Hazy recollection

It's the season for pointless time-consuming traditions and dull end-of-year lists: yes, The Golden Pints are upon us once more. 2018's deliberation beer is one I acquired at the Mikkeller takeaway bar in Copenhagen airport with my final fistful of kroner. Hazy is a New England IPA of 6.6% ABV, an opaque orange-yellow, topped by a thick white head. In the minus column there's a pinch of dreggy yeast and a rising garlic note as it warms; the principal plus, however, is a massive juiciness -- mostly sweet orange but there's a balancing citric bitterness too, from the Simcoe, I'm guessing. Three months on from canning and this was still a perfect example of this style done well. It does need to be consumed cold, though: I was only half way through deliberations when it warmed up to the point of losing juice. A lesson for me to make my decisions quickly. Anyway, without further review, here are...

The Golden Pint Awards 2018

Best Irish Cask Beer: O Brother: The Whippersnapper
This cask-conditioned Berliner weisse ran a close race against another oddity, Third Barrel's Raspberry Stout, but just pipped it.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Urban Brewing: Barrel Aged Sour
Barrel-aged pale farmhousey beers rocked my world this year. Extremely honorable mentions go also to Rascals for the Chardonnay Sparkling Ale and DOT's Dainty Wood. This one, while perhaps not the most complex, had the best mix of classic wild-fermented and wood-aged flavours, very like an authentic Belgian gueze. I hope they can recreate it, and that there are customers in the local market who appreciate this sort of thing.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Larkin's: Baltic Porter
This award is based not solely on the quality of the beer -- though that is consistently excellent. It's almost as much the availability: this one has been there for me at regular intervals throughout the year; occasions when I just want something unfussy but great to drink. It looks to have been renamed now, as "Dark Matter", but it still tastes perfect.

Best Irish Canned Beer: Hope: Hop Hash DIPA
My standout from The Big Grill Festival this year translated perfectly into canned form. Citric hoppy deliciousness.

Best Overseas Draught: Purpose: Smoeltrekker #68
Another one of those barrelled sour blondes, hailing from Colorado but showing up on tap at the Leuven Innovation Beer Festival back in the spring. All the oaky spices.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Sierra Nevada: Tequila Barrel Otra Vez
I've been a bit grumbly about Sierra Nevada's harmless gose-alike but I was genuinely wowed when I happened across a bottle of the tequila-barrel-aged version.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Collective Arts: Ransack the Universe
In Ireland, "Overseas canned beer" is mostly going to mean "some murk from England with an abstract design on it" -- there are a hell of a lot of those on the market at any given moment and I don't bother trying to keep up with them. So instead I'm picking some murk from Canada with a sort-of abstract design on it, and very nice it was too.

Best Collaboration Brew: Jester Zinne
This one from De La Senne and Jester King -- barrels, funk, sour: you get the picture -- could equally have been awarded Best Overseas Bottle but I'm slotting it into the collaboration bracket where there's less competition instead.

Best Overall Beer: Urban Brewing: Barrel Aged Sour
Scouring the above for the most memorable, pupil-dilating, beer experience of the year, and I think this is the one.

Best Branding: Kinnegar
The Donegal brewer switched its minimalist monochrome designs to the new busy cartoon bunnies and their associates. I haven't seen it on a label yet, but I loved the design for Rustbucket, featuring the late eponymous doggo.

Best Pump Clip: Beerbliotek: Shakes Fist Angrily
Still amused by the sheer daftness of this.

Best Bottle/Can Label: YellowBelly: Covert Operation
The Molloy's guys and YellowBelly are up to something. With a fox.

Not a skull to be seen.

Best Irish Brewery: Rye River
2016's winner returns to the top spot, though for different reasons this time. It still does excellent contract-brewing work, and the Brown Ale and Saison for Lidl were two very strong new strings to its bow, but the five limited edition seasonal launches really marked out the progression of 2018, and we got hints too of a pilot series a few weeks ago. The Rye River brand has come of age, and attached itself to some very fine beers.

Best Overseas Brewery: The Exchange
In a busy and diverse drinking year, no single overseas brewery stood out for me. This award is going on visitor experience, then, and the smart, bijou taproom of this place in Niagara-on-the-Lake, visited in September. It brews good stuff too.

Best New Brewery Opening 2018: Four Provinces
OK technically this was a 2017 launch, but it was 2018 before the new range started getting out and about. Láidir in particular was the best new regular-production Irish beer of the year, but there's no Golden Pint for that.

Pub/Bar of the Year: UnderDog
In the grand tradition of the previous year's Best Newcomer winning Best Pub this time round, UnderDog takes the prize. Anyone who's spent any amount of time there will know why. It's always entertaining and only a small part of that is because of what's on tap. Shout-out to Paddy, Barry and Chris who make it what it is.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2018: GIST
I think I'm right with the timing here: I don't see any reference to its existence prior to last January. Anyway, Brussels has a new star in its pub firmament; a lovely blend of traditional cosy brown-café vibes with a bang-up-to-date modern beer list. A most honorable mention goes to the Metalman bar in Waterford which opened just over a year ago, pouring great beers and hosting fun events on the city's quayside.

Beer Festival of the Year: Hagstravaganza
The only Irish beer festival that people talk about; the centre of the calendar for the last two years; performing stellar geek-service while also being just a fun day out. After a few hiccups in year one, the 2018 outing nailed it.

Supermarket of the Year: Lidl
Time was this was a back-and-forth between the supermarket near work (Fresh in Smithfield) and the supermarket near home (SuperValu Sundrive) but both have lost crucial staff resulting in the loss of elite status. I'm going with Lidl instead this year, largely because of the Rye River commissions above, as well as the exotic oddities from the summer. More tickworthy exotic oddities please!

Independent Retailer of the Year: Stephen Street News
Unlike the supermarkets, Martin's and DrinkStore have done nothing at all wrong, but here comes the disruptor, jumping on the aluminium bandwagon and making exemplary use of price-points and social media to corner the poorly-served ubergeek end of the Dublin beer market. Long may it continue.

Online Retailer of the Year: YellowBelly Brewery
I don't usually award this because I don't buy beer on the internet, except this year I did: I joined the first outing of the YellowBelly Beer Club which meant four six-packs in the post. As I mentioned in relation to the last one, they weren't all brilliant beers, but there's still a bit of fun in parcel-post beer delivery, especially when it's a local outfit rather than a, say, Scottish or pseudo-Danish one.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: The Good Beer Guide To Belgium, 8th ed.
The mostly-annual award for The One Beer Book I Read This Year goes to Joe and Tim for this one. It is genuinely good. You don't get Golden Pints, or any pints, for putting out dreck.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Every Pub In Dublin
I've mentioned in previous years how I'm a sucker for a grand project. Dublin has two which came to my attention this year, attempting to visit all the pubs in Dublin (for a given value of "Dublin"), so shout-out to Dublin By Pub, but for sheer indefatigable doggedness, and regular laugh-out-loud pen portraits, this one goes to Cian.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: @Bill_Linane
It was well worth keeping a blackboard record of how many times each Twitter account amused me during 2018. The final tally shows Bill to be out in front. Well done Bill.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: Eight Degrees
The most frequent winner of this category takes it again and godammit it shouldn't be this easy for them. It's not rocket science for breweries to put information about their new releases out on the internet so customers can see what they're buying when they're buying it, yet Eight Degrees is the only one that has the information to hand when I want it. A spirited, and much appreciated, attempt was made on Instagram by Whiplash but they still didn't manage to document all their own releases (Love is Lost? Hello?). Meanwhile, every other Irish brewery: pleeease do this better.

And there we are. Can you believe that that's ten whole years of Golden Pints? Madness. Big thanks to Mark and Andy, of course, who originated the categories, ones which are looking a bit clunky for the current beer scene, but my unhallowed hands shall not disturb them, or the beer world's done for. See you in 2019!

Some light pubbing

A random assortment of beers and bars from my recent Belgian trip in today's post, beginning with an icon. Fresh off the plane I stopped in the splendid Halles de Saint-Géry market hall for a bite to eat. The bar had a few options from Heineken's Belgian arm but I went straight for the flagship, Maes Pils. The best thing about it was the ribbeke glass: no pissing about with chalices here. It tastes sweetly of maize first, finishing on a drier husk. The carbonation is far too high making for prickly and uncomfortable drinking. I got a slight smoky staleness as well. Not an experiment I need to repeat.

There was another golden beer in the fridges at the meeting venue the following day: 100 PAP by 3 Fontaines, a brewery which I can't believe hasn't been forced to change its name by a certain lambic producer. This one was produced as a fundraiser by a migrants' charity and I understand has changed styles since its inception. It's now a blonde ale, or possibly even a pale ale, at 6% ABV. There's a lovely tropical aroma showing mango and pineapple. The flavour is clean and dry, quite lagerlike, with a little crisp caraway seed and some sweeter peach. Simple and decent fare, overall.

You want some wow factor? How about Jester Zinne, the collaborative sour saison from De La Senne and Jester King? How about Jester Zinne for €15 a bottle in Le Coq instead of the €32 that Moeder Lambic was asking for it? It's a modest 5.9% ABV and begins fruitily with fresh and juicy apricot, laced with oily coconut and followed with enough of a bricky gueze kick to make it taste more like a lambic than a saison. It's beautiful stuff, balancing the fruit and aged sourness perfectly, kind of like a junior edition of Cantillon's Fou'foune.

Friday lunch, as is becoming routine for these meetings, was spaghetti at Monk. They've just launched their very own house beer, Strandhut, brewed by the bar staff in collaboration with Stadsbrouwerij 't Koelschip in Ostend. It arrived to the table in a large bottle, a muddy pale amber colour and failing to form a head on pouring. I asked one of its co-creators what style they were going for and got a Klompian shrug in response. I'll call it a Belgian blonde ale so. Even more worrying, asking about the ABV elicited the same annoyed grumbling. "About 6%" he said, adding they didn't really record it accurately. It's quite a thin beer, but pleasantly bitter and spicy, with the level of herbs and lemon rind you might find in a witbier or even a tripel. As a food accompaniment it could definitely have benefitted from a heftier body; as a cheapish house beer: yeah, sure, why not?

Compare and contrast with the beer for dinner that evening, in the cosy embrace of first-rate beer restaurant Nüetnigenough. M'colleague Dr John had picked De Ranke's Guldenberg from the menu for us, a proper tripel of 8% ABV. This is an especially dry version of the style, lacking the honey and candy they often show, and replacing them with grain husk and white pepper. There's a certain apple and grape quality in the middle but it reverts to type in the end, turning acidic. It's a bit of a workout to drink, but I enjoyed the challenge and would come back for more.

The big discovery of the trip was Gist, a recently-opened beer bar not far from Grand Place and Centraal station. We visited a couple of times, enjoying the excellent beer selection and the laid-back vibe which will hopefully continue as it becomes more famous, but probably won't. Funnily enough, at the last EBCU meeting in Milan, I encountered Stradaregina's Sourflowers 02. And here in Brussels for the next one I found Sourflowers 01, the elderflower one. I didn't get much elder from it but there was a gorgeous brett-apricot aroma, and a flavour mixing peaches and gunpowder on a puckering tart base. It's not far off the level of excellence found in Jester Zinne and I'm glad it seems to be a longterm beer that travels. Grab it if you see it.

Gist had two cask engines on the go, but sadly neither was pouring lambic. I had a glass of Psycho, the table beer from local producer No Science. It's a pale yellow colour and at once spicy and flowery, beginning on honeysuckle and incense and ending with a hard kick of citrus and wax. At 4% ABV they've pushed through the limit of what constitutes a table beer, I reckon, though it does deliver that simple yet complex mix of farmyard flavours that the style is all about.

For his part, John went with Excuse Me While I Kiss My Stout (2018 edition) by Hedonis Ambachtsbier, a Belgian client brewer with which I'm not familiar. It was an 8.2% ABV imperial job with added mint, maple and hazelnut. For all that it wasn't overly sweet, balancing the syrup with bitterness and real coffee, and never getting too thick or hot. It's a balanced sort of pastry stout.

I finished that evening on a Canadian beer, Dunham's Berliner Passion Weisse. The aroma of this is pure sugary passionfruit but the flavour is bizarrely sharp, almost vinegary. It doesn't go all the way there, thankfully, keeping plenty of fruit around to offset the acidity. There's not much going on between its two facets, but what's there is enjoyable.

The inevitable few rounds in Moeder Lambic Fontainas began on yet another new house beer, Moeder Every Day by Jandrain-Jandrenouille. Like the earlier table beer, this is 4% ABV and a pale blonde, showing just a slight haze. Lemon zest emerges first, backed by crisp lagery grains. A tiny bitter yeast kick adds Belgian complexity, but that's as advanced as it gets. It's a beer that's not designed to be pored over or thought about, and I guess even Moeder Lambic has to have one of those on the list.

100 років УНР ("100 Years of the Ukranian National Republic") from Pravda in Lviv had a whiff of more than just nationalism about it. This is a strong stout of 8.5% ABV, densely black in colour with a tan head and smelling harshly of old cigarette smoke. The flavour was surprisingly sweeter, the ash turning to more avuncular pipe tobacco, plus a solid base of chocolate and treacle bread. This is strong yet subtle, and surprisingly easy to drink.

John, meanwhile, opted for Heavy Porter, another No Science offering. It's fairly classic in the way it's constructed, beginning on chocolate, adding in some meadowy floral hops, and finishing quickly and cleanly. This too is dangerously easy drinking, at a not inconsiderable 6% ABV.

I just had a quick sip of someone else's √225 (not pictured), a saison from Swiss brewery BFM. A sip was enough to know it's absolutely terrible, with a harshly concentrated vinegar acidity that's simply painful to drink, or even to smell. Moving on swiftly...

... to the much more friendly-sounding Imperial Hoppy Berliner Weisse from Mont Salève. It's oranges all the way here, from the colour through to the sweet orangeade flavour, complete with a pithy bitterness, leading to a tang of aspirin. The sour side is very mild, and the overall picture is refreshing and fun, more like a tart pale ale than a Berliner weisse. I was shocked to discover it's a full-on 9% ABV, so at least the "imperial" bit holds up.

My companion's finisher was Adelardus by Kerkom, one he knew but I didn't. It's a straight up dubbel at 7% ABV, a dark wine-red colour with a vinous aroma to match. The flavour is much more typical, indeed spot on: cereal and caramel form the foundation, overlaid with bass notes of plum and raisin, then ripe red cherries on the treble. It's rich, smooth and remarkably warming at the relatively low strength.

I'll come back to our other Brussels venue -- another brewery -- in tomorrow's post, but after finishing up here it was off to Leuven. A quickie Saturday night pub crawl began with exemplary glasses of Stella (don't laugh) in the raucous but wonderful Café In Den Ouden Tijd opposite the station, and finished on disappointment at De Blaue Kater, which has moved from its dark and cosy alleyway to a new location across town where it has evolved into a grand multistorey pub and venue. In between there was M-Café.

This modern bar at the front of the city museum was very quiet when we rocked in. It wasn't want of fancy beer that was keeping the punters away: my first was from Warpigs, their Snack Family pale ale. It's a murky orange colour and smelled fabulous, all zesty and spicy. That proved deceptive, as the flavour was disappointing: some mild jaffa, a touch of caraway, but that was it. I got through my glass OK, and enjoyed the part right before each sip. I was left unthrilled, however.

Something even more bro-ish for John: Spacelord, a coffee imperial stout by a Belgian brewer delighting in the name Malterfakker. It was another poor effort, heavy and sticky, lacking the fresh coffee flavour it needed to brighten it, doubling down on syrup and putty. Far too much hard work at this time of night.

I'll get to the beer festival we went to in Leuven later in the week, once I finish with Brussels in tomorrow's post.