Corporate gigs

Everyone's favourite UK pub chains, JD Wetherspoon and BrewDog, brought simultaneous festivals to their Dublin branches in October.

For BrewDog it was the first CollabFest since they opened, shortly before the pandemic shutters came down. By the time I got there only the local collaborative offering was left: Tuck Shop Mafia, a lemony sour beer, brewed with Hope, and a big one at 8% ABV. It was an appropriate hazy yellow in the glass and smelled of bathroom cleaner, so full lemon points for that, I guess. Lemongrass is one of the ingredients and that's the first thing I noticed on tasting, that slightly dry and green rasp. Bittersweet lemonade arrives behind this, forming the main feature: the lemon peel gives it a classy, posh-lemonade feel. An oily citric resin marks the end. While the sour-beer side of the equation is missing, it's otherwise a delightfully clean-tasting job, so perhaps that's where the sour culture contributes. Why it needed to be 8% ABV I do not know: it's a cleansing and refreshing chappie, the sort of beer that should not leave me concerned about the alcohol load. 

It's a bit of a trek out to BrewDog -- it's called "Outpost" for a reason -- so more than a zingy half was needed to justify the trip. I had yet to try any beers from the in-house brewery. As it happened there were three on so I ordered three thirds.

Beginning in the middle, that's Saison & On, a down-the-line 5%-er with no silly additions as far as I'm aware. There's a lovely fruity aroma here -- ripe oranges, just on the edge of turning funky. The flavour expands on that with a mixture of pith and straw, finishing on a peppery piquancy. This is really well done, and shows off all the things that saison is supposed to be. Where it differs from the classics is in the texture: there's an almost creamy feel instead of saison's usual dry and sharp quality, and that helps spread the flavour even further. This is a level above what I would expect from a miniature back-of-the-pub brewery on the quays.

Hazy IPA is next, inevitably. Opaque Lake is what they've called it, and it hums of garlic. I genuinely thought it had warmed to room temperature from the smell, but the first sip showed it was perfectly cool. It just smells like hot food. Garlic completely infuses the flavour from start to finish to aftertaste. You get a little contrasting vanilla with that, and a chalky dryness, but nothing good. Where's the juice? This sort of gag-inducing stomach-churner belongs back in the early days of the haze craze before anyone outside Vermont knew what they were doing. As such, it can get in the bin.

The final one, left of picture, is intriguingly random: a double IPA at 9.1% ABV, brewed with grape juice. I was sceptical going in but could not resist trying it. The aroma of deep orange Vinal Tap is weirdly sulphurous, like match heads. That translates to a saltpetre spicing in the foretaste, followed by an intensely sweet fruit candy, mixed tropical breakfast juice, and a big boozy napalm burn. This is no subtle Italianate grape ale; this is BrewDog Hardcore with the bitterness dialled back and given some extra fruit. It's all rather fun. Unlike with Tuck Shop Mafia, one is made very aware that it's a strong beer. There would be a risk of cloying were it not for that dry and spicy side. If this was an experiment, I think it paid off.

With that, it was back inland, up the quays to The Silver Penny. Time was I'd do a full tour of the Dublin Wetherspoons for the festival but the apps were showing precious little festival beer on the menus so I made do with the city centre branches.

It's a number of years since any Irish brewery featured on a Wetherspoon festival list, but BRÚ planted a flag this year, with a cask Brown Ale. It's a genius move, because whatever your opinion on Wetherspoon, everybody loves a cask brown ale. This is 4.5% ABV and a clear dark garnet shade topped with old-ivory foam. The aroma is a gorgeous mix of floral and caramel, with a waft of pipe tobacco for the full oul-lad effect. It tastes plainer. There's a toasty dry roast, a crunch of chocolate biscuit, and then a faint dark berry tang on the end. All of that passes through quickly, leaving no more than a vague chocolate aftertaste. This is a drinking beer, not a tasting beer. I wasn't there to quaff pints, but it would have been ideally suited.

There were two other festival-listed beers on offer but the only one new to me was El Camino, a golden ale from Conwy. It's clear, it's golden, so full marks there. The aroma is dry and waxy but the flavour expands that into a more comfortable honey and golden syrup effect. There's a spicy bitterness which suggests English hops more than the billed Americans to me, and while it's a light 4% ABV and very easy drinking, there's a lovely depth and complexity of the sort cask ale does better than any other format. This is unfussy but absolutely delicious.

Stopping in at Keaven's Port on the way home, I snagged Hogs Back Citrus pale ale, an amber coloured 4.5%-er. This goes big on the chewy fruit candy, all Starburst and Refreshers. Lemon and lime set on a slightly sticky honey base with added pear zing. I guess it's an attempt at blending smooth English cask ale with pointy American hops, and as such it works brilliantly. There's no edge, it's all rounded and easy, but the hop flavour is firmly pronounced in a way one doesn't expect from cask ale normally. Beautifully done.

Nevertheless, I hereby pronounce a saison and a golden ale as the joint winners of this craft-beer/cask-ale face-off. The presence of UK chains in Ireland remains a controversial subject for those who believe our native pubs serve the drinkers well enough. Me, I love to see things mixing up, especially when good beer is a result of it.

Highs and lows

I've been a big big fan of BrewDog's Aces series so far. Huge. So when the third in the set came my way I grabbed it without a second thought. This time it's posterboy Citra in the driving seat, and the specs are otherwise the same: a medium-gold, vaguely misty, 4.5% ABV pale ale. I was expecting big bitterness from Ace of Citra but oooh that aroma: soft mandarin and honeydew, a little bit of spicy marmalade and a cheeky pinch of oily dank. One is left wanting for little, smellwise. A gulp and, aha, there's a fault: it's a touch thin and overcarbonated. I'm wondering if there's supposed to be more of a hop punch up front and whether I've let that escape by waiting an inappropriate couple of months before opening it. Everything's in order in the middle, however: the dankness takes the reins, delivering a friendly hop-oil burn, fading to a pithy finish. The flavour isn't as complex as the aroma but it's still very nice. A pint would be just the thing.

I bought the bottle of Mr President prior to the American election when the world was brighter in general. Now its 9.2% ABV seems comforting. I read that this double IPA is a straight rebadge of BrewDog's classic Hardcore, but it's over eight years since I reviewed that so maybe a reappraisal is worthwhile. It's certainly darker than the 2008 edition: a deep orange-amber. Warmth and spice are the hallmarks of the aroma, with marmalade, pomegranate and a harsher metallic buzz. A surprising liquorice bitterness opens the flavour but it struggles to make an impact under sheer density of the body. It's like drinking syrup. The carbonation gets buried under this suffocating blanket so palate-cleansing is not a feature. I get a diesel fuel sharpness and then a faint citrus pithiness right on the end, but very little and very late. This thick and heavy beast is one of those beers that makes me think I don't like double IPAs. Can't fault it for trueness to style, I guess.

Big hops: there's a right way and a wrong way.

Dogwhistle beer

I don't think I'd ever seen a local buzz quite like it. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, Ireland's hop-chasers were all talking about Dangerously Close To Stupid by To Øl. The advantage this double IPA has over its new world contemporaries is that it's more, well, contemporary, having travelled a mere sidestep from Proef in Belgium, birthplace of so many great "Danish" beers. Having tired of reading about how amazingly fresh it was I wandered over to DrinkStore a couple of weeks ago and shelled out the €5.50 they were asking for a 33cl bottle.

Well, you know what comes next. I just didn't get the hype. I mean, it's quite nice, the highlight being a massive fresh mandarin aroma, and there's no doubting its hop credentials, laying on a thick and heavy dankness from the Citra and Centennial. But it suffers a little from the boozy heat of all that alcohol, though this is cleaned up somewhat by a sharply bitter aftertaste.

To be brutally honest this doesn't seem all that superior a beer compared to, say, BrewDog Hardcore, which is a little over half the price. Perhaps I just don't get the nuances in this most unsubtle of beer styles and would be better off leaving it to those who appreciate it more.

The Dog and the Rock

Easter Monday was a dismal one in London, though the weather did little to damp the crowds of tourists queuing round the block outside museums and attractions. We passed the hordes awaiting admission to The London Dungeon on our way west to the first beer stop of the day: Cask in Pimlico. The pub is situated on a corner of the iconic Lillington Gardens development, a low-rise red-brick 1960s housing scheme. Through the door it's a fairly small one-room bar attracting a mostly young crowd, plus a handful of older locals. The bottled beer selection is prodigious, though the draught offering is impressive too, split between cask and keg.

While waiting for a plate of nachos we began exploring the beers on offer from renowned new Huddersfield brewery Magic Rock. I opted for High Wire, a 5.5% ABV American-style pale ale, orange in colour and pretty straightforward in style. I detect Simcoe among the US hop flavours here, a weighty, funky dankness that borders on cheesiness to me. I was reminded of BrewDog's Punk IPA, another Simcoe-forward pale ale. The next handpump over was serving Rapture red ale and here the BrewDog parallel is unmistakable: this beer owes a lot to 5am Saint, in my opinion. Simcoe again, in spades. The cask serve lends it a bit more balance and subtlety than its Scottish counterpart, however.

To complete the set of cask Magic Rock ales, a half of Curious. At 3.9% ABV it's a little more traditionally English. It's a slightly hazy shade of yellow, delivering a serious bitter bite up front followed by a more frivolous hint of bubblegum. Over on the keg fonts the Magic Rock Dark Arts had just run out, though I got a little taste of the dregs of this 6% ABV stout: smooth and sweet, if a little formulaic, laying on the coffee and milk chocolate rather thickly. I opted instead for another keg beer, chosen solely for its name: Shoreditch Hipster by Evil Twin, brewed as Cask's house beer and served in an appropriately stylish stemmed glass. Though only 5.5% ABV it makes for tough drinking, being heavily oily with a kind of chocolate-orange bittersweet character, building to a medicinal eucalyptus flavour. A half was enough and the nacho plate had been cleaned. Time to move on.

From Pimlico, the Tube took us beneath central London and we emerged in bohemian Camden. The destination was BrewDog's London tap, the first of several I'm sure, given how quickly they seem to be expanding. It was bustling with an unsurprisingly young and urban crowd. Eschewing the high stools of the ground floor we took our drinks to the basement to flop on a comfy sofa. Tempting as a full pint of Zeitgeist was, I opted for one of the imports: Little Sumpin' Sumpin', a Californian IPA by Lagunitas. This is one of those fabulously drinkable American IPAs with bags of zingy orange sherbet and boiled sweets. Any overpowering sugariness is kept in check by assertive bittering. Full-on yet balanced. Beautiful.

My other half's half was IPA Is Dead: Galaxy, from the new set of four single-hop beers. As with last year's batch, I think they've over-egged the hopping on this somewhat. There's a an intense pungency from the garnet-coloured ale which leads on to a palate-burning acridity. Just at the end there's a hint of tasty mandarin, but the bitterness has already spoiled the show by that point. I'll give a full report of this and its brethern when I get my hands on the new fourpack.

Time was ticking down to our 7pm curry appointment on Brick Lane and there was one more pub on the list before that, so off we went.

The Ten Bells opposite Spitalfields Market gained notoriety as a regular haunt of two victims of the 1888 Whitechapel murders. It was even known briefly as The Jack The Ripper in the 1970s and '80s. I decided to drop in because I was going to be passing that way, and because I'm a huge fan of Alan Moore's  From Hell, which features the pub, including during its 1990s incarnation as a strip club. We stood in the small crowded pub, where the bar occupies the centre of the floor, and tried to figure out where you'd put a pole.

Of course, Spitalfields has its own beery history, being once the home of the megalithic Truman, Hanbury & Buxton whose stamp is still firmly on the area in the architecture, the street names and the pub liveries. Though the company was merged out of existence in the 1970s and production ceased altogether in 1989, the brand has been revived by new owners, doubtless taking advantage of, as Boak and Bailey put it, "the free advertising all over London". It was a pleasant surprise to find two of the new beers on tap in The Ten Bells, though I suppose it's entirely natural they would be there in this former Truman's house. They're currently being brewed at Everard's, pending the building of a new Truman's brewery in east London.

Runner takes its name from a porter Truman's were once known for, London of course being a porter town. The beer itself is a 4% ABV dark brown bitter with warming toffee notes. The other tap was serving Number Eight, 3.5% ABV and lighter in colour as well as alcohol. It's pleasantly tannic and sinkable: not interesting enough to spend any time over, however, so we didn't.

After dinner, it was time for a nightcap or two in the sister pub of Cask, Clerkenwell's Craft Beer Company, a fairly traditional old-fashioned corner bar that has been given the beer geek treatment and now numbers both its keg and cask taps in double figures. Plus three fridges of bottles, of course.

More Magic Rock and yet more Simcoe, this time in their black IPA Magic 8 Ball. It looks very stouty when poured: pure black and topped with a layer of cream-coloured foam. There's even a good dose of chocolate and a dry roasted bite in the finish. But the middle belongs to our funky friend Simcoe.

Human Cannonball double IPA finished the day's Magic Rocking with lots of 9.2% ABV alchol heat. I'd be tempted to start pointing out the similarities with BrewDog Hardcore, but this is a much better beer, giving lots of pithy zest and Opal Fruit candy flavours rather than just tandem hop burn and booze burn.

For the last round my wife was drawn to the De Molen offering Heen & Weer, a fairly dark 9.5% ABV tripel. It has all the sugary fruit one might expect, and no shortage of alcohol heat here either. But there's also some beautifully peachy hop notes as well. Only a slight disinfectant tang spoils the party a little.

And I just had an orange and pineapple smoothie. No, the beer on the right of the picture is Clementine from the Clown Shoes brewery of Massachusetts. It's a wheat-based beer and as opaque as any lassi I saw on Brick Lane earlier. To the traditional coriander and orange peel they've added clementine essence which brings a marvellous tangy backdrop to the light and almost sour beer. As with the previous day's Siberia, 6% ABV is well concealed.

We called it a day at that point and disappeared out into the rainy Clerkenwell evening.

All right, you got me

There's obviously something to this whole online viral marketing thingy. I'm more-or-less past the stage where I buy every new beer that becomes available in Dublin off licences. It's all the fault of the importers and retailers who are much better at their jobs than this blog requires them to be. Especially the guys at DrinkStore who take great pride in cramming tiny amounts of everything onto their shelves and into the "Tardis" stockroom. I'm in there fairly regularly, but I'm quite circumspect. If the price is over a tenner, I may not even buy the beer. Ordinarily, though, I'll take a bottle and give it the literal once over.

And then along came I Hardcore You, following a trail of panegyrical reviews from people who aren't generally known for their fawning fanboy antics. People like Zak Avery for instance, who was one of many to point out that one I Hardcore You is never enough. Look for a voice of dissent in the comments and you won't find it. Since a mere two cases of the beer had been delivered to DrinkStore, I took the unprecedented step of buying two bottles. Just in case I liked it and there was none left later.

Before the beer, the facts: it's a blend of BrewDog Hardcore IPA and Mikkeller's I Beat yoU. It's 9.5% ABV and dry-hopped several times. It should be a monster.

But, as everyone keeps saying, it's not. Slightly hazy, and a dark shade of amber, there's actually very little sign of all those dry hops in the aroma -- just a little wisp of grapefruit curling out of the glass. The head is short lived and it's quite full-bodied, yet sparkles enough to clean the palate as it goes.

Yes there's a hop burn, a jolt of acid on the first taste, but it's more than a one-dimensional hop-bomb. I got eucalyptus, vanilla and elderflower alongside the more normal pine and citrus. As to the much-vaunted drinkability, I'm not really seeing that. This is a sipper, and I enjoyed taking my time over it, watching the sun sink over west Dublin. I did not feel the immediate need to open the second bottle. In fact, I think I'll leave that one a while and see how the sharpness rounds out.

Not a monster, but still totally hardcore.

A completist writes

OK, it may well be some time before I encounter Brew Dog's Buzz, since it's not likely to be imported on cask, and one sort of Paradox isn't really the complete set, but I was still really happy when I saw the two Brew Dog bottled beers that I had yet to try on the shelf in Redmond's last week. (Most of the rest I covered here, with a pint of Hype in Manchester last year).

Hop Rocker is the inevitable pale lager, and one I might not have bothered with if I hadn't been wanting to try them all. An odd beastie of very bright but pale yellow hue, with just a hint of a haze through it. The aroma is bitter and almost lemony, though not especially strong. They've struck just the right balance with the carbonation, giving that refreshing cleanness you want from this style without it being too much of a bloatmaking fizzbomb.

The flavour is... interesting. The citric notes are there all right, presumably deriving from a light hopping, albeit with some pretty pungent varieties. But there's also a strong sugary character to it as well. It's not the syrupyness of your typical tramps' lager, but more like the candysugar flavour from certain Belgian beers. The two flavours don't sit too well next to each other for me, and I'm not sure how a committed lager drinker would find them. It's an interesting beer, but just not in the right way.

I'm consistently amused by Brew Dog's labelling (even if certain humourless busybodies don't get it). I also used to live in Aberdeen, just down the road from the brewery. I found it impossible to read the description of Hardcore IPA without hearing the lilting Grampian tones. The text is reproduced on the right. It's the word "relatively" in the last sentence that's pure Aberdeen to me. Roll that R.

Like the brewery's lighter Punk IPA, this 9% ABV bad boy is pale yellow in colour. Hardly any head is produced on pouring, nor is there much aroma -- just a vague hops-and-boiled-water smell of the sort you get on a brewery floor. The first taste leaves you in no doubt of how much alcohol is in here: big, high intensity boozy warmth fills the mouth. But that's not to say it's malty, oh no, the bitterness actually stings. There's no trace of the fun-and-frolicsome fruity, citrusy gee-whizz American hops. This is a serious hard-as-nails Calvinist IPA with no quarter offered. Well, almost no quarter: as it warms up the caramel malt notes begin to make themselves felt and the sweet-bitter flavour takes on nearly a perfumey character. But the aftertaste remains big boozy bitter hops. Hardcore, as the label says.

I don't really know many other IPAs of this kind of power and strength, but if I had to compare Hardcore to another beer I'd be more inclined to point at Sierra Nevada's Bigfoot barley wine than, say, Great Divide's Hercules IPA. There's a definite market for this sort of beer, and I'd say it'll sell well on the other side of the pond, but extreme experiences like this aren't anything I'll be running to repeat on a regular basis. Now and again, however, it's worth it.

And just as I post this, I discover the brewery has started a blog announcing a new bottled imperial stout in their range. My completist plans are in ruins. Thanks a lot, guys.