Hitting the bottle

That's enough bothering the bar staff for now. Irish Craft Beer Week continues with some new bottled beer brands.

Cloughmore is a label owned by Noreast, a veteran importer of fancy foreign beers, more recently turned to distributing the bottled output of Galway Bay Brewery and now with a marque of their own, brewed in Co. Down by Whitewater.

First up, Granite Lager. At 4.5%, this is suspiciously the same ABV as Whitewater's own Belfast Lager making me wonder if it's a straight re-badge. It's a while since I've tasted any Belfast Lager, never being much of a fan of it. Granite looks gorgeous, arriving  a perfect clear pale gold with fine bubbles forming an ice cream float of stiff foam on top. Both the aroma and flavour blend together the golden syrup of lager malt with the stern dry cut grass and crunchy celery of German hops, with the former taking the lead in the taste and the latter in the aroma. If this is Belfast Lager under a new name then I'm ready to take a second look because it's very well put together. I find it hard to believe anyone would put the effort in for a made-to-order commodity lager, but that's clearly what's happened here. It's smooth enough to throw down as a sunny day quaffer but also complex enough to take time over if you're a fan of full-flavoured pale lager.
[Edited to add: Whitewater has confirmed that Cloughmore beers are all different recipes to their own-brand beers]

Dark Water  is the Cloughmore stout and it got off to a bad start: a thin-looking red-brown with insane amounts of foam resulting in a glass that looked like an unholy hybrid of Don King and Marge Simpson. Again it shares an ABV with Whitewater's own Belfast Black stout. It has the crisp and dry aroma of German schwarzbier, or a bag of black patent malt, and this is the main feature of the flavour as well, rendered even drier by a big carbonic bite. There's more than a hint of dusty, husky malt floor sweepings about it, almost burning the back of the throat with its arid sandpaper quality. There's maybe a flash of milk chocolate or cappuccino in the centre, but blink and you'll miss it. If you value dry Irish stout for its dryness you'll get your money's worth here. Personally I found the time and effort of getting it poured with all that head not worth the return on investment.

I bought those two really for the sake of completeness. It's the third one in the series that really piqued my interest. No arty name here, it says what it is: Heather IPA. And a perfect pour too, a hazy amber with a modest respectable head. It smells only slightly herby but there's lots more action on tasting. What fascinates me is the concept: heather beer, typified by Fraoch, is generally hop-free. IPA, on the other hand, isn't. This mixes it all up, bringing in the herbal complexity of the heather and setting it on a toffee malt base that fits with a certain sort of IPA and adding a metallic bitter tang from some quite assertive hops. It's not quite as much fun as I expected, needing a bit more heather weirdness for that. But it is a pretty decent heavyish bitter-sweet amberish ale. Nothing fussy, just quality.

From the picturesque Mourne coast to the picturesque west Cork coast and Munster Brewery in Youghal. Bravely, perhaps, they've opted to launch with two lagers, both at 4.2% ABV. Blackguard is billed as golden but looks more of a kellerbier hazy orange. It smells wholesome, all rich maltsack and mild jaffa fruit, and that German microbrewery character continues on tasting: a smooth bready malt base barely troubled by the nettles and rocket of the hops. Yes it's odd drinking something that tastes like it came from a central Berlin brewpub but really just zipped up the M9.

The other one is Fir Bolg, billed as an amber lager and "hop strong" to boot. It's definitely bitterer than Blackguard, with a long tangy finish. Again it features a rich and rustic cereal quality, tasting as cloudy as it looks. In the midst of the malt biscuit there's more of the gentle orangey fruit, and then that tang on the end.

Munster Brewery have made an unusual decision with these two and I'm not sure that rustic German beer is something the Irish market has been crying out for. Me, I'm just glad to have the variety.

Two more new bottling breweries to bring us up to the festival tomorrow.

Back in the race

On Saturday last L. Mulligan Grocer celebrated its second birthday and I dropped in to eat lots of free black pudding sausage rolls celebrate with the guys, who had also just scooped Licensing World's first ever Craft Beer Pub of the Year award. Cask Fraoch was a little disappointing, lacking much of the subtle complexities of the bottled version. All-new Waterford-brewed Metalman Pale Ale was in magnificent form: a darker, funkier version adding a nice edge to the previously light and fruity quaffer. But the big occasion for me was the first sighting of Clanconnel's new beer, one with which the Co. Down brewery pulls itself up onto the pale ale bandwagon at last.

There's nothing immediately striking about McGrath's Irish Pale Ale: a par-for-the-course orange-amber body topped by generous foam and a manageable 4.4% ABV. I was a few gulps down before the pint glass began trapping any aroma for me: all sharp and slightly acrid. It's a theme which is borne out by the flavour too. No innocent breezy summer fruits; instead it has a rather harsh acidic edge: a squirt of grapefruit to the back of the palate; a teeth-cleansing rhubarb squeakiness.

I'm sure it will find its fans but it was a little severe for me. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, a bit of dry-hopping would do it no harm at all at all. By coincidence, Steve has a review of this on his blog today too.

A "white ale" is also on its way from the new Clanconnel line-up. More on that doggy when it comes around the track.

Geddit down yeh!

A big big thanks to SirRon, host of this month's Session with the brilliant topic of The Display Shelf. See, I was captivated by the beauty of Fraoch 20th Anniversary Ale when I first saw it recently. Never mind that ordinary Fraoch is one of my favourite beers, never mind the vital statistics (11% ABV; aged in ex-speyside sherry casks; limited edition of 7,500 bottles): the sheer class of the champagne stylings of the bottle made me intensely aware that this is a special beer for a very special occasion. It's quite possible that if it weren't for today's Session I'd never have got round to opening it. Instead, I decided this is the perfect opportunity to throw hoarding to the wind and just drink the fecker.

It's a dark and faintly cloudy amber colour and quite viscous, with just a dusting of froth which leaves a stiff lacing down the glass. The vanilla wood is present on the nose, but in quite a pleasant and subtle way, and there's also an enticing herbal complexity underneath. And of course there's no ambiguity that this is a big big beer. On tasting, the texture is striking -- thickly mouth-coating but with a gently enlivening sparkle. First in the flavour queue is that sour woodiness then a sweet honey complication. Amazingly, the fruit of twice-removed sherry still haunts the beer, and that heady malt from the scotch is in the mix as well. Just dusting the top there's a sweet and aromatic herbal flavour, deriving from the heather I assume, but carrying notes of red summer berries too. The finish on all of this is quite dry, leaving a strawberry and vanilla echo behind.

Fraoch 20th Anniversary is a gorgeous beer, and definitely one to have on hand for a special occasion. But there's absolutely no harm in cracking it open just because you want to. So should it be for every beer really.

In fact, in addition to our monthly Session, I think it would be worth the beer blogosphere designating one day a year as Stash Day: an occasion which acts as its own excuse to pour something special from your collection and tell everyone about it.

Ancient history

There are a few places and beers that will always remind me of the early days of my beer education. The Celtic Whiskey Shop is one such, and when it opened on Dublin's Dawson Street just after the millennium (the main one, not Dublin's local one twelve years previous) I worked nearby and was a regular customer. Alongside a massive range of hand-picked whiskies, whiskeys and other spirits, they had a modest but far more interesting selection of Irish and Scottish beers. It was here that I first encountered the "Heather Ale Company", these days going by their much more prosaic "Williams Bros." moniker.

Over several weeks I worked through their portfolio of ales made from traditional, yet exotic, ingredients. An early one was Kelpie, the dark seaweed ale. I recall being horrified by it and after one bottle vowing never to touch it again. Most of the rest of them I simply didn't care for; Fraoch I adored (and still do); but thoughts of Kelpie gave me the shivers for years after. Then recently I spotted a bottle in DrinkStore and started to wonder if it was as awful as I remembered. Wasn't it possible that my taste in beer had moved on to a point where seaweed flavours can now be welcomed? I bought a bottle.

It pours a red-brown Coca-Cola shade with a busy sparkle but not overly fizzy. The aroma is mild and chocolatey, like a mild or porter. I took a sip and waited for the other shoe to drop. But it didn't! Kelpie is actually quite nice. At only 4.4% ABV, it's rather light and possibly a touch watery, but the sweet roasted flavours are beautiful and there's a salty tang from the seaweed, adding character and finishing it off well. The whole reminds me of a lighter, simpler edition of Porterhouse Oyster Stout. It just goes to show that it's worth re-checking your opinion on every beer at least once a decade.

Tragically, Celtic Whiskey's days as a purveyor of fine beer didn't last. Probably sick of me as the only proper beer customer, the range was cut back until it was little more than cans of Guinness for the tourists -- I've not been in in a while so I really should go and check if the winds of change blowing through Irish beer at the moment have breezed down Dawson Street at all. The loss I felt most keenly, even more than the Fraoch, was Alba: the Williamses' strong scots pine beer. When I saw a bottle on the shelf of The Cracked Kettle last year I snapped it up. I have such fond memories of this beer, and it nearly pained me to open it: could it possibly taste as good as the nostalgia? One sniff and I knew the answer was yes.

Alba has always smelled and tasted of strawberries to me: not the fresh and firm kind, but big old sloppy, mushy, dark, half-fermented strawberries: it's a gorgeous heady sensation. Behind this there's a dry peppery spice and a little bit of yeasty ester, and possibly a funky hint of mushroom too. Barry got cloves in a big way, and I can see where he's coming from, but it's more subtle than that. It's quite a bit lighter than I remember, but then I've had plenty stronger than its mere 7.5% ABV in the six or seven years since my last bottle.

I definitely need Alba back in my life. A whole range of new and exciting Williams Bros. beers are now in stock in DrinkStore, and I hope to work through them during the year. But I'll always be yearning for an Alba.

JAGA

It's a happy coincidence that the Session on summer beer comes just after the Hilden festival. This was my third year attending the event in the brewery yard near Belfast, where summery blondes form a big part of the selection. I may not be a huge fan of the genre, but at least that's the legwork taken out of this Session.

The festival itself got a little bigger this year, with the addition of two teepees in the gardens, hosting comfy seats and live traditional music: respite from the benches and amped-up rock of the main stage area. There was also a homebrew competition (well done Derek; hard luck Níall), an additional al fresco bar, giant games, and all manner of more festive things. It's always a great day out.

My first blonde of the day was by Williams Brothers, the Scottish brewery which seems to be everywhere these days. I'm a massive fan of their Heather Ale Company range (especially Fraoch), but had never tried any of their more mainstream beers. Ceilidh was on offer -- a cask lager with 4.7% ABV. Sadly, it's not very good: very very sweet, with what they claim to be toffee flavours seeming like brown sugar, with lots of unpleasant graininess behind it. I suspect a bit of forced carbonation would liven this up, and make it taste like Barry says it should. Mrs Beer Nut didn't have a great start either, opting for Nethergate's coriander-infused Umbel Ale: an attractive shade of light copper, but really lacking any distinctive flavours, including the coriander. There's a bit of crunchy grain to it, but the rest is thinness and dullness.

Oakham's JHB gave us a bit more taste: a slightly spicy green flavour, like cress, as well as some bubblegum malt, but with Cotleigh Monument we were leaving flavour country once again. By the time we came to the unspeakably tasteless Evan Evans Gold, my wife had coined the term JAGA (Just Another Golden Ale) for the succession of boring blondes that had passed our way.

There were some notable exceptions, however. Cravenbräu from Nethergate offers a lovely balance between the big pale malt body and a hoppy bite at the finish: that's what summer blondes are supposed to do. Even better was Summer Lightning. I quite liked the bottled version of this, but on cask it's simply amazing: lots of zesty citrus, sherbety fruit notes and a generous dusting of spices -- wonderfully refreshing and very moreish.

Of course, summer beer doesn't have to be blonde. Okell's Red went down an absolute treat on Saturday: a simple ale with big malty flavours and all the tasty chewy caramel and toffee you could wish for. I was less impressed with another amber ale: Skinner's Keel Over. This is too watery and the caramel and smoke flavours just don't work hard enough.

And that was all the new beers. I also took the opportunity to find out if Spitfire is as boring on cask as it is from a bottle -- it is -- and had my third go of Timothy Taylor Landlord. For the first time I understand what people see in this beer: it was all bittersweet honey and botanicals and not the harsh monstrosity I'd been given in London previously. I only got a sip of it, though, because it sold out in very short order, unfortunately. My appetite for a proper pint is whetted.

The Irish breweries were well represented. On the downside, Messrs Maguire IPA and Franciscan Well Shandon Stout failed to impress: there's not really much going on in either. Cathedral Quarter on cask was a marked improvement on the bottle -- lots of lovely smooth chocolate flavours. Finally, I bored the hell out of everyone by going on at length about Barney's Brew -- Hilden's wheat beer and an epiphany at last year's festival. It's still sublime: spiced nine ways from Sunday with coriander, cardamom and what I'd swear is chamomile. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this beer needs to get out more.

And there ended another Hilden and another summer. Still, I can't complain: September brings a bit of travel plus the year's second big celebration of Irish beer, this one on my doorstep in Phoenix Park. I've time for plenty more summer beers yet, I'd say.

How very retro

If this was the other other sort of beer blog, the sort that reports interesting things from the world of beer, there'd be a post about how a group of Galway-based archaeologists have theorised that the ancient stone mounds called fulacht fiadh scattered about the Irish countryside were used for brewing beer, and that they attempted to recreate the ancient brewing process, and that the results were mostly surprisingly drinkable -- despite the opinion of one "Guinness and Bulmer's man" in this video. (Mind you, it was made with proper beer yeast supplied by the Galway Hooker brewery -- should've gone for something wilder, I reckon.) But the story has already been adequately covered by the beer blogging world at the likes of A Good Beer Blog and Lyke2Drink, for example. There's even a Beer Haiku on it, though for the record we're talking long before the Dark Ages here: by that time brewing was already the monks' domain.

But since this isn't that sort of blog, have some random ramblings about a beer I found. Actually, I was looking for an unhopped beer for this post, since hops wouldn't have been part of the ancient Irish brewing scene. Unfortunately, unhopped beers in Dublin off licences, other than the mighty Fraoch, are as rare as hen's teeth (unlike Hen's Tooth, which is readily available), so I've settled for an Aussie craft brew called Black Wattle Superior, which is hopped but is also flavoured with wattle seed which, the interweb tells me, comes from acacia trees.

It pours a beautiful clear amber-red with a lasting off-white head. The dominant flavour is malt with a gentle roasted barley character. I'm not quite sure where the wattle seed comes in. The mouthfeel is quite thick, but in a smooth and satisfying way. Even though it's not as out-of-the-ordinary as I had hoped for, I approve of this beer. Perhaps it's more distinctive when fresh: the bottle I have is a couple of weeks past-date, always a hazard with unusual beers in Dublin. Still, it's not like it's been sitting in a trough in rural Galway for the last three thousand years...

Flowers of Scotland

From Edinburgh comes Innis & Gunn, an exclusive-looking amber ale in a 33cl bottle. The unique selling point here is that it's aged for 77 days in whisky barrels which gives it a distinct oaky flavour as well as a scotch malt bitterness. This makes for a heady mix of strong flavours which I found a little overpowering, though there is a refreshing lightness at the back of the taste to stop it from taking over the palate entirely. Nevertheless, 33cl is enough of this one.

Of course, the Scots like their lager too, and the Harviestoun brewery make a fantastic one called Schiehallion. This beer has been very precisely crafted to just the right level of dryness and bitterness. There's a grainy complexity in the flavour too, making for a perfectly balanced lager. The same brewery make Bitter & Twisted which has a sharply bitter hops taste up front but again this is fine-tuned to keep it on the good side of tasty. The flavour is also tempered with a gentle lemony fruitness. Both of these Harviestoun beers are finely honed and plainly the work of people who know exactly what they're doing.

No run-down of Scottish beer would be complete without a return to an old favourite - Fraoch heather beer. There's really nothing else out there like this ale made from real heather. It's as easy to drink as any light ale or lager, but has an immesely complicated taste that defies description. Just try it.