The Twelve Brewers of Christmas 11: YellowBelly

There was a palpable change of gear for YellowBelly during 2019, with the pace of new releases slowing right down. It didn't stop, though, so I still have a handful of new ones to cover off.

They produced something called a "micro sour" which I found at the Rascals taproom: 1.5% ABV and called Han So Low. It's a hazy orange colour and even smells watery. There's a vague tartness, some grain husk, and a sweet mix of orange cordial and vanilla. It doesn't really work as a beer beer, but as a non-alcoholic substitute it's great.

I was suspicious of the next draught special I found: Elysium. This claims to be a weissbier but is only 3.5% ABV. A leichte weisse, then. Nevertheless it's convincing for the strength, with a proper weight and rich fruitiness. It's very fizzy, which adds a pleasingly champagne-like crispness, and an edge of toasty pale malt goes with that. The surprise finish is a generous slathering of strawberry jam which makes it almost too sweet to be easily drinkable. It works, though. Another passable low-alcohol number, this one sufficiently beery.

More recently, and based on a semi-original idea by Ben Clifford, Sky Tigers is an amber ale. As one would expect for the style it shows a rich and warming toffee base overlaid with fruity and floral hop notes. I get strawberry, predominantly, but also red cherries, roses and apricots. Maybe it could do with a heavier hand on the hops, introducing more of a citrus tone, but as a red ale it does the job well. At 5.5% ABV it's on the right side of sessionable, and winter is the ideal season for its gentle malt warmth.

For Beer Club members, the next release was a fruited ale called Memberberries: a simple recipe to which blackcurrants, blackberries and raspberries have been added. It's an easy-going 4.2% ABV, pouring a hazy orange-pink with a tight head on top. The aroma was a little off-putting, being dry and grainy, like rye bread or cream crackers. However, that simply serves to magnify the rush of berry juice which floods out from the first sip. I'd probably have guessed there was cherry in this: it's richer than what you usually get from raspberries. Mixing raspberry and blackberry also gives an effect like loganberry, which shouldn't be surprising. While it's certainly sweet, there's enough fizz to cleanse the palate afterwards, leaving behind the fruit flavour without the attendant sugariness. This is extremely quaffable and I'm glad I got six of them because a second needs to follow quickly after the first.

The final chapter of Beer Club 2019 (and possibly Beer Club Ever as they don't seem to be running it again) is called The Last Stand. The stress of getting these releases out on time is perhaps apparent in the lack of a proper label. It's 8.2% ABV, a dun brown colour and hopped with Columbus, Citra and Cascade. I was expecting Bigfoot. It's quite a bit different, however, and a lot sweeter. There's an oily orange rind taste up front, and some rosewater high notes, all backed by lots of caramel. The bitterness arrives in the end, tasting quite old-world (I guess that's the Cascade): grass and boiled veg. This is filling, warming and nicely balanced between hop and malt flavours. Just what you want from a barley wine, and a fitting end to the two-year series.

And so: it's almost Christmas Eve and I have just one more of these posts to do. Who will it be?

Home brewing and its consequences

For 2019 the National Homebrew Club moved its annual BrewCon conference from the salubrious surrounds of Smock Alley Theatre to the more bohemian event space of Rascals Brewing. It all worked rather well with lots of interesting talks and demos. The brewery itself is a product of home brewers taking their hobby professional and one of the highlights for me was hearing co-founder Cathal talk about the journey from apartment kitchen to start-up brewery to full-scale production facility and taproom. For anyone in the audience harbouring such ambitions it must have been inspirational.

And of course there was a raft of Rascals and guest beers to work through during the sessions. I began on Gose Suck A Lemon, a beer requiring little explanation. It's 4.1% ABV and a clear orange-amber colour. Simple and refreshing is how it goes, which is fine for a modern interpretation of the style, though it doesn't do much to separate it from modern Berliner weisse: I would like more salt and coriander character. There's a very pleasant light lemon tartness to add interest instead. This is clean fun, and a good choice for the beginning of what was to be a long day's drinking.

The 2019 Social Hops beer was on tap too, this being the fourth year that hops were collected from Dublin's amateur urban farmers for use in a one-off beer. They've gone with something darker than usual this time round: red in colour and red in taste too, the ABV hitting a generous 5.4%. There's a wholesome caramel and brown bread foretaste, finishing on clean tannins with a growing side element of figgy Belgian esters. It's decent but again unexciting, and not really much of a showcase for hops. Still, it's the project that counts, and the end result is far from a disaster.

Lightest beer of the day was the Cherry Sour at 3.5% ABV. Well, light in alcohol anyway. The beer itself is all about the sticky candy sherbet, showing just a faint wheaty dryness. It's definintely not what I'd call sour, coming across very like those super-sweet Belgian fruit beers under the likes of the Floris marque. I did get a slight touch of zingy wine grape behind the sugar, but otherwise this didn't do it for me. More sourness, please.

Hooray, as always, for black IPA. Rascals brewed one called Black Knight: a robust 6% ABV and very much true to style. There's a big big acidic bitterness all the way through: crunchy red cabbage and raw spinach. This intensifies to tobacco and tar while simultaneously lightening up with citrus spritz and and clove or ginger spice. It's all classic black IPA stuff. Maybe a little more hop flavour over the bitterness would improve it, but otherwise it's a wonderful channel back to 2012 when everything was fine.

BrewCon reached a crescendo with Supersplit, a rebrew of the beer which won Phil Smail the 2019 NHC Club Cup. Recreating the Supersplit (a creamsicle to Americans, the rest of you can do your own research) seems to be one of the holy grails of Irish brewing. The modern trend for juicy and creamy IPAs means one that tastes of vanilla ice cream wrapped in orange-flavoured ice is a worthy goal. Several beers over the years have been presented to me purporting to have achieved it; this is the first to actually carry it off. Seville marmalade late in the boil appears to have been the key. I really liked how, despite the vanilla and lactose sweetness, it managed to retain a light texture, making it easy-going and refreshing like, well, a Supersplit. I'm not against novelty beers, it's just they need to operate at this standard to be successful and so few do.

My Rascalling spilled over into UnderDog a couple of weeks later. There there was Green Acres, described as a farmhouse ale with green tea, grains of paradise and citrus peel. That all sounds very involved but on tasting it's just a perfectly constructed saison. Just that. It's a lightly hazy yellow, and refreshingly light-bodied. Though 6.1% ABV there's no heat; it's clean and refreshing with smooth and juicy honeydew plus a pinch of white pepper on the end. I would absolutely assign all of this to the doings of saison yeast, but if Rascals has achieved it with real fruit and spices then so what? There's no novelty or gimmickry to be tasted here, only great saison.

And there was Big Smoke, a smoked imperial stout, albeit a modest one at 7.8% ABV. It was available casked and kegged. I went cask. The smoke is subtle, no peaty punch here, just a mild wisp of iodine in the finish. In front of that is a rich blend of chocolate and coconut, the latter heavily present in the aroma. There's an assertive bitterness running through it too, which I put down to hops but might actually be a rasp from the rauchmalt. Overall, it's very tasty, being a lighter take on those densely calorific imperial stouts, bringing their flavour without the unreasonable strength. I can't help wishing for more smoke, though. And I wonder has some of this dropped into the Rascals barrel programme?

That's all the Rascals for now, but you can expect more taproom specials and whatever else they have out in due course.