Round numbers

Another Monday, another blog post, another round-up of recent Irish pale ale. This one is the blog's 3000th entry. It's best not to think about what that means, and move right along with the reviews.

Spent bread beers were a bit of a thing a few years ago. Wicklow Wolf still has one in annual production and now Lough Gill has added one, getting their crusts from the O'Hehirs bakery chain. Oh! is a pale ale at 4.5% ABV and looks lager-like in the glass: a mostly clear yellow with lots of bubbles and a fine white head. The aroma is crisp and broadly citric but doesn't offer anything especially distinctive or noteworthy. There's a decently slick body -- almost chewy -- but while that would surely be an excellent base for launching some new-world hop fireworks, it's a bit dull on tasting. There's a slightly sweaty savoury aspect, a little bit lemon cookie with a touch of oaty flapjack. "Easy drinking" and "brewed for adventure" says the brewery. They can't have both. I found it rather dull. It's simple and clean, and has a pleasant substance which I'm guessing is the bread doing its work, but it needs a stronger hop charge. I know from other examples that this sort of beer doesn't have to be basic and compromised, so I don't know why Lough Gill has made this one so.

That was followed several weeks later by Hazy Sunshine, about the most on-the-nose name for a summer "tropical IPA". Nectaron, Wai-iti, Waimea and Mosaic are the hops, which certainly sounds like lots of potential for tropicality. The aroma offers a significant degree of fruit salad, but also a harder pith bitterness, suggesting that it won't be sunny the whole way through. It's a heavy affair, tasting denser than even 6.1% ABV might imply, and I found myself wishing I'd served it ice cold rather than the slightly higher setting of my beer fridge. The extra warmth allows a little bit of dry grit into the flavour, just beginning to edge in on the fruit effect from the hops. That bitterness I noticed in the aroma doesn't really materialise in the taste, and instead it's thick and gummy, loaded with concentrated pineapple and mango. A tarter juice and zest effect arrives in the finish, but that's as close to bitter as it gets. I would say it's harmless fun, but the alcohol heat really puts a dampener on any carefree summer vibes it may otherwise have had. This is a serious sort of sunshine. We've become unfortunately accustomed to that around here lately.

I don't get to feature Hopkins & Hopkins on here much: it's a brewery that tends to do only a few things, but does them well. One of its handful of regular outlets is Moss Lane on Pearse Street, where they're pouring a new H&H pale ale called Easy - East. It's a medium orange colour and was served pleasingly cold in the high heat of summer last week. Fresh and juicy mandarin kicks off the aroma and follows through to the flavour, where it's joined by a surprise peppercorn spice and a weighty citrus oil, like a Terry's Chocolate Orange, minus the chocolate. I was reminded in particular of the much-missed Purgatory from the somewhat-missed Franciscan Well brewery. This kind of clean and simple American-style pale ale is far from the bleeding edge of craft beer, and that makes it all the more worthwhile, especially when it's more than a lazy clone of the mainstream.

Over at The Porterhouse they had a rare new one under their own brand, brewed by The White Hag. Cruel Summer is a cold IPA, a style that seems to have gone out of fashion for no good reason. It's a light 4.6% ABV and a very pale yellow, gently hazed. And yet: the dank. It smells pungently weedy with a twist or two of coarse-ground pink peppercorn. The flavour opens on that, brightly and shockingly, but quickly calms down, introducing softer tropical juice and a more orthodox pithy American bitterness. It finishes in a clean and crisp lager fashion, meaning that despite the BIG hop taste, it would work as a session beer. I sometimes fear that I might be getting a bit bored of beer, that maybe they're all actually quite samey and not worth the effort I put in to finding new ones. This was a reminder, a stark one, that beer still has the power to impress and excite. If you're in the vicinity of The Porterhouse or Tapped this summer, do not miss.

From the around-for-ages-but-new-to-me file, Five Lamps IPA. The brand is a pox on Irish beer in general, wrapping itself in the Dublin flag while being brewed by C&C in Clonmel. But at the otherwise lovely Toner's pub, its IPA was the best of a very poor draught selection. It's a sizeable 5% ABV yet still manages to be quite thin and bland. The hops offer no more than a whisper of strawberry and an English metallic tang; and while it's malt-forward, that's not very pronounced either, being lightly caramelised with a bigger kick of dry tannin. It tastes cheap, which isn't terribly surprising since I'm led to believe the range was created to provide Dublin publicans with cheap beer, to compete with the heavily-promoted famous brands. My pint, of course, was not cheap, at €8. It's all about the margins, and this IPA is only marginally enjoyable, so that tracks.

In the same file we find another 5%-er, Rye River's Hazy Bangin' pale ale. This has allegedly been on sale in Tesco for yonks, just not any of the many Tescoes I visit on my travels around Dublin. Then Dunnes got it too and, hallelujah, I was able to buy it in the Stephen's Green Centre while picking up the still-brilliant Grafters brown ale. I don't know if the recipe has much in common with the archetypal Irish west-coast IPA, Big Bangin', of which it's a brand extension. It's certainly not in the west-coast style, what with the haze, and doesn't have the same brightness of hop. Instead there's a medium-sweet zestiness in both aroma and flavour, the former introducing a slightly sticky orange cordial note, while the taste includes some surprise coconut. It's good fun, but I wouldn't call it bangin', exactly. There's a strong caramel malt note which took me a while to place, realising eventually it's something you get from once-hoppy beer that's been sitting too long. My can was four months inside the printed best-before date so I had a reasonable expectation of freshness. I fear, however, this beer may be a delicate creature, not built for the neglect of warm supermarket shelves. As with the IPA the brewery makes for Lidl's Crafty Brewing range, I suspect one must be careful here about freshness. I will seek out a younger edition next time. This one was passable, but no more than that. Even Dunnes has better hopped-up options available. 

Brasserie Nautile visited Ireland in the spring, and included The White Hag on their itinerary, where they helped brew Salt & Stone, a West Coast IPA. This looks well, having the same pristine golden clarity as the brewery's excellent flagship, Little Fawn. It smells sharp, zesty and classically American, which is in its favour; the mere 5.6% ABV less so. I found it surprisingly soft, not bitter, its flavour more succulent stonefruit than punchy citrus. The peach and lychee subsides after a moment, leaving a sharper bite of fried onion and then, finally, a buzz of grapefruit and lime oil. It's not exactly full-on, delivering the IPA basics but nothing spectacular. That's in spite of, or possibly because of, a highly involved hop charge, featuring Columbus, Chinook, Centennial, Motueka and Simcoe. I reckon they've blurred into each other and there's nothing distinctive about the beer as a result. This is inoffensive and a bit anodyne. It certainly doesn't come across as one of those brave and wacky recipes that brewers like to devise when they get together. I enjoyed its simplicity,  but honestly I think I'd have preferred a Little Fawn from the supermarket. Sure, it's West Coast all the way, but that doesn't automatically make it a great beer.

I can't imagine what the prompt which created Curtain Twitcher's label said, nor can I believe that the horrific result was the best the AI could come up with for Third Barrel Brewing. Suffice it to say that the promise of Nelson Sauvin and Citra attracted me more than the "artwork" did. It's an IPA; hazy, though not billed as such, and quite a dense-looking shade of orange. The brewery knows how to use Nelson, and it's very prominent in the aroma: flinty sparks and squashy pineapple. A more subtle white grape and gooseberry takes over in the flavour, plus a weedy dankness and background note of fruit candy, which I'm guessing comes from the third hop, Lotus. There's lots of complexity, then, none of it especially novel, but if the basic formula works, why go changing it? Most importantly, nothing has gone wrong. Hazy it may be, but it's perfectly clean and lets the hops do all the talking. 6% ABV gives them a solid base to work from, the malt providing texture without interrupting the taste. Quality stuff, and recommended in particular to my follow enjoyers of Nelson Sauvin's mineral spice.

"A whole lot of New Zealand goodness" is the sum total of the description on DOT's Nectaron IPA. This is another kiwi-forward 6%-er, and hazy too, of course. The aroma is cool and crisp, hinting at peaches but their sharply perfumed skin rather than the sticky, juicy flesh. The flavour continues that theme, bringing a slightly jammy peach-preserve sweetness and matching it to dryer crisp pale grain. It's a heavy and viscous take on the tropical end of antipodean hopping. A bit of grass and some basil or thyme rubs up against the soft stonefruit. Overall, it's fine, but no great shakes. The hop flavour is a little muted, subdued, and not as full-on as I'd have liked it. DOT makes beers for Aldi and, for me, this one tasted more like that price bracket than the bigger number I paid for it in the independent trade. 

Grumbling further, I don't think I've ever enjoyed a beer badged as an "oat cream IPA". Corner Club by Galway Bay in collaboration with Swiss brewer Hoppy People is not specifically designated as such, but on the label the brewer boasts "we pushed oats and wheat to the max with this brew, creating the creamiest, juiciest IPA base possible," so I think I know what I'm dealing with. It certainly has the hazy custard appearance of the oat cream brigade. The aroma gives little away, but the presence of Nelson Sauvin is unmistakable, with a subtle waft of grape. On the flavour... there it is. Oat cream IPA always tastes like plasterboard: dry and rough, with an alkaline harshness. There's no juice, no cream, nothing soft, only harshness. I drank this back-to-back with Curtain Twitcher and it's amazing how a beer with similar specs as that -- 6.4% ABV here, with Citra and Riwaka accompanying the Nelson -- can result in something so different and so much less enjoyable. It's not massively offensive, but was rather bland once I got past the drywall rasp. The can art is good and the artist is named, so if you've ever drawn a correlation between that sort of thing, I don't think it works.

Galway Bay also takes us out with the strongest beer of the day: Disco Paradiso, another hazy affair, this one at 7.8% ABV. Sureshot of Manchester is the collaborating brewery, and they go to a lot of effort to explain the process that went into making it. Cold-steeped oats, whirlpool Nelson Sauvin and double dry-hopped with three further prestige varieties, one in HyperBoost® form. If this isn't silky juicy perfection then it's time to cancel the whole haze project. It's on the darker side of eggy yellow, with the greenish cast that very hoppy IPA sometimes takes on. Head formation is perfunctory and unenthusiastic. The aroma is a mix of saturated raw-hop vegetal notes and a friendlier kind of tropical buzz. There is a surprising amount of bitterness in the flavour, the Nelson in particular showing its old-world ancestry with a hard, almost waxy, grass bite. There's little room for tropical niceties underneath that, and it finishes bitter and resinous, albeit with a hint of lighter juice, lurking beneath the surface but largely overpowered and subdued. That's a pity. I appreciate that this is intended as a hop showcase, but it ends up unbalanced and rather harsh. The name and branding suggest a quirky and fun quality that's some distance from the rather serious bitter liquid.

Maybe the hot weather had me grumpy but, Porterhouse aside, there wasn't a lot to like here. If there's a theme, it's that a good dose of Nelson Sauvin can be a pale ale's saviour. Use more of that, just to be on the safe side.

Cryo me a River

Anyone who pays attention to trends within microbrewing will have noticed in recent years the explosion in variety of proprietary hop products. I don't think these assorted extracts and powders and boosters were ever meant to have a consumer-facing role, but brewers seem to love them, and love letting us know that they've used them. Does that get them a discount from the supplier? I wouldn't be surprised.

For my part, I can't help wondering if these enhancers actually enhance the beers in any real way. I've certainly never identified any pattern among them: which ones to look out for and which ones aren't worth the paper their patents were filed on. Rye River, however, has given us an opportunity for some objective evaluation. As "a bit of fun" the brewery made a small batch of its Big Bangin' IPA using Cryo Fresh™ Wet Hops from Yakima Chief, "the new frontier of freshness", designed to produce a just-harvested hop effect which you can deploy year-round. I don't drink enough fresh-hopped beers to put that claim to the test, but I was very interested to find out how this version differs from standard Big Bangin'. So, of course, I tasted them blind.

There's certainly a difference in appearance: one is very slightly hazy while the other is classically crystal clear. My immediate suspicion is the one that was more of a craft operation was left hazy, while the other is clear for the supermarket audience. The hazy boi had a magnificent aroma of pineapple and passionfruit, with a slight background tang of funky silage. All good clean hop fun. The other one has a much plainer smell. It's pleasantly spicy, with a hint of peppercorn and a fainter non-specific tropical fruit behind. Nothing wrong, but it doesn't compete with the other one at all. My initial loose suspicion began to tighten. 

I thought I'd start tasting with the clear one. It's recognisably Big Bangin', which is to say cracker-dry with a more pronounced tropical element than the aroma, turning savoury towards the end, with a rub of white onion. It lacks the intense punchy bitterness on which west coast IPAs built their reputation, but there is a certain acidic kick in the aftertaste which is sufficient to keep it within the style specs. My hazy friend, on the other hand, was strangely malty. I don't know where all the fruit from the aroma went. The hops are mostly doing bitterness here, which is properly west coast but a little disappointing after that fabulous technicolor aroma. Remember the funky silage? It's back in a big way here, balanced against a kind of marmalade or orange sweet side. I guess I was expecting something more New England, given the juice of the aroma, but I was definitely expecting a more intense flavour experience, and since I suspected this of being the cryo one.

And I was wrong. You may already know that from the accompanying photograph, but at time of writing I haven't taken it yet. The stand-out lesson is that standard Big Bangin' from my local Tesco is world class in the aroma stakes, and that's worth the price of admission (less with Clubcard) alone. The cryo stuff does enhance the taste, but not hugely. Importantly, it doesn't enhance the hop flavour, just the bitterness.

My main takeaway here is a new appreciation for standard Big Bangin'. Turns out there's not much that even the boffins at Yakima Chief can do to improve upon it.

Surprise Vocation

My little local Tesco serves me well for the basics. Emergency Manislav and 4-for-€10 Leann Folláin and I consider my needs met. It was very surprising, then, to find a couple of high-end Yorkshire IPAs warming themselves on the ambient shelves, both canned less than a month previous. It wasn't beer shopping, it was a rescue mission.

First up, a splash of summer colour on a collaboration can between Vocation and Marble. Hop, Skip & Juice "hazy pale ale" nails its style credentials to the mast. If you don't get full New England vibes from this you deserve a refund, is the implication. It looks correct: the lemon-curd yellow of such beers, regardless of their strength -- this one a modest 5.7% ABV. It smells of custard vanilla first, backed by a sharper mix of lime jelly and fresh garlic. Again, bang in the centre of those inexplicable style parameters. The flavour, let it be noted, is not a mess. It's certainly dessertish: that mix of sweetness and lemon giving it an overarching meringue pie effect, with the garlic entering the picture as a savoury twang on the end; a two-course meal in reverse. But it's light, undemanding and fluffily textured, with none of the unpleasant extreme aspects that beers like this show too often. I wouldn't go so far as to call it "juicy", though. There's too much fuzz on the tongue for that. I guess it's a supermarket take on New England pale ale, and if that means it's balanced and accessible then I will absolutely take that, and commend it to you.

The ABV goes up to 7.2% for Love & Hate, badged as a New England IPA and following Vocation's standard branding and binomial nomenclature. Still hazy yellow, though it does look denser and more opaque than the previous. Here the garlic dominates the aroma and there's a worrying heat in the nostrils too. Is this the style reverting to its usual naughty ways? Yes. Yes it it. A rub of raw garlic across the palate, a scorch of hard alcohol and then a spike of dreggy yeast bite in the finish. This is both extreme and entirely normal for modern IPA fashion, and I despair for anyone who considers this a good beer or somehow progress. I've had worse, for sure, but here's a deliberately poor and unfinished-tasting beer getting into Tesco Express, where innocent civilians might find it. Hopefully the €4.40 price tag will keep them away when Manislav, Leann Folláin and Francis' Big Bangin' IPA are all on the same shelf and better value in every sense. Not forgetting the Hop, Skip & Juice too. Let's pray that punters are drawn to the colourful can first.

Moaning about fashion aside, a shout-out to the Tesco operative who decided that my neighbourhood store was worthy of these. There's a certain optimism -- especially when commerce is so heavily emphasising The Essentials -- in taking a chance on high-risk beer trends. Throw us another couple of randomers and I'll sure as hell buy them.

Planting the seeds

"I don't normally drink beer" is nearly the slogan of the Bloom Inn. You hear it a lot at the beer bars. The drinks tent at Bord Bia's annual garden festival in Phoenix Park is therefore probably a good place for brewers looking to expose their wares to a new audience. That said, the beer offer seemed down this year when I went along on Saturday afternoon. Only The Porterhouse, Rye River, Jack Cody's and Boyne Brewhouse were representing for 2016, plus a guest tap of Stone Barrel Boom IPA on the Rye River stand. The rest of the space was amply occupied by the spirits and cider folk and everyone seemed to be doing great business.

But why wouldn't they be? It was a glorious afternoon, sunny and warm, with literally acres of drinking space. Dublin's annoying prohibition on public outdoor drinking means that Bloom is one of the very few opportunities we citizens get to sit out on the grass of a summer's day and have a picnic with beers. Anecdotal evidence seemed to suggest the punters weren't being especially adventurous with regard to their beer choices -- Paddy from Boyne Brewhouse told me their lager was the soaraway success of the day. For my part there were two beers I'd never tasted before so that's where I started.

Worcester Sauce is the name Jack Cody's has chosen for their new English-style bitter. It's 4.2% ABV and poured from the bottle a perfect clear amber colour. The appearance is about the best thing it has going for it, however. At the core of the flavour is a wheaty, dusty taste, reminding me of Ready Brek or similar processed cereal. Behind this sits a sour twang and then an unpleasant rubbery aftertaste. Something seems to have gone wrong here though I couldn't tell whether that's in the recipe design or the production process. I finished my pint, but this isn't the beer for me.

To follow, a beer I only recently realised I'd never had before: Rye River's Fancy Frank's Lager, part of their McGargle's series, a replacement for that dreadful pilsner I can't even bring myself to name. Frank's is another one where the visuals are impressive: a paler yellow than most microbrewed lagers. The flavour is rather lacking, however. Sweetness dominates -- chewy grain and an almost syrupy quality. I guess the low level of hopping fits its niche as a commodity lager like the macros make, and it was certainly popular on the day, but to me it just felt like a beer with a hole in it. For comparison I followed it straight away with Boyne Brewhouse's Long Arm which is far from a hop bomb but is dimensions more interesting.

With the hard work done it was on to the €5 pints of Francis' Big Bangin' IPA followed by the wobble home.

Thanks to Bord Bia for the tickets. Today is the last day of Bloom 2016 and it closes at 6pm. It also has gardens.

Feel the Gs

We don't have celebrity brewers in Ireland, for very good reasons, but if we did, Alex Lawes would be a candidate. From award-winning homebrew before winning awards for homebrew was really a thing, a spell at James's Gate, to Rye River where his tenure as head brewer has seen some of the best hop-forward beers Irish brewing has produced arriving and making waves, both under the brewery's own McGargle's brand, and the two supermarket house labels it produces. So it's entirely unsurprising that there's been a buzz about the first beers under his own solo marque, Whiplash.

"Brewed under contract for Whiplash by Whiplash at Rye River Brewing" explains the copy on the label: the honesty of the text offers refreshment before I've even taken a mouthful. Scaldy Porter is the first one I opened, a 33cl bottle at 5.5% ABV. It's a thick beast, glugging slowly out of the bottle to become a dense black glassful topped by a dark tan head. Roast looms large in the aroma, and that dark -- almost burnt -- character is the centre of the flavour. Around it orbits an array of other tastes, nothing outré, but it's unusual to find so many in a single beer. You get strong espresso, a milky creaminess, bitter dark chocolate and some chewy butterscotch toffee. It's all rather serious and there's an acridity in the finish that doesn't exactly invite the next sip. The label describes it as a "robust" porter; I'd say downright surly. While definitely tasty and well-made, you do need to be in the mood to do battle with this one. Easy drinking it isn't.

A change of format for its fraternal twin: portentiously-titled Surrender to the Void double IPA comes in a shiny monochrome can styled like one of them high-art Danish contract brews. It's 8.5% ABV and beautifully clear, a pale orange-gold. From the get-go it's another complex one. Various hop elements vie for superiority in the aroma, loudest among them the juicy mandarin and viscous pine resin. There's nothing viscous in the texture however. Though the carbonation is low and strength high, it has a fantastic light touch, the warmth only really becoming apparent after a few swallows, and happening in the belly rather than the mouth. Assuming the best-before is a year from canning, mine had spent a mere week in the tin before I drank it, which goes some way to explaining just how banging the hop flavour was. Bitter pine is the first impression, but it steps off after only a second letting sweeter zesty orange oils come through, lightening further to tangerine and mango. This fades quickly leaving a sticky marijuana funk as the finish. The malt base is... there, somewhere, probably, but you don't really get to taste it: Surrender to the Void is a beer with a hop obsession and wants to share it with you, loudly and at length. Alex received big plaudits for McGargle's Francis' Big Bangin' IPA and I hope this one gets equal attention. It's a better beer, in my opinion, and I'm not the sort of beer geek who thinks that you just need to up the ABV and add more hops to achieve that. There's a roundness and a nuance to Surrender that's rare in strong and hoppy Irish beer but which this pulls off neatly. If anyone fancies putting it in a blind taste against Galway Bay's Of Foam & Fury I'd be interested to see the result: I think the contention would be very close.

Alex very kindly gifted me a couple of cans of his third beer, released the week before last. Rollover is a session IPA of just 3.8% ABV. It's a murky little chap, pouring a cloudy pale orange and looking more like a witbier in the glass than anything else. A clever bit of sleight of hand sees the addition of oats to the grist, presumably to help boost the body of what might otherwise have turned out a little thin, and it works too: the texture is convincingly weighty, providing a perfect platform for the hops, though it's rather flatter than I expected. Sweet satsumas are the aroma, laced with some sharper pine, and the flavour performs a similar double act. First it's juicy orange sherbet but that's quickly upstaged by bitingly acidic resins. The pineyness grows as you go along and does bring the cumulative effect a little too close to floor cleaner for comfort -- I think I'd like a touch more fruit softness than this offers. Those after a bitter bang for their buck will definitely get a kick out of it, and there's no question about the freshness, though its sessionability will depend on your tolerance level for explosively flavourful new world hops.

So that's Whiplash: another front on which Irish beer is rendering imports increasingly unnecessary.

Pocket change

Ten euro and one cent is what this lot set me back. Five beers from Rye River Brewing released under Lidl's cringeworthily named own brand: two of them new, three previously available as four-packs of 33cl bottles but now reformatted to half litres. And all of them a first try for me.

First over the jumps was the 4.1% ABV Crafty Brewing Company Irish Red Ale which looks quite black in that picture but is more a mahogany red-brown in real life. Mild toffee and lightly metallic English hops are the aroma: invitingly, old-fashionedly, beery. I was surprised how sweet it was: a big, gooey, candybar hit of caramel makes the first impact, growing to the point of sickliness. Thankfully it fades quickly. The bitterness kicks in to replace it, but it's unpleasantly acrid: part liquorice rope, part metal pencil sharpener. This tastes like a thrown-together budget red. It's not boring by any means, but I don't think the recipe has been assembled well.

Onwards and upwards, to Crafty Brewing Company Irish Stout. 4.5% ABV and looking every inch the part: black in the middle, garnet round the edges and topped by a pillow of off-white foam. The carbonation is lower than I'd expect for a bottled stout, perhaps trying for some sort of nitro effect, though missing the mark. And once again the flavours don't quite gel together. While not as sweet as the red, there's still a brown sugar or molasses taste -- mild but enough to make my palate recoil slightly. A classy crisp roasted dryness is the other side of the seesaw but it fails to balance the beer properly. Like the red, it's worth paying a little more and trade up to a better example of the style.

I can't remember the last time I had a 50cl bottle of a new pale lager in front of me, and Irish lager has been on a bit of a roll lately -- including the excellent unfiltered pils Rye River had at Alltech last month. So it was with a mix of excitement and tredidation that I came to Crafty Brewing Company Irish Lager. The tiny badge on the label that says it won a Great Taste Award in 2015 provided some reassurance, as did the appearance: the pure pale gold of Helles. One glance and you're in Munich. Late hopping is promised on the bottle and yep, I get that: a slightly oily celery and white pepper flavour right in the centre. But while I would like that to be floating on a billowing soft malt base, there's instead a honking musty off-flavour: dry, acrid and sharply metallic. This is nearly a superb beer but as-is it's one I'd have to drink very cold and very quick. Up against Aldi's Spaten at the same price it doesn't compete.

That concludes round one and, to be honest, I wasn't really expecting to enjoy any of those. What actually got me through the door of Lidl were the newcomers. Rye River does hoppy exceedingly well, from the much-lauded Francis' Big Bangin' IPA to the hugely under-rated Cousin Rosie to its other budget supermarket own-brand Grafters. Simon had already given the thumbs-up to Crafty Brewing Company Irish Pale Ale so I was expecting a next-level experience, even at just 4.5% ABV.

It poured a dark copper colour and shows a mildly zesty citrus aroma. It tastes... decent. There's a firm malt base and although Ella is mentioned on the label, I detect the down-to-earth citric bitterness of Cascade in here. It's definitely on the old world side of new world, reminding me of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in particular, a flavour profile harking back to its roots in English bitter. Worth €1.89? Sure. But it's another beer that I think is worth trading up from.

And speaking of trading up, Crafty Brewing Company Irish IPA, at 6% ABV, is priced a little higher at €2.45. West-coast gold and smelling dankly bittersweet with a bit of liquorice and a bit of guava, achieved with Vic Secret hops, the label helpfully tells us. The texture is surprisingly light, lighter than the Pale Ale. In fact the whole thing is a much more polished experience than any of the others. That darkly bitter liquorice effect is at the centre which means this could easily be classed as the first pale black IPA. There's a gorgeous fresh resinous hop buzz, a dash of tropical passionfruit and maybe an edge of red onion, much like Francis' has when I drink it. There's no sign at all of that strength and its paleness, lightness and low bitterness conspire to make it exceedingly drinkable. This is a superb beer, especially at the price. I don't expect availability to be particularly high once drinkers get wind of it. Be nice and don't hoard.

And if the low prices of these beers leave you feeling a pang of guilt, Rye River's Kickstarter campaign begins today.

Relentless

The Irish Craft Beer Festival came and went in late August, and almost ended me. Though the festival was shrunk to two evenings and a day, and I spent a significant amount of time serving beer as well as drinking it, I came away exhausted, physically and gustatorially. The root cause, I think, is that so many of the new and special edition Irish beers are very strongly flavoured. And while that's a bonus when it's one tap out of ten in the pub, serial sips of these beers, one after the other, for three nights running, is probably ill-advised.

And I suspect that's why my standout beer of the festival was Mont Nude Lager: in part because it's a superb helles, with all the gentle softness that goes with, but also because I drank it late on the last evening when it was exactly what I needed.

Similarly Rye River, who stole the show with their specials just like at Alltech last February, managed to squeeze in a Vienna Lager and a Double Decoction Märzen, both of which hit the perfect clean lager profile squarely in the centre with the right amount of malt heft. I've never known of an Irish microbrewery doing decoction mashing, but they were at it again with a Triple Decoction Doppelbock, again right on the stylistic button, all chocolate and caramel. Last of the four Day One lagers was a Baltic Porter which I thought lighter and sweeter than the ones I tasted in Poland in April. 6% ABV is a little low for the style, isn't it?

Rye River Watermelon Wheat

Later, more extreme offerings from Rye River included Sexy Lacto Flanders, a mercilessly sour Flemish-style red that I thought a bit overdone but interesting to see how sour sour can go; Lemondrop Berliner, which tasted greasy, like drinking a scented candle, but in a good way; Hipster-Hopped Azacca which used a brand new US hop variety, but one which tasted very familiarly of grapefruit and peach; and the ironic style of the moment Watermelon Wheat, made with a vast quantity of real watermelons for a concentrated sticky chewing-gum sweetness that really stuck around on the palate longer than was welcome.

Two new beers under Rye River's McGargle's marque also made their début at the stand: Toothless Dec's Brown Ale is a straightforward light, sweet and caramelly brown; while Francis's Big Bangin' IPA really turned a few heads, being a pale coloured, 7.1% ABV west coast-style IPA. I could certainly see the resemblance to beers like BrewDog's Jackhammer, and it was served fantastically fresh, but there was an overlay of savoury onion that spoilt it for me.

So that's two of the fifty or so stalls covered. We'll explore further next time.