Clock this

I'm used to Irish breweries having a long gestation, from the first announcement by some ballsy entrepreneur to actually being able to drink a pint they brewed can be a long stretch, and often the second part never actually happens. So I was agog at how fast things moved with Changing Times. The news that a consortium of prominent Dublin publicans had bought the old Kepak warehouse in Glasnevin and were planning to set up a brewery in it only landed last July. Since then we've seen Franciscan Well co-founder Shane Long and former Trouble and Hope brewer Mark Nixon become associated with the project, and now only four months later, there's actual beer pouring.

The consortium of owners includes The Palace pub in Temple Bar, and that's where I went on the day after the high-profile launch to try out the first two. Any excuse to visit such a fine establishment.

Daydreamer is the lager, described on the badge as "snappy". It's a very pubbable 4.2% ABV and arrived extremely cold, with a €7.60 tab -- priced on a par with other independent beers. There wasn't much to say about it at first: lots of fizz and a tiny amount of haze on the pale yellow body. Given a moment, there's a pleasant cracker crispness (snappiness? sure, why not), and a moment later brings some Germanic hopping. That adds a different sort of crispness: crunchy green vegetables. With the pint half empty and warmed a little, there's a threat of butteriness in the aroma but the flavour stays clean and dry. This has the basics of decent lager, and certainly isn't a clone of the cut-corner big brands. At the same time, however, it's no connoisseur's lager and only hints at the fun you can have with good pilsner, Helles or the like. If the mainstream lager drinkers aren't completely tied to the familiar labels, this offers an alternative of acceptable quality. I'm guessing that's what it's meant to do.

Launching alongside is the pale ale, After Hours. They've put "hazy" on the badge, but it's not really much cloudier than the lager. Sorry, hazebros: nothing for you here. It's 4.2% ABV again, which puts in a competitive space with Little Fawn, but it's nowhere near that quality. The aroma is broadly about American hops, with a certain amount of pine resin, though nothing overboard. The texture is thin, and fizz is again central, something much less acceptable in a pale ale than a lager. In the flavour, the hops make a valiant effort to be heard, but can't quite manage it sufficiently. There are token quantities of juice and dank with minimal bitterness, so it fits the hazy profile in the most basic way but, to me, comes across like an Ambush that's been run under the cold tap. It's not offensive, bad, or poorly made, but it tastes cheap and dumbed-down. This sort of beer was radical in Ireland a decade and more ago. These days, I think even mainstream pale ale drinkers will find it lacks character. I wouldn't be fully confident that it's a trade-up from fresh Hop House 13.

So... I don't really know who these beers are for. I can't see any drinkers of the big brands making the switch, when they've already turned down the pre-existing alternatives. And this goes even more for the third in the range, Clockwork stout, arriving soon. Equally, there's not much to attract the seasoned drinker of microbrewed beers. I see After Hours working as a distress purchase, but I think most of us would prefer a Little Fawn, Ambush, Scraggy Bay or Galway Hooker. It's disturbing to hear already of independent breweries' taplines being removed from pubs which are part of the brewery consortium.

A brand new brewery means lots of new potential, but I'm not seeing that realised to any great extent in the first two beers.

Gate and switch

An icy gale was whipping the flurries of snow down James's Street and barely a sinner was out in it, except for the trickle of Ireland's beer commentariat filing through the entrance to Open Gate Brewery. The bar was almost eerily quiet this Tuesday night: closed to the regular revellers, and with all the taps blank and the blackboards clean. We had been invited along to taste the latest Guinness beer, without any clue as to what it was. My rumour that a mixed fermentation barrel-aged version of Satzenbrau was in the offing had failed to gain traction.

Out came the tasting trays of the new beer, introduced by brewer John Casey. It's a lager, he told us. While it looked like one, of the clear golden sort anyway, it didn't feel like one. The body was quite heavy, gummy almost, and I suspected that, as with Hop House 13, it was fermented with an ale yeast. There's a somewhat wort-like sweetness up front, but followed and almost fully offset by soft stonefruit hop flavours: mango and peach in particular. Topaz, Galaxy and Mosaic are the hops: the same combination used in HH13, and the main reason for its similarity. The twist is that the new beer, Pure Brew, is alcohol-free, or near-as at 0.5% ABV. Although I spotted the malt-extract sweetness which so often marks these, the hopping was sufficient to completely prevent me making the association. The technicals of it, explained next, are quite interesting. Here comes the science part: concentrate.

I don't know how often this happens with non-alcoholic beer, but it's not brewed to strength and then de-alcoholised. They start with a wort of around 1.030 and pitch a special variety of yeast which brings it down no further than about 1.025 before finishing of its own accord. The quirk of this process that really interested me is that this is one of the very few Guinness beers you'll find out and about that's produced at sale strength rather than brewed and fermented at high gravity and watered down before packaging. Though it bears the name of the Open Gate Brewery like every new release lately, there is a pleasing piece of extra transparency on the back label "Dreamed up at the Open Gate Brewery. Brewed next door in St James's Gate", as are all the Open Gate branded beers that are distributed beyond the taproom itself. A thumbs up for this, and I'll happily overlook the slight topographical inaccuracy.

Pure Brew works well as a non-alcoholic offering. Yes it's a bit sweet and heavy, but that hop profile, if it survives out on the dusty floor-level shelves where pubs keep these products, is enough of a redeeming feature to give it the beatings of its German rivals.

L: Plum Pudding Porter ; R: Olde English Ale

Duty to the new guy done, there was time for some swift catching-up on Open Gate's winter offerings. First out was Plum Pudding Porter. I was imagining a sticky confection, especially given the downright imperialist ABV of 7.2%, but it's pleasingly dry right from the very first sip. The pastry element is present but understated: raisin and prune, lightly spiced with cinnamon. It's a proper winter beer, not gimmicky, and with the fruit and spice additions well integrated into the flavour, not squirted in as an afterthought which seems to be too often the case with this lot.

Olde English Ale is apparently a staff favourite. It's another dark and strong one, 7.5% ABV this time, given 11 months of maturation before serving. It's also quite dry, with a bit of Foreign Extra Stout's bitter bite balanced by toffee in the tail end. While clean and straightforward, I thought it lacked something with regard to complexity: it feels like it should have more interesting mature beer flavours, some coffee or cocoa; even a cheeky savoury edge of autolytic umami, but everything it does arrives in one go and leaves the palate just as promptly.

A total change of tack for the evening's finisher, and a perfect contrast to the heavy stuff. Goodbye Gose is that rare bird: a gose that hasn't been hacked around with in the mistaken belief that the style needs syrupy enhancements. This is absolutely straight up, 5% ABV, offering a refreshing briney salt foretaste countered by tart lemon and all set on a gently effervescent body. You may not think you need cleansing refreshment on a snowy night in January, but this delivers it anyway, and I felt the better for it. It could probably stand to be a little sourer for my taste, but worked absolutely perfectly as-is.

Once again Open Gate excels at a German beer style. Sure you'd wonder why they bother with the dark stuff at all.

 A little over a week later I was back in for something else and two new additions had gone on the bar. Winter Sunshine is another pale ale, 5% ABV, and suffering from the thick syrupyness that seems to beset most Open Gate attempts at doing properly hop-forward beers. It's not unpleasant, having a kind of bittersweet marmalade orange taste, as well as a fun peppery spice. It completely fails to be refreshing, however, coming through heavy and a little cloying. The refreshment quotient is disappointingly low.

The other new one was a complete contrast: Dunkel Hefeweizen, obviously a wheat beer but arriving looking like a stout: black with a beige head. The term "hybrid" gets thrown around to an inappropriate extent in modern beer, but this really did taste and smell like an amalgam of two very distinct styles. There's the rich and sweet brown-banana of a particularly warm-fermented weizen, sitting next to the dry burnt-toast flavour of a particularly roasty stout. A curious mix, and one that shouldn't work, but I quite liked its oddness. The blandness that often besets dunkelweisse is mercifully absent. On the down side it is a bit thin, with a low energy ABV of 4.6%. The fun flavour blend does go a long way to make up for that, however.

That's it from Open Gate for now. I've an appointment there in early March and will be hoping to meet the spring collection then.

Cherishing the children equally

When you spend a lot of time watching the doings of small breweries, the behaviour of big breweries can seem a bit weird. Diageo, for instance, has two new beers out but looks to be treating them in very different ways even though they're quite similar to each other, on paper at least.

Smithwick's Blonde I learned about via my ancillary hobby of peering in pub windows at what they have on tap. The first place I noticed it was The Norseman, but the bold yellow font was also to be seen leering across the bar in The Boar's Head and neighbouring Slattery's on Capel Street. It was in the latter that I finally caught up with it. A simple substance, it's dry and crisp with lots of fizz, a watery heart and a rather stale malt husk finish. The gas and water makes it nicely palate cleansing, which is about the best I can say for it. Why they made it and who it's for is anyone's guess. I've seen no related PR and not even the Smithwick's website recognises its existence. As soft launches go, this one is downright soggy.

Compare it, then, with its almost-twin Hop House 13. This was launched with a thumping audiovisual fanfare at a media event in St James's Gate last month. Here's Nick Curtis-Davis, Diageo's Head of Innovation for Guinness, explaining the rationale behind the new beer, followed by the soundtrack of a short video they made to introduce it:

Sounds great, eh? The show-and-tell was followed by a taste down at the pilot plant with Peter Simpson, the young brewer fronting this release. It was cold in there and the little sample even colder so I didn't get much of a chance to assess it. I caught up with it again in the wild at Slattery's a few days later.

Diageo has branded it a lager even though it's made using standard Guinness ale yeast, and there's definitely an extra ale-like body to it rather than the clean blank slate of a pale lager. Hopwise they've employed a prestige combination of Mosaic, Galaxy and Topaz which creates an immediate fruity spicy buzz on entry with even a hint of naughty dank and some dry but fun pomegranate and cranberry. These are mere nuances, however, and the main thrust of the beer is a simple and sessionable English-style golden ale, putting me a little in mind of the likes of Hopback's Summer Lightning. At a piddling 16 IBUs and high-gravity brewed in huge quantities it's not going to displace any Irish micros, but like another of its siblings, the Amarillo-laced Smithwick's Pale Ale, it's the sort of beer I'd happily drink when it's the best available option.

The new brewhouse at St James's Gate has allowed Diageo to design and launch new beers faster than ever before: Hop House 13 was an unprecedented seven months from first draft to first draught. That makes four brand new recipes out the gate of the 'Gate in the last six months. At this rate, and with access to all those increasingly scarce hops, they're bound to hit on something really good at some point soon, right?