End of

Oof. I'm glad I'm not in the business of making predictions, because the things I merely hoped for in this post last year did not work out. No, don't go and check; let's leave 2024 in the rear view mirror, with 2025 now ready to join it.

It's time to run through the highlights of the year just gone in the time-honoured (17 years!) fashion. My trusty assistant for the work at hand is Brewers At Play 48 from Kinnegar. It's a 10% ABV barley wine so should be up to the task. It's as viscous as one might expect, pouring slowly and forming a thick puck of cream-coloured foam over a murky mahogany-red body. The aroma combines bready malt warmth with some summery fruit: cherry and red grape in particular, a reminder that the style was named for its mimicry of wine. It opens with a bitter, herbal bite, something like a brightly-coloured Italian aperitif, with a hint of oak vanilla too, even though it hasn't seen the inside of any barrels. That settles but never quite goes away, while the fruit from the aroma makes a return, forming the centre of the flavour. The brewery says plum, and I get that, but I think it's more intense, suggesting damson, blackcurrant and raisin. Towards the end there's some pepper and nutmeg spicing, meaning there's a very decent degree of complexity on offer here. Coupled with the heavy texture, it's a sipper for sure. That's copperfastened by a growing warmth as it progresses. You don't need me to tell you this is a beer to take time over, and there's lots to explore and ponder. But I have a different sort of pondering to do. 

And so, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats and pray silence for...

The Golden Pint Awards 2025

Best Irish Cask Beer: Otterbank: The Magic Road 
It hasn't been a bad year for Irish cask, with Lough Gill and Brehon Brewhouse joining Hopkins & Hopkins in the rotational cask selection at Dublin's Porterhouse branches. The winner comes from a festival, however: Belfast, last month. Otterbank presented The Magic Road as a strawberry sour beer but there was much more happening than that short description conveys.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Wide Street: Cuvée Spontanée
This could also have been a cask contender, though was a little green when first presented, at the Mullingar Wild Beer Festival in April. By Hagstravaganza four months later, it shone on keg, delivering by-the-numbers classic oude geuze flavours.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Rye River: Grafters Night Shift
Dunnes Stores takes a gamble on the American-style brown ale that Rye River previously supplied to Lidl. I hope it stays here longer, because the combination of brightly floral hop fun with indulgent chocolate is rather special, while the teeny price tag is almost unique for a beer of this quality. Please do your bit to keep it on order at Dunnes. A very honourable mention goes to WhiteField for their joyously no-nonsense Irish Stout.

Best Irish Canned Beer: Lough Gill: North Star
Unsurprisingly, there were lots of contenders for this one. Lineman cornered the market for hop-forward styles, Third Barrel aced the lagers, but Lough Gill continues to reign supreme in imperial stouts, and gave us a dizzying array to choose from. Sherry-aged Solera was a strong contender, but the one with the Christmas spices -- crucially, not overdone -- was my top preference.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: 't Pomphuizeke: Peper Lambiek
Preference is an important factor in these awards. I'm not saying that the spiced lambic from a Belgian brewery I'd never heard of was the best overseas draught beer by any objective measure, but it's very much the sort thing I like, and enjoy finding when it's done well. This one, from this year's Borefts Beer Festival, goes full-on novelty while still retaining its core lambic character. Superb.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Tommie Sjef: Flint
More sour beer from the same festival. No gimmicks here, just spontaneously fermented and barrel-aged flavours, exactly the way I like them. A reminder that lambic, and lambic-a-likes, don't necessarily need spices to taste spicy.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Dois Corvos: Magnetic Poles
The Portuguese brewery puts a dent in my theory that classic lager styles are best not given wacky, craft-era, recipe twists, with this tonka'd up Baltic Porter. What if tonka, but just the right amount? This is the first beer I've ever encountered that's done that.

Best Collaboration Brew: DankHouse and De Molen: Dank & Dutchies
Is it just my imagination or did black IPA have a wee bit of a resurgence this year? Not much, but it seemed noticeable. Not all of them were great, but this collaboration for Borefts was everything the style ought to be, which is a near guarantee of an award from me. 

Best Overall Beer: Cuvée Spontanée
One does not simply walk into the brewhouse and begin making beer like this. Wide Street's abundant enthusiasm for the style and years of honing its processes has paid off handsomely, and I think that deserves recognition. In place of proper recognition, however, I can offer only this meaningless plaudit. Bottled Cuvée Spontanée is out and about at the moment, and deserves to be snapped up.

Best Branding: Wicklow Wolf
I've long been a fan of the way Wicklow Wolf presents itself, and there have been some lovely variants on its consistent house style this year. The contrasting colours on the tap badges for Pacific Heights and Cliff Walk looked striking side-by-side at Tapped back in April, while the glow-in-the-dark Halloween label and the Troy Parrott football celebration lager showed a wonderful sense of fun.

Best Pump Clip: Galway Bay: Forbidden Cats
More fun from Galway Bay too. Rock on, racoon!

Best Bottle/Can Label: Hopfully: Snowboard
For the second year on the trot, the best label goes to a beer I haven't published a review of yet. This was the work of Laurynas Butkus, a student at the National College of Art & Design. I loved the geometry and economy of the picture. I hope we'll be seeing more of his work on future Hopfully beers. And indeed, more named artists on beer label smallprint generally.

Best Irish Brewery: Lough Gill
I've never gone back to count the number of Golden Pints that Francesco Sottomano is responsible for throughout his years at various Irish microbreweries, but I bet it's a few. This year he has been absolutely killing it at Lough Gill across a range of styles and formats. I hope the team up in Sligo enjoys making the beers as much as I enjoy drinking them; they have a lot to be proud of. 

Best Overseas Brewery: Hill Farmstead
This award is on the strength of only three beers (one of them, yes, at Borefts) but they confirmed my conviction that Hill Farmstead is not a brewery whose beers one passes by when they're available. Their output is quite different to how European breweries do the whole wild beer thing, but if there are more operators like this in the US, please send those our way too.

Best New Brewery Opening 2025: Priory
It's a re-opening rather than an opening -- the kit in Tallaght hasn't moved an inch since it was installed in 2017, but this year it exited an extended Covid-era suspension and began brewing again for its new onsite taproom and tank bar at the Priory Market food court. The beers have largely been excellent too, with particular shouts-out for the Helles and stout.

Pub/Bar of the Year: La Fleur en Papier Doré
Another welcome back to a long-closed establishment. I was delighted to be able to enjoy a beer at this Brussels icon back in the spring, making it my favourite pub experience of the year.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2025: Daphni
A tough category, with openings of good beer outlets very much in negative growth around here -- RIP UnderDog. The new bar from Animal Collective, at Bolands Mills, wins by default, though I was genuinely impressed, by both its beer offer, and the setting: it's the sort of high quality renovation of an old industrial site that we don't see enough of in Dublin.  

Beer Festival of the Year: Borefts
It supplied three of the award winners above, so it shouldn't be a surprise that De Molen's festival gets this prize again. Third year running, but last year ever, following the brewery's closure in September. The field is open for 2026.

Supermarket of the Year: SuperValu Sundrive
The era of specialty beer being one of the front lines in the endless War of the Supermarkets is long over, but nobody seems to have told my local SuperValu. It continues to stock a first-rate range of core beers from Irish breweries, as well as solid classics from Belgium, the UK and further afield.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Martin's of Fairview
I only trekked up to the far distant northside on a couple of occasions this year, but I came away both times with beers I hadn't expected to find, or didn't know existed. Add in their fondness for commissioning special beers from local breweries, and you have everything you want from a neighbourhood offy. If only it were in my neighbourhood.

Online Retailer of the Year: Craft Central
Four years running. I'm not even going to pretend there's anyone else in contention. I click the beers, I pick them up, and the rest of this blog flows from there, by and large.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Filthy Queens
It's the battle of the books this year, with two works of beer history, taking very different approaches. Kudos must go to Martyn Cornell's monumental Porter & Stout: A Complete History. It was a slog to read, but even before I finished it, I was using it as a reference resource. It will stand for the ages, and double-fastens the author's legacy. Christina wins on narrative grounds, however. Her book is one of people and their stories, rather than cold numbers and diagrams. It's an account of the real lives lived by the people -- mostly women, it must be said -- who brewed and sold Ireland's beer down through the ages. There has not been a beer book like it.

Best Beer Blog or Website: The Drunken Destrier
I had this flagged for greatness since the spring, but the flurry of entertaining beer reviews petered out in late May. In the hope of some revived activity -- I mean, how hard is it to drink a beer and write down what it tastes like? -- I'm slinging a Golden Pint in Kill's direction.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: barmas.bsky.social
Yeah, it's mostly for the dog pictures, but you knew that.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: Rye River
This was the year that I made a firm and final break with Twitter, in favour of doing much the same sort of timewasting on Bluesky instead. Like the media outlets I used to follow, not many breweries have made the switch, but Rye River have, and regularly post their beer news and other fun stuff from around the brewery. I'm hoping to see more of my favourite producers posting to The Nice Place in 2026.


And with that, the awards table is empty for another year. Thanks for reading in 2025, and here's to more award-worthy beer in the year to come.

Single hopped, in your area

Could it be that pale ale's dominance of the new-release beer schedule in Ireland is waning? Even allowing for the plethora of fruit beers which landed this past summer, there doesn't seem to have been quite as much of the hoppy stuff. I think that's good for diversity. Anyway, here's all the new Irish pale ales that came my way in recent months. 

After a pause of several years, the O'Hara's Hop Adventure series has set sail again, this time crewed by Nelson Sauvin. As with previous iterations, it's a 5% ABV single-hop IPA, and perfectly clear in a welcome retro fashion. The aroma is slight, but does have a little of the vegetal spice which is one of Nelson's calling cards. That's hinted at in the flavour, but a hint is all you get. The base may as well be a blonde ale, being very plain, and then there's a tiny pinch of peppery rocket on a blink-and-you'll-miss-it basis. It could be that the brewery has been somewhat parsimonious with the Nelson, which is unforgivable in a supposed showcase, or maybe heavy-handed pasteurisation is to blame. There's over a year to go on the expiry date and there isn't really much space for the flavour to fade out, so if you're at all interested, get it quick. I'm disappointed, though. There's quite a lot of Nelson Sauvin in new Irish beers at the moment, and all of them show it off better than this one. This was a missed opportunity to create something bold and delicious; instead it's an inoffensive pale ale with little to say for itself.

Another rarity follows: a limited edition can from Dew Drop Brewhouse, the production arm of the Co. Kildare pub of the same name. Normally they stick to competent renditions of classic styles but this one is a hazy pale ale. You may have begun to think of that as a classic style, but with a mere 3.7% ABV, that's a difficult case to make for this beer. It's called Cloud Nine and looks proper: perfectly opaque and a pale shade of yellow, removing any worry about inappropriate oxidation during packaging. The hops -- Citra, Cascade and Amarillo -- absolutely sing in the aroma, with the latter's soft mandarin effect most prominent. It suffers a little from a low gravity, the mouthfeel starting out full and fluffy but fading to wateriness too soon. That in turn means the all-important hop flavour is short-lived, and a bit generic. The colourful mandarin is replaced by a workmanlike lemon or lime zestiness, backed by a surprising amount of dry tannin. The aftertaste is a more typical vanilla sweetness. It's an odd one. I guess it does deliver the New England pale ale features more or less successfully, and if you want them at a very sessionable strength, here they are. But you will have to accept that they're compromised, in both texture and flavour. If it's only a limited edition then maybe the experiment was worth doing in order to find that out. I wouldn't be giving it a place on my regular drinking roster, however.

The White Hag has been commissioned to make a new pale ale for The Porterhouse: Juicy XPA. While it's certainly extremely pale, and very faintly hazy, I'm always suspicious of that juicy claim when I see it. This one pulls it off quite well, however, and I'd guess that White Hag's signature hop Mosaic is the reason. A big whoosh of chilled pineapple chunks arrives as the aroma and continues deep into the flavour. Despite a significant 5.2% ABV, it's light and refreshing -- I can see why Australia has made this its national style. It turns pithy later on, adding just enough bitterness to balance it without compromising the fundamental tropicality. Nice. There's more than a hint of Little Fawn about this, which is somewhat unnecessary since that's permanently on tap everywhere it's sold, but I'll take the percentage point ABV boost for the 40c discount and say thank you very much. Make this one permanent.

What is permanent, and had hitherto escaped my notice, is Burn the Witch, which White Hag brews for whatever the rump of the P. Mac's chain is called, now that it no longer runs any pubs called P. Mac's. I caught up with it in Blackbird, Rathmines. This is another mildly misted yellow pale ale, and while it still places tropical fruit at the centre of the flavour profile, it's not trying to go full-on juicy. The aroma is an understated and nondescript citrus but the flavour unfolds a tremendously fun bouquet of grapefruit, mango, passionfruit and guava: it's adult Lilt, basically, without the overwhelming sugar. The group has excellent taste in choosing house beers, and I had a pint of Trouble's Vietnow while here just to confirm that for myself. Burn the Witch, at 4.8% ABV, is gentler, more sessionable, but still packed with lovely, clean, new-world complexity. If it's slipped under your radar so far, stop by Blackbird or Cassidy's on Westmoreland Street to try it, even if you're not in their cool kid demographic. Yes, I felt old.

Today's third White Hag beer was created for the Hagstravaganza festival, covered here. Hopstravaganza is an annual release, this one for the brewery's 11th birthday. 6.5% ABV in 2023, 5.8% last year, and now we're down to 5.5%. Times are hard, I guess. It looks light and easy-going, despite the haze, and the cool bitter lemon aroma adds to that. As a collaboration with Yakima Chief hop merchants, it contains all sorts of proprietary hop-derived products, though the base varieties are Citra, Riwaka, Motueka, Columbus and Krush. That's quite a mix of the citric and herbal, and the dank resins are mostly in charge, given a spritz of lime and grapefruit towards the finish. Even allowing for the steadily declining strength year-on-year, this is still thinner than I would expect for the ABV, meaning it's refreshing and thirst-quenching, but lacks any real follow-through in the hop flavour, and also the fluffy mouthfeel that normally comes with haze. I found it enjoyable but unspectacular, with the savoury New Zealand hops working hardest to give it a worthwhile character. Like the O'Hara's beer up top, making a big deal of the hops on the label doesn't necessarily mean hop fireworks in the taste.

The branding of the next one gave me a proper giggle: Grapefruit Peelers, on which Bullhouse leans into its home city's reputation, with a police Land Rover on the label. It's what people think of when they think Belfast, so why nat, like? It's quite densely hazy, with lots of froth on top, and a citrus aroma that's all hop and no syrup. There's a little bit of sweet-sharp grapefruit extract in the foretaste, but otherwise it's quite a straightforward affair with a hazy softness and a gently bitter dessert quality, like a lemon meringue pie. I feel a bit gypped on the lack of novelty, but the balance and approachability on display here is excellent. It's clean and refreshing, and completely devoid of syrup stickiness, swapping it for properly tangy hop zing. All told, this is nicely put together, combining Bullhouse's love of haze with a somewhat more classical bitter side.

Daylight Atheist, new from Lineman, sees the Dublin brewery going all in on the haze, producing a 5.4% ABV pale ale which is about the most extremely dense-looking pale yellow I've seen, presenting like dregs, or something paintbrushes have just been washed in. When handed a beige pint of it in The Porterhouse, I was dubious. A happy surprise, then, to find the beer is delicious. The brewery lists Citra, Mosaic and Riwaka hops, so only one-third Kiwi, but it has a huge New Zealand character. The aroma demonstrates both the ripe tropical fruit and mineral sharpness typical of New Zealand varieties, making the beer smell like a diesel fire at the pineapple farm. There's a stark herbal bitterness at the front of the flavour, all heady damp grass and spicy rocket leaves. The texture is soft and there's a lightly vanilla-flavoured custard finish, which is the only sign of the haze in the flavour, which is good. While the tropical fruit element promised in the aroma is absent from the flavour, it's still beautiful, both in its sheer boldness, and the mix of softness and spice it offers. Something for everyone here, and I recommend it to all the haze-dodgers in particular. Let your guard down for this one.

Bierhaus in Galway is 20 years old and has commissioned a celebratory beer from O Brother, called Fiche, the Irish for twenty. I found it a long way from Galway, at The Harbour in Bray. They claim that this is a West Coast IPA, and it is broadly amber coloured and nicely clear, but the hops are rather low-calibre, with no proper bitterness or resin. There's a tiny lemon spritz in the aroma, and the 5.8% ABV gives it plenty of density and heft. It's just a shame that the taste doesn't deliver a whole lot. I would have thought a birthday beer would have more wallop, especially from O Brother who aren't usually shy with the green. Oh well. It was a satisfying pinter on a warm afternoon, even if it didn't set the world on fire. Happy Birthday to Bierhaus!

Good News! Third Barrel has stopped using bad AI-generated art on its cans. Only joking: it's still cringingly awful. Their latest is a 6% ABV IPA and uses an American hop called Elani, which I don't think I've encountered before, alongside stalwart Citra. There's a medium haze here, just about passing as opaque in a pint glass. The aroma has a spicy fruit effect, like grapefruit rind, with a little pink peppercorn and savoury onion, plus a separate resinous funk. That's intriguing. It's light for the strength; almost a bit watery, but in a refreshing and drinkable way. That lack of body means the flavour isn't as punchy as I thought it would be. Fizz is the first impression, then a basic pithy bitterness, and then the onions. And that's kinda it. There's a light and fairly inoffensive rasp of plaster dust, and a certain unwelcome alcohol heat, but none of the pineapple and peach promised on the label. You need softness for that, and this is pointy. The flavours aren't strong enough to be unpleasant, but at the same time it's all sharpness and not much fun. Good News? Not really.

A mostly-kiwi hop line-up on Lough Gill's Tropic Tempest "juicy IPA" is instantly appealing. Along with the Riwaka, Rakau, Wakatu and Motueka, there's a bonus serving of American El Dorado. It's quite a dark orange shade in the glass, fully hazy, of course, and with lots of lasting foam on top. The aroma is enticingly peachy with some added melon and pineapple, so again a beer with "tropic" in its name might actually taste of tropical fruit. It does! Not really in a juicy way, though: the beer is a little too thick and dense for that. Instead it's a pineapple and mango dessert, one with generous amounts of cream and candy sprinkles. It works, mind. It's quite tasty, in a subtle way. As ever, I'll nod to the roll-call of typical hazy IPA flaws and tell you that none are present. While it's heavy, it's not hot, which is good for 6.3% ABV. And even the candy-and-cake sweet side behaves in a mannerly way. This is no silly, soft-drink-copying, novelty beer: it's an excellent take on hazy IPA, and a reminder that while I dislike the style's continuing dominance, it does have a place.

I don't normally have cause for complaint about the service at The Black Sheep, but landing me with a pint of Forbidden Cats when the advertised measure is 33cl was an unwelcome surprise. My 50c Beoir token took some of the edge off the yikesworthy €8.40 pint price, but I was experiencing a bitter taste before I even sat down with this IPA. "Oat cream" they say, which is presumably why it's extremely murky and pale. While it looks like dregs, it smells bright and fresh, of mango, passionfruit and ripe mandarin segments. Yum. At first I thought the tropical cleanness carried right through to the flavour, and it almost does: the beginning and middle are soft and fleshy pineapple and guava, but towards the finish the murky grit asserts itself, bringing both chalky plasterboard and a burn of allium acidity. This grows, so that by sip three the harshness is occupying the palate and smothering the sunny fruit. That said, I got used to it, finishing the pint with an impression of yet another mediocre garlicked-up hot haze job. I'm sure it does what its brewers want it to, but not me.

I was back at The Black Sheep for the latest from Brehon. Stronger again at 6.8% ABV but clearly advertised as by-the-pint, and only(!) €7.30 for that. It's in that not-quite-a-style "Mountain IPA", and with appropriate Monaghan humour is called Drumlins. It looked New Englandy to me: not opaque, but thoroughly misted and yellow. The aroma pulls us zestily west, and there's a crisp texture to it, so definitely not the pillowy fluff of the east. The flavour put paid to my initial scepticism: this really is a half-way point. There are lots of west coast elements, and a strong lime bitterness in particular, plus some sharper grapefruit. Yet this sits next to, and contrasts with, the softer vanilla sweet side of New England. It's a combination nobody asked for, but I give the brewery full marks for creating a true hybrid. I'm not fully sure that the flavours work together especially well -- at risk of being both harsh and sticky -- but it's a fascinating exercise and one I don't think even the American originators of Mountain IPA have executed as convincingly.

Whiplash's new IPA is the same strength, and called Full Body Yawn. Your hops today will be Motueka, Citra and BRU-1, with a substantial haze and a slightly darker than expected orange colour. The aroma is sweet and citrus, like lemonade or drizzle cake, and it's surprisingly light of body, with a dangerous lack of alcohol heat. On the downside, the hops don't perform so well in the flavour. There's a contrast of murky vanilla sweetness and a harsher herbal bitterness (thanks Motueka), but no central fruit flavour, something that would round it out nicely. Am I complaining again that today's Whiplash beers are lacking high-end hop wallop? I fear so. This one's blend of custard with thyme is certainly distinctive, but not terribly enjoyable. It's a full body shudder from me.

It's customary to round off these round-ups with a double IPA, but we've been short of those lately. Luckily, Whiplash has stepped into the breach with Gold Is Up, an 8.2% ABV job, single hopped with Superdelic. It's quite the emulsion, yellow-orange with a dusty grey element, topped with a loose-bubbled white head. Maybe there are people who find beers like this visually appealing, but I'm not one of them. I don't buy beers to look at them, however, and the aroma here is very promising: oily and resinous; spicy and vegetal, with a little hard-candy fruit. The texture is beautifully smooth and again with little sign of all that alcohol. We're definitely in New Zealand for the flavour, which has a noble and grassy Germanic quality, allied with a sweet vanilla side in keeping with its New England sensibilities. Given the appearance, I was actually surprised that there's no unpleasant plasterboard grittiness, because it looks like one of those sorts of beers. Instead, it's nicely balanced, with a lot of classy old-world lager character for something that is very much not one. As with the above, it offers no wallop of hops, but I think I'm coming to appreciate the more subtle and nuanced approach that Whiplash seems to be taking these days. If ever a style needed to calm the hell down, it's hazy double IPA, and this one does. An example that you can relax into is very welcome as I approach my dotage.

Reading back, that's quite a run of New Zealand hop varieties from the eleven breweries represented here, and I really like the spicy herbal and mineral flavours they bring. Just don't skimp on the Nelson, yeah?