Walking the plank

I have been most remiss at keeping up to date with the beer turnover at the Open Gate Brewery. I finally put things to rights a couple of weeks ago and dropped in on a Friday evening. It's almost half way through its initial three-year tenure as the tasting bar for Diageo's experimental brewery, and business appears to be booming. My concern that the pre-booking barrier for admission would keep people away seems unfounded.

There were three beers new to me on the roster and I got my paddle duly loaded up on arrival. I started on the (I think) somewhat tortured German of Weisen Stout. It's meant as a hybrid between stout and weissbier and is a whopping 7.1% ABV. For the most part it resembles one of the strong Guinness variants: roasty, with a sharp sourness, and then a caramel and ester finish. If you'd told me it was Guinness Special Export I'd have believed you. There's just a slight, mild, waft of banana on the end to remind you there's some sort of novelty factor, but as usual with Guinness stouts, the essential Guinness flavour characteristics dominate the picture.

L: Damson Plum Sour, R: Weisen Stout

No chance of that happening with beer two: Damson Plum Sour, the first sour beer I've tried from Open Gate. They seem to have gone all out for the super sugary sort that Belgian brands like Lindemans and Mort Subite are most famous for. I'll admit, I've long had a soft spot for their lurid candy stylings. This one is an opaque purple colour with pink foam on top. It's pure cherry sherbet up front, all tooth-jangling sweetness and soft effervescence. There's just the faintest buzz of tangy sourness right at the end. Despite being so sweet it's very quenching and drinkable and I'll admit to enjoying a follow-up pint before I left.

Down to the serious business, then, of the new Open Gate IPA, Third Strike. I had this next to a sample of the Nitro IPA but really there's no comparison. While Nitro is over-processed perfumey goop, Third Strike is a very decent take on English IPA, despite the advertised hops being Simcoe, Centennial and Hüll Melon. What gives it its character is a strong tannic quality, making it smell like a refreshing cup of black tea and giving the flavour a perfect, cleanly defined, edge. Then there's a major fresh and leafy hop character right in the centre, but it's more the firm crunchy veg you find in top-notch Yorkshire bitter than anything fruity and American. It's another one that's very happily pintable and I was shocked, and a little dismayed, to notice that the ABV is an unreasonable 6.8%. Like good bitter it's one I could quaff lots off, but that would be inadvisable.

Thanks as always to Padraig and the Open Gate crew for their hospitality.

Beers in spaaace!

The Irish Beer & Whiskey Village returned to the RDS in mid-March and I went along on St. Patrick's Day for a sedate afternoon's beering. Brewery numbers were slightly down on last year, but the spare space was well used, with extra seating and a barber's shop, though I only made use of one of those facilities.

My first port of call was Trouble Brewing who had two brand new beers on their bar. Big Top is a heavy rye IPA, all of 6.3% ABV and with a lovely rounded texture. The bitterness is low but it doesn't go in for the juicy topnotes either. Instead there's a resinous and oily hop flavour, mellowing to allow a modicum of mango, lychee and white plum. It's not a hop firework display, more a hop log fire: comforting and classy.

The other début was Evil Robot, an amber ale at 5% ABV. It's a style that can go in all sorts of directions; sometimes sweaty funk, sometimes watery acridity, and all in points in between. This one, while having a solidly chewable red malt base, leans heavily on bright and fresh grapefruit for its flavour element. It's balanced, but only just, and works in favour of the hopheads.

The most impressive beer of the gig came from Rascal's Brewing. They had given their Big Hop Red an eight-month sojourn in a French wine barrel, turning it into Rascal's Pinot Noir Red. The grape character that this has imparted is phenomenal, like you'd find in an Italian grape-based ale. There's a significant amount of oak, though as a spritzy sandalwood spicing instead of heavy sweet vanilla. The two coalesce into a long exotically-perfumed finish: Irish ale meets Arabian nights.

And for a palate reset, there was White Hag Festival Lager. Simply constructed at 4% ABV but screaming quality with a clinically precise clean and crisp pils character, complicated by a small waft of sulphur and tiny bit of apple fruitiness.

First time exhibitor at the festival, and indeed any festival, was the Guinness Open Gate Brewery, bringing a selection of their special small-batch beers. Antwerpen Export Stout is a slightly tweaked version of Guinness Special Export Stout. The classic Guinness sour tang is very much in evidence and is the beer's best feature. Beyond that there's a big estery sweetness, more pronounced than I recall in SES, but I could be wrong on that. As usual with these Guinness brand extensions, all it did was leave me hankering for a dry bottle of Foreign Extra.

A couple of decent and unGuinnesslike classics also on the bar were Dubliner Wheat: a bubblegum-heavy pale weissbier with a lovely kick of lightly green noble hops. It tasted like a very authentic recreation of a Munich weiss to me, particularly impressive at just 5% ABV. And Vienna Common, a crisp, dark-brown lager-a-like with more of those lovely celery and white pepper Mitteleuropa hops plus a pleasant light roast bite and a perfect clean finish. It's one of those great quaffing beers that are also complex enough to drink slowly, should the need arise.

Toasted Oatmeal Brown Ale With Vanilla was the last recipe put together by former Open Gate brewer Jason Carroll. It pretty much hits every element in that description, point by point: sweet caramel, vanilla candy and a smooth weighty body. While it avoids being unpleasantly sickly, it's still not the sort of beer I'd have more than one of.

Jason's new base of operations, Wicklow Brewery, was also present and I took the opportunity to tick off one of their core range that I'd previously missed. St. Kevin's Red is a hazy and wholesome number, almost a shade of pink rather than red. There's a butterscotch toffee sweetness, but set on a light and dry base so it doesn't build and get cloying. Grain husk and an earthy hop bitterness add a seriousness to the candy sweetness. It's another beer that I probably wouldn't deliberately choose, but down in the brewpub where it's born I could see myself getting through pints of it. Think of it as an Irish kellerbier.

Finally, a quick stop-off at the Station Works bar for a first taste of Foxes Rock Stout. I've been critical of Station Works beer in the past but the only thing wrong with this one is that it's not a stout, not by a long way. It's a red-brown colour and smells enticingly of blackberry jam. This leads on to a flavour that's just as sweet and fruity with a kind of wheaty Ready Brek effect. It could happily pass as a dark bitter or brown ale but you won't find any coffee, chocolate, roasted grains or hop bitterness. I'm no style purist but there is absolutely nothing here that I look for in a stout.

Congrats to Bruce and Carly for another great show, and special thanks to Carlow Brewing for providing a freebie ticket. Bruce's show will be on the road later this year: to Belfast on 21st-23rd April, Doolin on 26th-28th August and Cork in late September, plus of course the year's main event back at the RDS on 8th-10th September. Plenty to put in your diary there.

Our American cousin

Chris was a little bemused when, having offered to bring any beer available in California to Dublin for me, I asked for some Guinness Extra Stout. I make no apology: it's just the way I work. There's a version of Guinness brewed in North America that has often featured in conversations I've had, but I've no idea what it tastes like or how it differs from the Guinness beers brewed in Ireland. That needed putting right, and I'm grateful to Chris and Merideth for providing the opportunity to do so (and for the actual Californian craft beer they brought me out of sympathy and which will feature in a later post).

American Guinness Extra Stout (picture, left) is 6% ABV so I reckoned that the best way to get the measure of it was a parallel tasting with the two strong Guinnesses brewed in Ireland: Foreign Extra (7.5% ABV -- second left) and Special Export (8% ABV -- second right). After the first sip I realised that it would be worth adding Irish Guinness Extra Stout (4.2% ABV -- right) into the mix as well. As an aside, when I went stout shopping in St James's Gate (it's cheapest), I was a little disappointed to find that the gift shop has stopped selling the classic returnable pint bottles, substituting the rather squat and ugly half-litre here depicted.

Back to the Canadian Guinness, then. Much like Foreign Extra and Special Export, the most striking thing about it is a caramel and molasses sweetness. It's a different and lighter sort of vibe though, missing the more full-on liquorice bitterness that balances Foreign Extra. Next to Irish Extra Stout it's a sugar bomb and definitely not fitting the dry Irish stout model. Yet nor is it one of the sweet and chocolatey Irish stouts like O'Hara's: the flavour is more treacle than roasted malt. Only a dry and slightly metallic tang on the end marks its relation to any of Ireland's session stouts.

It sounds like it falls between two stools: neither a punchy export-style stout nor a casual drink-and-forget gulper, and perhaps I'm being unfair by judging it against its brethern rather than on its own merits. The fact is that it is nice to drink. Most craft-brewed versions of the same style would wipe the floor with it, but as an accessible beer with a bit of -- but not too much -- character it works well. Much like the bottled Guinness Extra Stout sold in Dublin, I'd say it's a useful fall-back when there's nothing better available.

Refusing Brussels stouts

I have not, hitherto, felt particularly positively disposed towards the stouts of Belgium. Hercule is often lauded as the finest of the genre, and while I appreciated that it was well made and did everything a very strong Belgian stout is supposed to do, the thick sweetness of it meant I just couldn't warm to it as a regular. It's still streets and streets ahead of Leroy Stout, a saccharine bomb I picked up in Ypres and which I really should have left on the shelf. As a result of all this, when I'm feeling stouty in Belgium, I'll generally go for Guinness Special Export, since it has that lovely balance between treacle and roastiness that the others just can't seem to manage. It takes a lot to move me away from it.

It was the terribly cool socialist-realist label that made me pick up and bring home a fourth stout on my January trip to Belgium. Stouterik is brewed by De La Senne of Brussels at the De Ranke brewery (thanks for the correction, Stan), and at only 4.5% I should have known this was going to be different from the bigger ones. It's very pale for a start, pretty much a red-brown shade. There's a dry roast barley nose, and a gorgeous sulphurous gunpowder flavour fading to dryness, with just enough sparkle to keep it moving. We get a fleeting glimpse of something very sweet right at the end: violets or lavender or similar, but it vanishes quickly. All in all it's a wonderful stout experience and I could drink a whole heck of a lot of this. Shame it's in 33cl bottles.

My perception of Belgian stouts has been altered and I'm a lot more willing to give new ones a try. Recommendations always welcome.

When they met, it was Moeder

Last Sunday in Brussels was quiet. The city was buzzing -- with market stalls in Place d'Espagne and Grand Place, and the cafés all busy -- but Mrs Beer Nut and I were drifting about in a slightly fuzzy-headed world of our own. We had an early lunch in one of the upper corners of Grand Place, and I righted my head with carbonnade flamande and a Kwak -- the latter from a proper glass, I hasten to add. That fortified me for a trip to Bier Tempel to do some shopping, and then we drifted over to Le Cirio -- a gorgeous grand café beside the Bourse which, like A La Mort Subite, was one of those Brussels drinking landmarks we'd not visited since our first trip in 2002.

We settled in near the door for a bout of people-watching (and, it being a Belgian café, dog-watching too). Looking for something plain but wholesome on the menu I realised I was hankering after Guinness Special Export. It really is the perfect Sunday afternoon sipping beer. Séan had gone home on the morning flight, but Dave and Laura caught up with us briefly, then headed off on their merry way. Our own merry way involved some exploration, to an unfamiliar district of the city and one of the few legendary Brussels watering holes I'd never visited. After my second bottle of Guinness, we were off.

The pre-métro underground tram thingy brought us southwards, and a short walk from Horta through a rather well-heeled neighbourhood took us to Chez Moeder Lambic: Brussels' beer geek central. It was just gone 4 so the bar had opened recently and was inhabited by just a couple of regulars, plus a dog belonging to one of them who walked round, inspecting that the drinks being served were up to scratch.

It's a small bright corner bar, laid out in slightly rustic style with brick and wood, and a minimal scattering of breweriana -- notably only from quality Belgian breweries. Boxes of comics line the windowsills, and the menu itself is styled very much in the Belgian comic tradition. It's not one of those 400+ whoppers like Bier Circus or Delerium. Instead, everything seems to have been chosen by hand with only the smallest nod to the token beers required for economic purposes. I don't think they even had a pilsner available. Each item was assigned a comic-book icon indicating its status as from either "microbrasseries", "indépendants/familiales", "trappistes" or "grands industriels", and the beers were divided into style categories. My particular favourite was a category which contained just one item, one which I'm guessing the management aren't terribly happy about having to have, or else they stock it just to wind up the manufacturer:That's "Based on 1% lambic, filled up with totally chemical syrup". Mi-aow.

Also of note was the beer engine on the bar, serving Cantillon Gueuze. The draught menu listed Cantillon Faro, so I figured I would attempt to redeem my experience of the style following Friday's nasty experience. As far as I know, Cantillon don't actually make a faro, and this is mixed in-house. Blending in the sugar removes a lot of the sharp tart edge you get from the Gueuze but doesn't make the beer taste sugary as such. It's a different experience to drinking the beer neat, and works quite well I thought, for those of us who like sweet beer at least.

The two guys running the place really seemed to know what they were talking about. A group of Americans who came in after us engaged them in a conversation about brewing which resulted in a case of raw malts being produced for them to taste, followed by a tour of the cellar. Our perusal of the blackboard listing the current draught beers produced two recommendations. De Ranke's XX Bitter is a deliciously sharp golden ale absolutely crammed with grapefruity C-hops and raw vegetal flavours. Deliciously intense. From Jandrin there was V Cense, which Joe was enjoying simultaneously at the Zythos festival. This amber ale reminded me a lot of quality English bitter -- slightly tannic with a beautiful mandarin nose. Very tasty and extremely drinkable.

Time was beginning to press us at this stage, so our ones for the road were Witkap Pater Double -- a foamy brown abbey ale with a very interesting herby botanical character and a touch of cardamom, I think; and Guldenberg, another blonde ale "with the taste of every hop" according to the merchandising. It starts with a perfumey aroma and tastes quite spicy at first, giving way to a dry bitterness. Like so many of the Belgian hoppy beers around at the moment, it has used the hops to create a strong bitterness while avoiding any of the more fun fruity characteristics they can impart. The end result is quite an understated beer, but I didn't have time to sit around being disappointed. Having enjoyed adding Moeder Lambic to our personal map of Brussels, we headed back to the city centre.

We caught up with Dave and Laura at a Moroccan restaurant just off Boulevard Anspach. They were staying another day, so it was just us who shovelled our molten tagines into us like we hadn't eaten in days. The menu included a Moroccan lager called Casablanca. Classy stuff this -- every bit as good as you'd expect a lager from Morocco to be.

And then we were off again, to the airport where there was just time for a quick Leffe before the flight home.

And that was Brussels. We went to see Cantillon making beer, but got so much more out of the couple of days we spent there. Brussels really is one of those cities where the beer hunter will always find something new and interesting, if he or she can resist the draw of so many old favourites.

The stouts of wrath

Guinness Foreign Extra Stout is a relative new-comer to the Irish market. It took the demands of a growing African community to make Diageo distribute it directly in its country of origin. Before that the stronger Guinness was shipped from St. James's Gate straight to foreign parts and then re-exported back to Ireland in small quantities. A slightly tweaked version, with sorghum, is made in Nigeria for the local market there and occasionally shows up on the shelves in the UK.

It was recently brought to my attention that the new Foreign Extra Stout was not exactly the same product as the re-exported version I was used to. Sure enough, the domestic product is 7.5% ABV, while the export-then-import is 8%. And of course the name is different: Foreign Extra for us, Special Export for everyone else.

Intrigued by this, I decided a parallel tasting was in order, so I'm sitting here with one of each. The Foreign Extra is presented in a distinctive high-shouldered bottle engraved with the trademark harp; Special Export comes in the classically Belgian slope-neck.

Straight out of the bottle, Special Export has a thicker head, though both wind up with just a thin film of foam before long. The biggest difference between the two beers is in their respective mouthfeels, with Foreign Extra offering a prickly fizz, while Special Export is fuller, smoother and altogether more Belgian, frankly.

The tastes are certainly similar, with Foreign Extra drier and hoppier, while Special Export is packed with sweet malty flavours. This one comes down to a matter of personal preference, I suppose, but the export version edges it for me.

So there you have it: I'm not entirely happy with a product Guinness has put on the Irish market. Big surprise, wha'?