Not the Belgian Guinness you know

L-R: Wit, Saison, Dubbel, Tripel, Lambic & Stout

Well this was a surprise. Though maybe it shouldn't have been. Both Diageo and John Martin have been throwing shapes in the new and evolving world of beer that's grown up in the last decade or so, clinging to their respective inherited legacies while recognising that there's a new market of curious drinkers to be tapped. They were part of the furniture in European beer when they got together to create Guinness Special Export Stout, and I can't help wondering if the Martin people were a bit miffed when Diageo went solo with their own version of it -- Guinness Antwerpen -- a few years ago. All seems to have been forgiven as their second collaboration landed with much fanfare in mid-September.

It's a bit of a cheaty collaboration, though, being a blend rather than a de novo recipe. Diageo contributed their West Indies Porter while Martin, knowing where their geek cred rests, added their Timmerman's Oude Kriek to the mix. And a dash of Special Export was included too. The marketing whizzkids earned their fee by granting the finished product the name Lambic & Stout.

To celebrate, the Open Gate Brewery, where no part of the finished beer was produced, held a celebration of Belgian-style beers, most of which they had actually brewed themselves. I popped in to see how that went. The headline act, in its elegant long-stem glass, is 6% ABV and a red-amber colour, suggesting they haven't skimped on the lambic portion. Much like the more famous lambic/stout blend, Tilquin and Rulles's Stout Rullquin, it tastes exactly the sum of its parts, the elements separately discernible but not really melding together. You get cherry first, then stout, and then a mildly sour finish, adding up to a pleasant black forest gateau effect, but I'd still much rather drink the component parts, all of which are very decent beers, separately.

For their part, the Open Gate brewers had come up with six takes on Belgian styles, and I began with Open Gate Witbier. This was 4.5% ABV and gently lemony, but that's as far as the trueness to style went. It was also heavy with esters and thick of texture, lacking any of the refreshing zing that makes the style worthwhile. A solemn chewy biscuit character was no substitute for proper wit softness and spritz.

Open Gate Saison proved lightly sour at first, which was odd, but then piled in the white pepper and cedar wood spice, which is exactly how I like my saisons. There's a floral lavender side as well, bringing a touch of granny's bathroom to the whole thing, but it enhances rather than distracts from the main flavours. Again the texture is a bit thicker than expected, so while I'd say this doesn't taste like any recognisable Belgian saison, it's very nice indeed.

Beer three was Open Gate Dubbel, and again the style spec must have fallen down the back of the mash tun. It's only 6.5% ABV for a start, dark garnet rather than brown, and lacking any Belgian ester characteristics. Without them, the mix of chocolate, raisin and caramel makes it taste like a ruby porter, a particularly thin one with a burnt roast finish and some old-world bitterness. I enjoyed it on those terms, becoming less bothered about style specs as I went along.

Of course there couldn't be a dubbel without Open Gate Tripel, and at least the ABV was to-style at 8.3%. It's an amber colour and tastes pleasantly of honey and pepper, with a lovely warming buzz from the heat. If anything it's too clean, however, resulting in an unBelgian lack of depth: the initial pop from the flavours fades to nothing too quickly for something that ought to be a sipper. I found myself drinking it far too fast, though maybe that's a compliment.

L-R: Blonde, IPA

While everything so far had at least some redeeming features, I can't say much about the vapid Open Gate Belgian Blonde. It's lager-like in appearance but has no aroma to speak of and only an echo of honeydew melon and granola in the flavour. The watery finish is unforgivable at 6% ABV. It's unflawed but but boring, and set me wondering if there's a common thread here of beers fermented at too low a temperature.

If so, there was at least a style that suited this: Open Gate Belgian IPA. This began with a zingy hit of orange sherbet, lemon pith and floral violet. There's a spicy Belgian yeast character which threatens to turn it harsh but the clean hop notes manage to keep pace with it, and the resulting harmony of hop and yeast elements is exactly what makes Belgian IPA so enjoyable when done well. The end result is complex and quenching, sippable or quaffable depending on one's mood. Watch out for that 6% ABV, though.

It was fascinating to watch a brewery attempt to create a sequence of beers outside their normal comfort zone, and the results were interesting if not all great. These were a reminder, I guess, that this is still very much the experimental brewery for Diageo. A certain lack of polish is to be expected.

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

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

I can't help but feel that Diageo have fashioned a rod for their own backs with The Brewers Project. It's easy to read it as promising things that it was never really intended to deliver, and that's just going to annoy people.

My experience of it began back in early September when the company invited a small group of bloggy types to St. James's Gate to learn about the Project, the first time they have ever done so. As everyone is doubtless aware at this stage the Project has been launched with two new beers: Guinness Dublin Porter and Guinness West Indies Porter. In answer to my obvious  "Why now?" question, Nick the Innovation Marketing Manager, leading the group, said that the rise in diversity on the Irish beer scene had not gone unnoticed at Diageo. They saw it as an opportunity to play a little, to try something that wouldn't have worked before but could be worth a go. Those of us still lamenting the premature death of the St. James's Gate beers know all about Guinness projects that were tragically ahead of their time.

There are two principal features of the new venture, explained to us when we left the plush surrounds of the Director's Dining Room and donned our protective goggles for entering the pilot brewery: one is that the pilot plant itself plays a central role in creating the beers; the second is that the Guinness archive is also pivotal, providing inspiration for the brewers designing the beers. These are the messages we see again and again in the marketing surrounding the new products: brewers given freedom to create, and a taste of authentic history. The problem is that both concepts are paper thin and disintegrate disappointingly after a mere moment's scrutiny.

Let's take the historical side of things first. An archivist was on hand to show us the logs which were directly relevant to the two new beers, or rather, how they're marketed. One log was from 1796, the earliest to show porter being brewed by Guinness. The other was dated 1801, when Guinness began brewing porter for export, a recipe which evolved into today's Foreign Extra Stout. Gearóid, one of the brewers gathered round  with us, pointed to the figures for hopping, saying that they were much higher than you'd have today. I've read enough Ron to know that's par for the course, but also that no 1796 porter would be anywhere near as weak as the 3.8% ABV of the new one. So what gives? It's an influence on the recipes, say the men from Diageo, an inspiration. But where did the basic specs come from, the original gravity and so on? Oh they were just handed down from above, same as every beer. These porters conform rigidly to modern Guinness ingredients and methods.

I'm not having a go at Diageo for not making Pattinsonian clones of beers in their logs. They are entitled to make what they like. I do, however, think presenting them as any way historically associated was a mistake -- something that will mislead most customers and just irritate the ones who look a bit further into it.

It's all neatly illustrated by the posters which began to appear a couple of weeks ago, ahead of the launch of the beers in Ireland. Try Our New Beer From 1796 / 1801 they exclaim. You have to look at your feet to spot the small print:

That's a lot less fun and I wonder what the point of the whole thing is. A beer that sort-of has some influences from an older one isn't a thrilling window into the past, but nor is it an exciting new recipe. It looks like a brewery wanting my attention but offering nothing to hold it.

The 10hL brewhouse

And then there's the pilot brewery itself. You'll have noticed it on your way along James's Street, its delivery shutter two storeys up the wall on the outside. There are a pair of brewhouses inside: a one hectolitre, fanciest-homebrew-kit-you've-ever-seen, and a ten hectolitre kit, originally installed in the late 1990s to brew the "St. James's Gate" range of proto-craft beers but still very shiny and well looked after. It could be the brewery of any small-to-medium microbrewery, except there's a cereal cooker at the start for adjuncts, and a pasteuriser at the end: St. James's Gate is a totally sterile plant, no beer leaves alive, not even the made-for-destruction test batches.

It's the only pilot brewery in the globe-spanning Diageo empire and it has the job of testing all the ingredients that arrive, be it a new crop of sorghum for use in Nigeria or a fresh batch of foam stabiliser from Kerry. One of the FVs was marked as containing a test run of Tusker, several had the last runs from the former Smithwick's brewery in Kilkenny inside.

The pilot also does recipe development. Every Diageo beer starts life on the small kit, then gets reproduced on the 10hL one. If successful, an Irish recipe graduates to the brand new main brewhouse where Guinness stout comes through 1,000hL at a time, though half-sized batches are often done for other beers and, Gearóid says, they can bring the quantity down to 350hL if they absolutely need to. And the new beers are no exception: both were scaled up through the pilot brewery but the beer you drink came from the industrial-sized facility.

The 1hL brewhouse

I've seen several references to The Brewers Project as "craft beer", or an attempt thereat, by the makers of Guinness. Everyone I met inside St. James's Gate denied that this is what it's supposed to be, and I completely believe them that their intention isn't to fake small-batch, artisan Guinness. But they can't possibly not have noticed that, with all the mention of the pilot kit and the men who work there, and the emphasis on the human input into the product design while totally ignoring the economic aspect, that "craft Guinness" was a perception bound to result. And again that anyone who saw the details of what's actually happening would be disappointed.

Eleven paragraphs on a brewery's marketing is not how I roll normally. But The Brewers Project fascinates me, albeit in a slightly morbid way. That said, the opportunity to look into the Diageo brewing process and see a whole new yet familiar side of brewing is something I'm hugely grateful for -- a big thanks to Julie and Ruth from WHPR for masterminding the event, and the Diageo team for showing us round. I'm hoping it's the beginning of a new era of glasnost initiated by the taciturn Dublin 8 monolith.

We did get a small taster of the two beers when we visited. My first impression of both was that they're very similar to existing Guinness products: Dublin Porter thin and crisp like Guinness Extra Stout while the caramel and mild sourness of West Indies Porter lit up the receptors in my brain which enjoy Guinness Foreign Extra Stout but left them craving the weight and complexity that Foreign Extra delivers at 7.5% ABV which West Indies lacks at a mere 6%. I had to wait until last weekend and the release of the bottles on the Irish market to get my hands on them and do a proper taste test.

Guinness special editions tasting very similar to each other is something I'm used to. Anyone who worked through the Brewhouse Series almost a decade ago may remember. But the brewers I met at St. James's Gate are adamant that all the beers are radically different from each other, even the Brewhouse Series. The amount of aroma Goldings added to West Indies Porter is off the charts for a Guinness beer enthused Gearóid, and again I believe him. I just could not smell that for myself. "Could the common taste be down to the Essence?" I asked, referring to the soured syrup that Diageo produces to give all Guinness worldwide a signature flavour. Gearóid's answer was a phrase I have never heard on a brewery tour before: "We don't talk about that."

And so down to business. A blind triangle tasting of both beers and what I regard as their respective close cousins. Could I tell them apart, and which are better?

The six 100ml glasses of 10°C beer in front of me were a uniform black with barely any difference despite the weakest being half the strength of the strongest. I figured head colour would be a dead giveaway so they were carefully poured with no foam showing. A first go through the set showed clearly which were the strong three and which the weak three, but there was nothing else obvious.

Picking the odd one out from the weaker three was almost impossible: it was just glass after glass of watery fizz. I tried drinking them in different sequences, pausing for water between them, and running through them in quick succession but it was very difficult to spot any distinguishing features. Going past the wateriness, and letting the beer warm and flatten a bit, I started getting hints of chocolate and a green vegetal complexity, just shading towards metal. This was in all three but I half-guessed that I could taste it a tiny bit less in one of the three so I marked that as Guinness Extra Stout and the other two as Dublin Porter, and I was correct.

Interestingly, as I finished off the leftovers once the challenge was over and the beers had been sitting out a while, I found that the Extra Stout got more full-flavoured as it approached room temperature: your classic large-bottle-off-the-shelf. The Dublin Porter did not, however, staying as thin and dull as when first taken from the cooler. So, if faced with a choice of just Dublin Porter and Extra Stout which to pick? I now appreciate that there is a mildly stronger flavour in cool Dublin Porter, but the emphasis is on mild there. But warmer Extra Stout was a revelation: I never would have guessed there would be such an appreciable difference between 3.8% ABV and 4.2% ABV, but that extra 0.4 really does add heft. Room temperature Guinness Extra Stout remains the company's best session-strength option.

The stronger set was easier. One of my glasses contained a hot 'n' heavy sour coffee and caramel madman, the other two a more gently sour, roastier beer with an added metallic edge. It wasn't too much of a reach to guess that the former was Foreign Extra and the latter West Indies Porter. And it's not just the alcohol difference that gave it away. I was on alert for those bonus Goldings that Gearóid had mentioned and though there was no sign at all of them in the aroma (all six smelled of damn all), there was a discernible crunchy green cabbage flavour behind the signature sour Guinnessy tang. I've tasted English hops doing that before, especially when in quantity.

I stand by my initial impression that West Indies Porter does have much in common with Foreign Extra, but this test proved that it is markedly different from it, though I wouldn't at all say that it's an improvement, apart from the bottle size. The next phase of the test should be to determine whether a half litre serving of West Indies Porter delivers more pleasure than 33cl of Foreign Extra Stout, but I think these beers have already taken up enough of my time and your screen.

All four beers are unmistakably Guinness and I think I'll have to agree to disagree with the Diageo bods on whether this is a strength or a flaw. In the microbrewing sector it's commonplace to hear of a company recruiting a brewer who has Guinness experience. While visiting James's Gate I took the opportunity to ask if the reverse happens: do brewers from Irish micros ever take jobs with them? The answer was no. While there's a certain amount of cross-pollination between the big industrial multinationals, nothing from the craft side. I think the result of this inward-looking philosophy can be tasted in these new beers, and every other Guinness brand extension where the consumer complains that it's not different enough. To the brewers and execs for whom Guinness represents archetypal porter perfection honed over centuries these variations are an audacious victory, instilling the quintessence of the brand in a radically different host body. This stout drinker thinks they should get out more.

(For more longer-than-usual blog posts about beer from a variety of authors, check in with Boak and Bailey this Saturday and follow their #beerylongreads project.)