simply too easy: new beers arrive, they go up on the website, I order them and pick them up next time I'm passing. There's a slight premium to be paid for the convenience but it's very much worth it to me.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: none
I usually award this one by default for the single book I read during the year, but I don't even have that for 2022. A symptom of wider malaise in the beer publishing industry? Nope, just me being bad at reading.

Best Beer Blog or Website: BeerFoodTravel
April was the only month that Liam didn't have a new post for us, which counts as prolific in beer blogging these days. It's all great stuff too, meticulously researched and entertainingly written. This Golden Pint is very much a personal token of appreciation for the effort that goes in.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: @alldoomandgloom
In-jokes are the best jokes; the more specific and audience-tailored the better. Ross gets to them faster and better than I do. I don't know how much longer I'll still have a Johnson to give, but for now it's his.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: @PilotBeerUK
They last collected this one from me in 2016 but they're still at it and it never gets old. I don't get to drink their beer and daft tweets is the second-best thing a brewery can produce.

There. That'll do for 2022. I have a generalised bad feeling about what 2023 will bring to the small and independent brewing sector in Ireland and abroad so I'll sign off with a wish of good luck to all who may be affected.

BXLnt to each other

Tour & Taxis is a vast former goods depot on the canal in north-west Brussels. As is the way of these things, the authorities have tried hard to find things to do with the plentiful buildings and even more plentiful space: shopping, exhibitions, startup workspace and of course events. BXLBeerFest set up here in 2017 and, prompted by Eoghan Walsh, I made arrangements to attend last year. That didn't work out but tickets rolled over and so there I was, if not quite front at least fairly centre, on the last weekend in August 2022.

Sixty invited breweries occupied eight circular pods, each pouring four or more beers at a time. The selection was carefully chosen from Belgium, Europe and North America, with an emphasis on the wild side of fermentation, like saying "we invented lambic, show me what you can do".

The first brewer who I wanted to see doing their thing was our own Land & Labour. Spon 4-Year Blend is one I missed by being at the wrong day of Fidelity for it. It's definitely an accomplishment for an Irish brewer in this space, tasting very convincingly gueze-like, down to the sharp waxy bitterness and different-sharp nitric spicing. If anything it's maybe a little too sharp, verging on harsh, though that's more about my preference: I like a bit of mature smoothness in these. But, as usual with Land & Labour, whatever the criticisms, the potential for better is always apparent. The Spon project is definitely going in the right direction.

Across the way, 3 Fonteinen were showing everyone how it's done, their bar including three lambics on the cask handpumps. The one I'd never tried before, and therefore availed of, was their Oude Lambik, a dark amber colour, looking like apple juice. Its ageing is apparent in the concentrated sappy tang of old oak, sweetened with a quince jelly middle and a mild sour burn in the finish. The smoothness is off the charts, and even though it's only 5% ABV, the long finish encourages sipping and savouring. It's a shame this is such a rare speciality -- I'd love to see a cask of something like it in every corner café in Brussels.

I'm not sure if  Gueuze Erfgoed from Het Boerenerf counts as a new one or not. It's one of those revived brands, a farmhouse brewery closed in 1960 and now producing again under a new generation of the family. It tastes convincing, showing all the right flavours: bricky, oaky and smooth with a rub of lemon zest. Although 7% ABV there's little by way of weight or heat, and bitterness has been sacrificed for extra spice. Just the way I like my gueze, in fact. I'll be looking out for more from them.

Another new-wave producer of wild drinks is Pellicle Vergistingen, not really committed to whether it's a brewery, a winery or something else: if it ferments, it's fair game. They were offering something like a plum lambic called Palla Mirabella, 6% ABV and hazy orange in colour. It was surprisingly sweet for what it purports to be, loaded with apricot jam notes and only very faintly sour. 80ml cost me €5 and I don't feel I got anything like my money's worth. I'll be more circumspect about this lot in future.

My big discovery of the festival was the Norwegian project Eik & Tid. I began with Barbar, described simply as a rhubarb sour ale, and only €3 for 150ml, and was stunned by it. It's bright golden, with a gentle haze, and while sharp and flinty at first has a juicy white grape centre and then a spicy mineral finish. It's absolutely lambic-grade, even if the brewer is too modest to claim so.

That had me back soon after for a cherry beer called Cerasus. While not as amazing as the other one it is pretty damn good: bright pink and with the too-rare proper kriek effect of a sharp sour spark meeting sweet macerated cherry in the finish. It's sort of a sherbet-and-vinegar combination which shouldn't work but is absolutely magnificent. I tried not to linger too long on any one brewery, but Eik & Tid were the ones who made that especially difficult for me.

Berliner weisse was a major comedown after all that, especially Dunham's Bébé Lala, one I chose mainly because I liked the name but also because it includes blueberries. The result is a yoghurt aroma and a Ribena flavour, refreshing at 4.5% ABV with its light body, but not in the same league as regards flavour complexity as everything else on offer around it. I didn't linger long over this one.

Their fellow North Americans, Off Color, did something much more interesting in creating Avec La Guillotine. Seemingly the recipe started as a doppelbock but there was no trace of that left by the time it had been infused with cherry and pomegranate and blended from barrels which previously held red wine, bourbon and Calvados. The end result resembles a Flanders red most of all: a heavy oaken acidity and lots of hot cherry, like throat sweets. Strong and sour isn't normally my bag but this carries it off well, at 7.8% ABV and tasting like all of it and more.

Staying in the US it's a gose next: the Watermelon Suburban Beverage by Perennial. This looked like a glass of white wine and managed to be both dry and juicy at the same time. The melon flavour is very realistic, not at all the ersatz candy effect that tends to plague "watermelon" beers. And like an actual watermelon it's very refreshing. It helps that they've paid attention to what traditional gose tastes like and included quite a heavy salinity which adds to the quenching power, and it also helps that it's only 4.2% ABV. Nice work.

The other Perennial beer I drank takes us into the dark and sweet zone. Abraxas, in its vanilla-infused form, is an imperial stout of 11.5% ABV. The vanilla, combined with cinnamon, gives it a bit of a tonka bean effect, which can be hard to take if there's nothing else, but here there's a herbs on red wine complexity that gives it more of an air of vermouth than any imperial stout has a right to. A rounded and mature smoothness also helps elevate this beyond the easy sort of multi-ingredient palate-puncher into something powerful yet refined. I was charmed.

And to illustrate what I mean by that, here's Prizm's Breaking Decency for contrast. This 12% ABV imperial stout also includes vanilla, and the flavour piles in chocolate, banana and hazelnut in a most unsubtle way. It's pastry stout in its most basic form and it's lucky I had a few lacklustre sour beers immediately before I drank it. It wouldn't be my sort of thing normally, though there's nothing wrong with it as such.

We'll finish today with two more from Sweden, courtesy of Stigbergets. Their pastry stout, at 12.5% ABV, is simply called Vanilla as if to make it clear that complexity is not on the menu. And so it goes, though it was better than I expected. No hot and sticky mess here, just the clean sweet crunch of chocolate wafers balanced against a medium hop bitterness. The mouthfeel is surprisingly light making for easy, relaxed drinking. This could work well as a gateway pastry stout, though if you like it you'll be chasing the 19% ABV barrel-aged raspberry donut jobs within minutes.

These stouts, however, top out on 13.5% ABV with Stigbergets Big Bourbon. Again, not a subtle name, and not a subtle flavour either, but not what I expected. Instead of all that cloying vanilla oak there's a nuanced mix of coffee liqueur and luxurious chocolate fudge sauce. It would run the risk of turning sickly were it not for a just-right level of hop bitterness. It was easy to forget it had been barrel-aged at all, never mind in bourbon: the base beer has held its own well against anything the barrel could throw at it. Unsubtle, yes. Unbalanced, no.

So there's a flavour of the nationalities and beer styles on show for you. Was there any IPA in the room? We'll find out tomorrow.