Ireland calls

Time for another Irish beer round-up, prompted in part by the arrival last week of a new beer and a new brewing company. Andrew Murphy and Feargal Chambers (one teacher, one pharmacist) have just established Four Provinces Brewing and the first beer was launched in L. Mulligan Grocer.

The Hurler, brewed at Trouble Brewing, is intriguingly styled a "copper ale" rather than a red. I can see why too: it's a fair bit paler than most Irish reds though stained in a way most pale ales aren't. It was pouring beautifully clear as well, despite not having been through Trouble's filter. I wasn't so keen on the aroma: there's a little bit of stale grain and old hop. On tasting there's a mouthwatering punchy grapefruit bitterness up front from the extensive use of Chinook and Cascade. The guys said they were looking for an Alt-like melanoidin effect, and I can sort-of taste that in there, but the hopping leaves little room for anything else. Joyously, The Hurler comes in a tidy 4.2% ABV package and is light enough to be properly sessionable. I'd happily drink several.

To keep matters dark 'n' hoppy, the next newest Irish beer is from Blackstairs, a Wexford-based brand. There are plans for a brewery in 2015 but for now the beer is in the capable hands of Brú Brewery. The first out is a Ruby Red IPA, though I'd go so far as to say the red is a darker, browner hue than that. The smell is very strange: heavily roasted and almost meaty. The burnt flavours of dark malts are to the fore on tasting but the sharp ashen dryness is accompanied by a strong vegetal bitterness leaving an acrid sensation in the back of the mouth. There's a resinous dank centre and a faint trace of tart red berries. Flawlessly brewed, this is a very grown-up beer and while I'm sure it will have its admirers it was just a bit too stern for me. Maybe it's the disapproving gaze of the wolf on the label but I never really felt I could relax with it.

One that eluded me on my last trip north was Farmageddon India Pale. Fortunately, Richard has my back. This is 5.5% ABV and a dark gold colour, with an slightly off-putting sweaty lemon biscuit aroma. On first sip it nails its colours to the mast with an astringent lip-curling bitterness followed by a rather harsh acid burn. Oddly for a microbrewed IPA, the ingredients list maize, for head retention I'm guessing (edited to add: this is a typo, apparently. Thanks to Steve for the update). There's no sign of it in the flavour, and very little by way of grains at all, in fact. I found this beer to be all sharp angles without any mellow warmth or fruity fun. A bit like the Blackstairs above, it's definitely well made, but just too severe for my liking. Given another bottle it's possibly one to settle into, once the palate adjusts, but as a one-off sipper it's hard work.

I was a little disconcerted when I saw there was a new pale ale from Carrig Brewing. Their Pipers Pale Ale has been around barely a wet week, and now here's another session beer: Poachers Pale Ale is 4.7% ABV, just a notch higher than Pipers' 4.3. It seems a little darker, pouring out a dark gold shade with lots of enthusiastic fizz. While Pipers is all soft and fruity, this is sterner stuff, with quite an astringent bitterness: lemon peel just shading towards washing-up liquid territory. The malt element shows up more in the aroma than the flavour, adding a spongecake effect to the waft of lemons. The bit of wheat they've thrown in adds nicely to the texture making it a full-bodied beer and I can see why the label recommends hearty food as an accompaniment. I enjoyed it as much as I did the Pipers, but for different reasons: that one is all soft luscious fruit while this is invigorating bitterness. No harm having both in one's portfolio.

Kinnegar's latest, in its handsome tall bottle with minimalist labelling, is Otway, a 4.3% ABV pale ale. It's a hazy, farmhousey, pale orange and nicely light on carbonation, with the big loose bubbles of the head subsiding quickly to a thin skim. There's a light waft of spiced mandarin from the aroma plus some sweeter cereal notes. The texture is very thin, even at this modest ABV, and the flavour is as minimalist as the label, offering just some light pine resin and frankincense spicing set against crisp grain husk and finishing with a pithy bitterness. As sunny day thirst-quenchers go, this offers a more interesting flavour combination than most, but the teasing hops have me immediately hankering for something bolder.

Finally we come to Eight Degrees, a brewery which is on something of an upswing at the moment. Amber-Ella, The Full Irish and Hurricane have landed punch after delicious hoppy punch lately. Their latest offering is a white IPA (hoppy witbier) created in collaboration with London's By The Horns brewery and called (wait for it) Horn8's Nest. I caught up with it at Beerhouse where it arrived a just-off-clear pale lemony yellow. There's what I'm beginning to think of as the signature Eight Degrees aroma of fresh and spicy herbal hops. There's a wheaty softness in the texture and a generous dose of coriander though not so much evidence of the orange peel. It's probably safe to guess that the fruit has been buried under an aggressive bitterness, lightened only by zesty lemon and deepened by oily dank. The thirst-quenching power is a good as any wit you can name but this is still yet another Eight Degrees beer for connoisseurs of big hops.

I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing much slowdown in Ireland's current boom in hop-forward beers.

... and South

More west than south, really. All of today's beers are from Connacht microbreweries. The province's most prolific operation is, of course, Galway Bay. Their latest pilot batch was a Peanut Butter Stout, a hotly anticipated release, at least among those who didn't immediately go "ewww". It was a little bit of a let-down in the end. The name conjures rich, oily savoury peanut flavours but instead what we got was a fairly decent unexciting dry stout at 5.5% ABV. There is some lovely chocolate in the aroma, while the flavour blends dry crunchy roast, sweet caramel and just the faintest hint of savoury peanut. The latter is a little more apparent in the keg version, I thought, though there's not a huge difference between the two dispense methods.

Staying in Galway, and the paradoxically named Dublin Brewer Blonde, produced by Independent Brewing in Carraroe exclusively for The Larder on the capital's Parliament Street. I was bowled over by the Pale Ale from the same range so hopes were high for this. Unfortunately it doesn't come through. It's obviously intended to be inoffensive: beer for those diners who don't really like beer. But instead of crisp and dull, it's a bit bleachy, while the malt and hops provide elements of golden syrup, bubblegum, digestive biscuit and an acrid bitterness right at the end. I don't think I've ever criticised a beer for being too full-flavoured before, and that's not the problem here, but the elements don't sit well together and that swimming pool foretaste just spoils the party for me. Stick to the Pale Ale, folks.

And finally to Leitrim and the companion beer to the Pipers Pale Ale I reviewed a couple of weeks ago: Brazen Amber Ale. It's available on draught but I've yet to cross paths with it at a convenient time so this review is based on the bottled version which is 4.2% ABV. It pours a beautiful clear dark amber, though rather headless after the first fizz subsides and it smells grainy, something which follows through in the flavour. There's almost a porterish dark grain quality coupled with a Lucozade-like artificial fruit. The dry grain is firmly ascendant over the hops, putting it somewhere below the bar for amber ale, though in the happy place for Irish red. It's a perfectly decent drinkable beer, but if American amber ale is in your head when you pop the cap it's time to recalibrate.

Not the greatest of ambassadors for the Irish brewing scene, these, but the wonderful thing about beer is you never have to wait long for the next one.

Footnote from Munster: The new version of Hurricane IPA from Eight Degrees is an absolute belter. See, I knew it wouldn't be long.

The local news

Irish Craft Beer Week rumbles onwards, leading us to the final destination of the Irish Craft Beer and Cider Festival, kicking off in the RDS tomorrow afternoon and running through to Sunday. The beer list is exciting and intriguing in equal measure, with lots of new beers to tick so I've been doing my very best to get to as many as possible beforehand.

As usual, the Bull & Castle has been doing sterling work in this department of late and is still my routine destination for new stuff from Irish micros. Although that said it seems like a lot -- a hell of a lot -- of new Irish beer is coming from the one plant: 8 Degrees in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork. So with great fanfare last month we had the Dublin launch of Kinsale Pale Ale. Sam Black is in the process of setting up his own operation, with premises acquired and building under way. If you fancy getting involved in his project you can join in with his crowd funding effort on IndieGoGo. Meanwhile, he's brewing at 8 Degrees, though very much his own recipe.

It's safe to say Sam is comfortable around hops. Kinsale Pale Ale is a 5% ABV symphony in Citra. I wasn't all that impressed with the bottled version when I tried it at the Alltech Gathering -- and that's a bit of a theme with 8 Degrees beers for me: the bottles are very often duller versions of the draught, sometimes downright wonky -- but on keg it was powerfully flavoured, perhaps even a little too much for my taste. Masses of pine resin and freshly chopped mixed herbs form the vanguard; a little bit of the medicine cupboard and a little of the urinal cake. Once my palate adjusted -- which is why it really deserves to be served by the pint rather than the 33cl bottle -- it opened out into a more nuanced peach and pineapple experience, much more my sort of thing. I'm sure it'll change once production moves to Kinsale, but this first effort show that Sam knows what he's about and wants to keep the hopheads happy.

The Dublin-based 8 Degrees contractee is Five Lamps, who came out of the traps last year with a fairly plain but acceptable golden lager. The boat remains unrocked by their follow-up, Liberties Ale. In stark contrast to the super-sweet Sweetman's red reviewed on Monday, this is very dry, with an almost stoutlike roastiness going on. It reminded me quite a bit of the excellent Traditional Irish Red that Carlow brewing used to make for Aldi, though I've yet to find anyone who agrees with me on that observation. This swings a bit too far in the opposite direction from Kinsale Pale Ale for me; a few more hops would be appreciated, but I'm sure there's an audience out there for it. The rumour mill has it that Five Lamps have recently secured a premises in Dublin (embarrassingly on the other side of the city from the Five Lamps) and will be setting up a real live brewery in due course. (Late edit: In fact, the brewery was already up and running and Liberties is brewed there. The lager will continue to be brewed at Eight Degrees.)

With this lot going on it's hard to believe that 8 Degrees have time to brew anything with their own label on it, but the recent big news was the arrival of a competing pair of IPAs brewed to the same recipe only differing in the hops. The starting point for both recipes was the brewery's standard 5% ABV pale ale Howling Gale, so they have retained an anemological name for the new ones, though intensified to signify the higher 7% ABV. The northern hemisphere hops Simcoe, Citra and Mosaic went into Hurricane, while antipodean Motueka, Pacifica and Ella feature in Cyclone. I set them up blind to try them side-by-side.

The first thing that struck me in these supposed grist twins is that they're different colours from each other. What's going on there? The second is that for pretty strong brews they're both a little on the thin side. This does make for easy drinking, but it also leaves the hop flavours in both rather muted: I expected a much bigger punch on the first sip. The golden one to begin and it starts with a very floral perfumey nose, but turns sharply bitter on tasting, though not unpleasantly so. There's a lot of pithy zest here: orange rind and dried lemon. It was the one where I felt the understated flavour most acutely and I would have liked to savour it a bit longer than sharing a small bottle allowed.

Turning to the amber one, the hops were much more eager to please here, sending out keen aromas of mandarin peel and herbal dank. There's a little more to the mouthfeel here too: it's rounder and smoother and the flavour flashes a beautiful grapefruit and nectarine juiciness, but suddenly dies off leaving next to nothing in the finish. It tastes better than the first one, but not for long enough to make it a better beer. My vote went to the paler offering, which turned out to be the southern hemisphere Cyclone. A fun experiment, and two beers I'm really looking forward to trying in draught form.

And outside of 8 Degrees? Yes, there's plenty happening. The Porterhouse have bottled their stonking American style barley wine Louder and I suspect it'll be a great one to leave for a couple of years to age. Galway Bay have installed their new bottling machine and so far I've brought home their Full Sail pale ale -- my go-to when I'm in their tied pubs. It's quite a raw beer: cloudy and unrefined with lots of big citrus hops right in the middle of the flavour. A good return on one's hepatic investment too: all this hop power comes at a very reasonable 4.8% ABV. And Dungarvan's Comeragh Challenger bitter has re-emerged for another late summer run. It was showing a bit murky when I tried it on cask in the Bull & Castle. Does it ever drop bright?


We also have a new one from Metalman -- a rare full-brand beer rather than another Chameleon edition. It's a style-defying 6% ABV amber lager using (why not?) Sorachi Ace hops, called Sahara. On the strength and hop choice I really was expecting a clone of Kiuchi's Nipponia, but it's not that at all. It's a paleish red-gold and overwhelmingly dry (hence the name, I've only just realised): tannic and bitter like an old fashioned nut-brown bitter served in a dimpled glass by Bet Lynch. The signature lemon notes from the Sorachi Ace slowly unfold as the beer warms, and on that dry, almost astringent, base it acts as a grime-and-lime scrub for the palate. But even this bitterness gives way in the finish to those all-conquering tannins. It's an intriguing beer and one I'd be very willing to explore further if it were a more sessionable strength.

And with those cheery beery notes made it's head down for the big push and off to the RDS. I'm volunteering / getting in the way for all four days so give me a wave if you see me.