Strong recollection

My end-of-year ambition was to clear out all the scribbled unused tasting notes I have and turn them into proper blog posts. I nearly did it too. Among the stragglers were two from Hardknott brewery, from separate occasions earlier in the year. Rhetoric came courtesy of brewer Dave via Reuben back in August. It was supposed to be opened, consumed and commented on across the Internet in a coordinated way at an appointed time, but that sort of thing is way too difficult so we settled for sharing a bottle in our own time later on.

It's 10.2% ABV and Dave has branded it as a Belgian-style quadrupel, and my first surprise was the colour: a clear red rather than the murky brown I was expecting. But who gives a toss about colour? I do give a toss about oxidation, however, and I can taste it in spades here. The first hit is a not-at-all unpleasant sherry kick and it's only after this that a bit of stale wet cardboard creeps in. In the middle there's a lovely balsamic strawberry effect, plus a lacing of liquorice from the star anise. It's a busy, chaotic sort of beer and tasted rather homebrewey to me: like one of my batches where I try too many different experiments at once. With a little refining it could be superb.

A few weeks previously I had picked up a bottle of Hardknott's Vitesse Noir in York. This is an 11% ABV imperial stout with added coffee, chocolate and vanilla, with a label which promises an "over-the-top explosion of stimulating flavours". It's certainly a dense beast and won't be rushed into the glass, showing little signs of carbonation and lazily forming a dark brown head. Nothing especially stimulating jumps out of the aroma: just the sweet roasted smell you get from any decent strong stout. But this is just a trick, to wrongfoot the unwary drinker. The flavour is intense. It's hard to pick out any individual elements at first: it's just a blast of fruit and roast and alcohol, but by the third sip it had come into focus. Milk chocolate and the vanilla to begin: literally sweetness and light. The sweetness changes tack in the middle, turning fruity, with elements of black cherry and sultana. The liqueurish booze makes its presence felt at this stage too, introducing the sort of headiness you get in suspicious stoneware bottles from olive-skinned peasants. Then a grand crescendo of dry roast to finish, overlaid with darker, more serious, chocolate notes. A magnificent beer and one to remember.

So while I'm looking back at beers consumed earlier in the year I reckon I may as well take the whole year into consideration. As usual I'm employing the template created by Mark and Andy. Can you believe it's year 4 already? Cor.

Let me just slip into my sparkly cocktail dress and sashay up the red carpet for...
The Golden Pint Awards 2012

Best Irish Draught Beer: Dungarvan Rye-PA
Almost literally a blink-and-you-missed-it appearance at the Irish Craft Beer Festival this year. And while this pale ale combined two things I don't normally approve of in beer, namely rye and very limited availability, it was stunning: spectacularly combining bold assertive hops with smooth cask drinkability. The hope of a more regular supply is just one reason I hand over this award.

Best Irish Bottled or Canned Beer: 8 Degrees Ochtoberfest
I'm cheating a wee bit here as I drank a lot more of this on draught than from the bottle (especially that memorable night in Farrington's when Barry was over), but it was gorgeous in both varieties and a definite contender for Ireland's best ever lager. Two in a row in this category for the trans-Tasman partnership in Mitchelstown.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Raging Bitch
I made a decent fist of travel this year, making it to nine countries, including much beery delight in England, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. But the gong here goes to a beer served much closer to home. Against the Grain seems to have a permanent selection of Flying Dog beers on tap, and this old favourite of mine is the one that made my year. Raging Bitch is one of the very few to get the right balance between pungent American hops and funky Belgian yeast.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer: Kernel Export India Porter
Looking at other people's Golden Pints, I can see that the Wizards of Bermondsey have been sweeping the board. Reason enough for me to pass them over. But I have memories of that balmy summer's evening in the York Tap, when I thought my palate was completely exhausted, and my Export India Porter nightcap served as a reminder for once and for all that there's always room to enjoy another beer, if said beer is good enough. And robust yet delicate Kernel Export India Porter certainly is that.


Best Overall Beer: 8 Degrees Ochtoberfest
Looking at my four nominations, that's a pretty broad range of styles, and all them are beers which suit particular moods and settings while being less appropriate for others. I'm tempted to give it to Dungarvan, but I don't think I can justify it on the paltry amount I drank. So this will be going to the plentiful all-weather lager.

Best Pumpclip or Label: Dr. Rudi
They don't put a foot wrong, the L. Mulligan Grocer team, when it comes to the look and feel of their product. Usually you'll find it in the ambiance of their pubs or the playfulness of their menus, but their attention was turned to beer this year, and Dr. Rudi -- first in a series from "The Brown Paper Bag Project" -- was the result. Classical, sober, understated, but with more than a hint of fun about it.

Best Irish Brewery: White Gypsy
A return to the podium for the 2009 winner in this category. White Gypsy has kept the headlong rush of limited edition cask and keg specialties coming. But there's been a settledness too, with their excellent Belgian Blonde and Pils a regular feature at Bear (which would win my restaurant nomination for 2012 if there was one), and the long-awaited delivery of the bottled series of strong beers. From session red ale, to lager, to imperial stout and doppelbock: all things to all drinkers is just what you want from your local brewery.

Best Overseas Brewery: Evil Twin
I was sipping on thimblefuls at the Borefts festival so no single Evil Twin beer gets an award from me, but there were some absolute corkers in there, not least of which were the Hey Zeus! imperial stout and Molotov Spicy Cocktail IPA with chilli. With merely a pang of guilt that they're not really a brewery, I give this one to Jeppe.

Pub/Bar of the Year: Rody Boland's
A firm handshake, sincere well done and Silver Pint to WJ Kavanagh's which opened in Dublin this year and where I've spent many happy afternoons and evenings being well fed and beered, but once again I'm giving the award to a non-specialist pub. Being a mile from my front door means Rody Boland's doesn't quite qualify as a local for me, but it's not exactly a drinking destination either. Shopping in Rathmines, or going to the cinema, it's just there and you can drop in for a pint of something decent for a very reasonable price. Exactly what we need from pubs, in short.

Beer Festival of the Year: Irish Craft Beer Festival
Easy one this. Stand aside Borefts, move over Berlin: Dublin's three-day extravaganza in September was the year's top ticket, for the beer offer as well as the amazing atmosphere of joy and beery bonhomie. I may have spent quite a lot of it sticking wristbands on punters but there was still plenty to enjoy. Well done to the Seamus and Bruce who organised and the army of Beoir volunteers, ably coordinated by Andrew, who pitched in. If you've yet to experience Ireland's craft beer revolution, the RDS in September is one of the best places to do it.

Supermarket/Shop/Online retailer of the year: No-one
Once again I've bought next to no beer in supermarkets this year. Tesco seem to have made a bit of an effort, with Dunnes and Superquinn coming up behind them with a better beer offer than before, but none of this has really affected me. My regular haunts for beer buying -- DrinkStore, The Beer Club and Redmond's -- are still there and still as great as ever, but I'm not going to pick one out. And I don't buy beer online, though it's good to see Bradley's in Cork getting into that game as well. So no trophies, just an all-round keep-doing-what-you're-doing.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Shakespeare's Local
Another area where I'm not in much of a position to make a call. This year's top reference work seems to have been Stephen Beaumont and Tim Webb's World Atlas of Beer but I've not seen it; while Stan Hieronymus's For the Love of Hops arrived too late for me to get a proper look at it. Which leaves, by default, Pete Brown to take the Golden Pint Award for Only Beer Book I Read All Year. Shakespeare's Local is a fascinating social history of the London Borough of Southwark, told with particular reference to The George, last of London's galleried coaching inns, all told in Pete's usual fun and matey style.

Best Beer Blog or Website: The Drunken Destrier 
Writing a blog of just tasting notes is a lonely furrow, I have found, and there aren't many others that I read. Too many are just lists of flavour descriptors or, worse, numerical ratings. So it's refreshing to find a blog that keeps a similar line to mine and does it in a lucid and entertaining way. For that reason, Kill of The Drunken Destrier is my blog of the year. Bonus points for some impressive beer photography as well.

Best Beer Twitterer: @BrouwerVanKlomp
A rare, sometimes terrifying, but always fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of Belgium's -- and the world's -- greatest brewers. Worth a follow if you feel you're worthy, though you obviously aren't.

Best Online Brewery Presence: Dungarvan Brewing
Oh how all those wonderful websites launched two or three years ago by the new wave of Irish breweries have fallen into abeyance. No-one seems quite able to keep their seasonals and availability quite up to date. I suppose it all goes on Facebook, though I don't. So this will be a Top Marks For Effort job, and it goes to Dungarvan for lots of quality tweeting and a shiny new website. Brown paper seems to be quite the design trend this year.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year: Lunch at Jacobsen
Food and beer is a big part of what Carlsberg subsidiary Jacobsen does, so when they hosted the European Beer Consumers Union delegates in September it's not surprising that they pulled out the big guns. I won't go into detail, but if you are in Copenhagen do tear yourself away from Fermentoren and Mikkeller for an hour and have lunch in Jacobsen. And try the cheese.

Open category: Best Cider: Double L
It doesn't get mentioned much on this blog, but cider has become a much bigger part of my drinking life in the past year. The Irish cider revolution rumbles on apace and the quality of produce coming from the north -- Armagh Cider and Tempted? in particular -- is fantastic. Down here there's quality cider from the likes of Stonewell and Longuville House, but my cider highlight of the year was cask Double L at WJ Kavanagh's. Apple perfection in a glass.

In 2013 I’d most like to... get reacquainted with Belgium
It has been far too long. The Cantillon open day in early 2009 was the last time I set foot in Brussels. I have to get back and do some serious catching up: Moeder Lambic Fontainas is calling.

Tapped

"Daddy's taking us to see a model railway" yelped the excited young'un as our train pulled into York. Two rows away I felt a pang of sympathy. Daddy hadn't done his homework. It's a few years since I was last in the city, but even I knew that the model railway in the old station tea rooms had closed and relocated some time ago, replaced by the leather banquettes and dark woodwork of the York Tap. Daddy had this explained to him by the receptionist in the neighbouring Royal York Hotel as I was checking in. I'm sure the family found something fun to do instead, but I wasn't disappointed at all: three days in this fantastically beery English city, staying right next door to the town's top pub for serious beer geekery.

I had been travelling since before 6am, with a pause for the full, salty, Irish at Dublin airport. By noon on the muggy July day I was tired and incredibly thirsty, in need of a pick-me-up. The Tap offers twenty casks plus a dozen or so keg beers. After a full lap of the bar I settled on a pint of Gentleman's Wit, brewed on the remote windswept moors of Camden Town. This arrived as fizzy and hazy as one might expect, a washed-out shade of pale yellow, kicking off with immediate aromas of spiced boiled sweets. One long pull wiped the thirst clean off my palate, the second brought soothing vaporub notes of chamomile and similar herbs. The bergamot with which it's brewed comes later, adding a drier, tannic element. While a boon when the beer is fresh and cold it does introduce an unfortunate soapy aspect to the taste if it's allowed to get warm. But for the first two-thirds, this was exactly what I needed: a super-refreshing quencher which avoids all the pitfalls of wonky witbier: no watery lack of body and no cloying sweetness.


I felt I should pay my respects to the county next, and opted for Ilkley's Mary Jane. It's a golden bitter of 3.5% ABV and my pint showed worrying clumps of yeast lava-lamping around in it. The aroma is quite sickly and sugary while the flavour is unpleasantly sharp and soapier than the foregoing beer. I suspect that I was served the dregs of the barrel but it was hard to imagine what the underlying beer was supposed to taste like, if not this. Still, at a mere £2.70 a pint I wasn't going to start a debate and simply moved on to something I reckoned would have a bit more wallop.

Colorado Red: another Thornbridge-Odell collaboration, 5.9% ABV and "massively hopped". Yes, that'll do. There's a little haze but that doesn't distract even slightly from the gorgeous chestnut red colour. The blurb is a bit of an overstatement, however. No hops, massive or otherwise, are apparent in the aroma, just some light cocoa and turkish delight. There's perhaps a little back-of-throat bitterness in the finish but the centre ground is all creamy milk chocolate plus a touch of the familiar mandarin Odell hops. A welcome upgrading of plain brown bitter, this, but no more than that.

Somebody must have been enjoying it because the Colorado Red was gone soon after, replaced by another from Thornbridge: the inquisitive Wye. The unique selling point of this golden ale is the generous addition of cucumber (in the recipe not in the glass). A dry green vegetal nose starts it off and there's a very clear, crisp, cucumber bite in the flavour, lingering long in the palate and even reasserting itself in cucumber-flavoured burps. Thankfully there's enough lagerish golden-syrup malt to keep it more like a beer than a cucumber alcopop, though once again the hops are lacking.

I finally hit the hop jackpot I'd been seeking with Marble's Lagonda IPA. The aroma is understated but it delivers a massive bitter punch on the first taste followed by an intense flavour of concentrated tinned peaches. Yum. You get a bit of a harsh acidic burn, but it's not unpleasant and the finish is clean: not hanging around oilily on the palate the way some of these intensely hop-forward beers do. When it's gone, it's gone.

I started to hit the law of diminishing returns with the York Tap selection at this point. Kirkstall's Dissolution Rye IPA had some interesting orange and lavender flavours going on and thankfully none of the harsh grassiness that usually puts me right off rye beers. There was no indication that it's all of 6.2% ABV but even odder were the massive yeast clumps that sat in the liquid, suspended as though in jelly. What's up with that?

Blue Monkey's Infinity was quite nice: extremely pale with some sherbet and lots of the mineral qualities I've found in all of their beers. Hambleton Hurdler is a better-than-average brown bitter, buttery with an extra strawberry tartness I enjoyed. Can't say the same for Black Jack First Deal. In fact this brown bitter was almost completely undistinctive.

It was almost as an afterthought on my last session in the Tap that I opted for a bottle of the Export India Porter from The Kernel. Everything they say about it is true: incredibly smooth for a bottled porter with a complex bittersweet flavour profile including dark chocolate and rosewater. I'd go so far as to say it's damn near perfect, as this style goes.

I did venture out from the York Tap on a couple of occasions during the stay. One of these was a bijou pub crawlette  in the company of York resident Ally of Impy Malting fame. We met, perhaps appropriately, in The House of Trembling Madness, a poky attic bar above the best beer shop in town. Tragically the Hardknott Cool Fusion had just run out so I started off on a 7% ABV US-style double IPA from Ilkley called, with appropriate racial sensitivity, The Chief. It's a very hazy orange colour and packed with pleasantly zesty mandarin notes. None of the hop burn I might have expected from something branding itself as this style. Ah well.

Following Steve's advice, I dragged us across the street to The Punch Bowl, now under Nicholson's management and alleged to have a much improved beer offer. Well, it's still a rambling low-ceilinged traditional pub and was quite quiet for an otherwise bustling Thursday evening. John Smith's was still on cask but there was also Cropton's Hawaii 340. I was expecting big Pacific hops in this pale ale but the biscuit malt flavours are dominant. Ally enjoyed it, but it wasn't for me. I think I did better with my XT8, a stout from XT Brewing down in Buckinghamshire. A nicely balanced number this, with quite an intense roastiness offset by full-on liquorice sweets. Predictably, our crawl wound up back at the York Tap. Cucumber beer for all!

My solo adventures in York brought me, of course, to Pivni (rebadged since my last visit) for a swift pint of Fyne Ales Rune. The Scottish masters of pale 'n' 'oppy are at it again here: 3.5% ABV, a very pale gold, and gorgeously, gobsmackingly, bitter. It's waxy and harsh at first but this calms down soon after providing tart raspberries and crab apples. Puckeringly good. I downed it fast enough to leave time for a swift half of something else. From the keg selection I opted for Mary's Maple Porter from the Brooklyn Brewery. It looks the part of a 7.5% ABV porter: a lustrous and silky black. I found it hard going to drink, however, with lots of hot and heavy fruit esters plus cloying milky coffee. It's akin to trying to down a boozy banoffi milkshake, and a half was more than enough.

The Maltings was last on my hitlist, a poky ramshackle boozer just inside the city walls. It was busy but the layout meant I was still able to find myself a quiet corner, just opposite the toilet which some design guru saw fit to install in the room. Stars 'n' Stripes by Rooster was first up, a beautifully clear pale ale of 4.2% ABV. There's a nice balance of grapefruit and bubblegum notes here: pinchingly bitter followed by soft fruit notes like lychee and white grape. It did get a little boring half way down but was eminently sinkable while I thought about what to have next. And that was the beer of the trip: Brasscastle Brewery's York 800 imperial stout. 8% ABV yet only £1.90 for a half. You have to laugh. Under the tan head sits an immensely complex beer, introducing itself with big and tart red fruit notes of cranberry and redcurrant. There's a little touch of putty which suggests oatmeal to me, as does the silky smoothness. Only after swallowing does the dry roast flavour make itself felt. End to end beautiful.

So yeah, not bad beer options in York. Not bad at all.