Amber to red

Who's up for some malty goodness? Today's pair are of the russet persuasion, noteworthy for being something Irish brewers don't produce very often. Tellingly, they're quite different from the usual formula for Irish red ale.

O Brother, for example, has allied with coffee roasters Velo to create a Coffee Amber Ale, exclusive to Aldi. It is indeed amber: a dark shade, though not at risk of being mistaken for porter or brown ale. That's topped with a head of fine bubbles, looking almost nitrogenated. The aroma is dry and roasty, though very much in a beer way, not coffee. There's a hint of cherry or similar red fruit too. The coffee waits until the flavour to appear, but isn't shy when it does. It doesn't taste like the frighteningly serious gourmet coffee that I associate with named roasteries, but is sweet and somewhat powdery, suggesting (to my untutored coffee palate) instant with a dollop of cream. Next to that, there's lots of genuine malt character, bringing more of that red fruit from the aroma, though more strawberry than cherry, some light caramel and a toasted grain dryness to keep things balanced. It's no masterpiece of complexity, but is enjoyable and delivers well on the promise of amber ale with coffee.

For its 38th Limited Edition beer, Hope chose Red Ale, which I thought was an odd move until I read the small print. 7% ABV with Citra and El Dorado as dry hops means we're a long way from Macardles. There's definitely a citrus quality to the aroma, but not intensely so. It only smells a little like a pale ale. I think of El Dorado as a fruit-candy flavoured hop, but the main flavour of this beer is at the opposite end of the spectrum: dank, oily, and very savoury. That contrasts strongly with the caramelised malt, and it's a bit disconcerting at first, especially when the beer is still fridge-cold. It rounds out once there's a little warmth on board, however, even if it never quite loses its sharpness. The strength helps the malt hold its own against the hop onslaught, though I don't think I can fairly call it balance. While this is a bit of fun, I'm happy for it to be a once-off. The experiment to marry rich red malt with resinous American hops has not been entirely successful here, and the result is just a little too discordant to be enjoyable. I have tasted plenty of excellent American-style amber ales, but they tend to be more subtle on all fronts, and with good reason, it seems.

I somehow doubt that these beers will meet the needs of the people who complain about the lack of red beers from Irish breweries. Both are significant twists on the plain caramel-water of mainstream red. And while I wasn't a huge fan of either, they're still better than the norm. Hooray for variety, I guess.

What works and what doesn't

The Jumping Church Brewery has been operating in Ardee, Co. Louth, since 2021. They've made no more than a handful of different beers in that time, and seemingly none of it travels very far from its place of origin. I have Thomas and Brendan to thank for donating today's three bottles, picked up on their way south to Mullingar in April. I will say at the outset that I don't have a whole lot of trust in the quality of the beer from small rural Irish breweries with very limited distribution. But I hoped for the best.

First open was Gae Bolga, a pale ale of 4.3% ABV. It's a slightly hazy amber colour, and the first sign that something may be amiss was the mass of froth and busy carbonation. If the conditioning wasn't properly under control, what else wasn't? The answer comes right in the foretaste: an acrid burnt rubber taste which suggests something is up with either the water treatment or the fermentation. It's a rookie homebrew error, and sadly much too common in beer from these sorts of tiny breweries. This is allied with a cardboard-like twang which suggests oxidation as well. Because it's a light and, frankly, quite watery beer, the Cascade, Columbus and Centennial hops' contribution isn't very loud and gets drowned out by the off flavours, for the most part. Only Cascade's earthiness puts in a proper appearance.  It's not woeful, but it's not a good pale ale either, and certainly nothing like an American brewery would produce. I hoped for better from the following two darker beers.

The retro style whose scarcity everyone complains about but nobody actually buys, red ale, is represented by Ferdia Red, again 4.3% ABV. Full marks for the visuals: it's a dark cola-brown with an off-white head, making it look wholesome and rustic, as I'm sure was the intention. It's quite fizzy again, however, which here interferes somewhat with the all-important malt in the flavour profile. When that settles a bit, there's weighty mix of caramel, coffee and chocolate, reminding me a little of another by-gone style, ruby porter, represented on this island by the once-mighty Clotworthy Dobbin from Whitewater. While that had a sneaky cheeky twist of Cascade bitterness in the finish, this is an all malt affair, taking you on a tour of the characteristics of the medium dark varieties. A very slight vegetal tang -- English hops, I assume -- is the only thing to tell you hops were involved somewhere. I was worried about off flavours which might have crept in during production or packaging but I am very happy to report that it's clean as a bean. I will take well-made and simple over complex and wonky any night of the week. This is the beer that Macardle's wishes it could be. A bottle in a warm, dark pub would be ideal, though I could still discern its quality on a drizzly summer afternoon. You won't often find me extolling Irish red, even when new ones are a rarity, but this meets the requirements adequately and is an enjoyable grown-up drink.

It must make your excise returns easier when your core range are all the same strength, because The Turf Man stout is also 4.3% ABV. While the red was dark, the stout is only a couple of shades darker beyond that, pouring a chocolate brown and looking a little murky under the cream-coloured head. The aroma is lightly roasty, not dissimilar to a certain big-brand Irish stout when it's in carbonated format: slightly burnt toast and a metallic mineral tang. I was surprised to find the texture full-on creamy, the fizz held well in check and a smooth, almost cake-like, texture taking over. The flavour is not an especially strong one, so this is very much a stout built for the session -- I would very happily spend the night on it. Nothing builds, nothings cloys, nothing twangs, and instead there's a brisk dry roast with a glimpse of a slightly deeper dark chocolate complexity: something to hold your interest during any lull in the conversation. Some slightly sticky black liquorice indicates the hops' presence. This feels to me like an Irish stout designed by someone who loves to drink Irish stout. It is the epitome of nothing-fancy while still having an understated character and quality. Like with the red, I can't pick anything I would do different, given the specification.

I don't imagine we'll be seeing any sour fruit beers or rye-and-grapefruit saisons from Jumping Church any time soon. This seems to me like the sort of little local brewer of quality, traditional-style, beers that should be rinsing the multinationals in its catchment area. That hop-forward beer might be a problem for them is unfortunate, but there's no reason they need to get good at that, any more than they need a lager. Even in this day and age it should be possible to make a living producing the basics of beer in a excellent way, as Jumping Church appears to be doing.

Bog standard

Bog Hopper Brewery of Muff, Co. Donegal has been on the go for a couple of years now but the beers have landed only recently in Dublin and I picked up a set at DrinkStore.

To start, their pilsner Dirty Chick. I got a clean and clear glassful as I began to pour it but this was spoiled just at the end when the bottle-conditioning dregs fell in. It still looked good: a wholesomely hazy orange-gold with a handsome fluffy white head. The aroma is more that of a weissbier than a pils, sweet and fruity. It's quite sweet to taste as well, a fruit salad of banana and pear, plus a spicier smoky incense thing. All of which is the yeast at work, and the resulting esters make it thick and greasy. While quite pleasant to drink, it absolutely does not meet the crisp and hoppy spec of proper pilsner. If given it as homebrew I'd be advising the brewer that their brewing practices just aren't up to doing the style properly. I was immediately on guard for a rough and rustic set of beers.

Horny Ram did little to dissuade me of that when it began escaping the bottle as soon as the cap came off. This is a red ale at 4.4% ABV. It's clearer than the pilsner, a handsome strong-tea shade of red brown. It smells of caramel, as one would have every reason to expect of a red ale, and the flavour is all that too: a light burnt sugar sweetness, a trace of smoke, and finishing on a gentle roasted note. What it lacks is any distinguishing features. The better sort of red ale from Ireland's micros tend to put a bit of a twist on the style: extra hops, summer fruit, darker grains. This one doesn't bother with any of that and is quite bland as a result. Its decently full body means it's definitely a step up from any red ale offering from the industrial breweries but there's nothing to mark it out as exceptional or different. Still, providing an alternative for the local Smithwick's and Macardle's drinkers is probably a viable commercial strategy and a noble calling.

You need to try harder with a pale ale, however, and Hairy Bullocks is certainly a bit different. Like with the pilsner, the yeast makes a major contribution to the flavour, its nutmeg and clove combining with a gentle citrus bitterness to create a rather fun spiced cider sort of effect. The bitterness is low and the overall flavour quite dry. I've certainly never encountered an actual American pale ale that tasted like this and it's much more along the lines of an orangey English bitter. While interesting it's not very polished and I detected a slight wet cardboard burr at the very end. This is another one that calls to mind the more homebrewish side of craft brewing, with all the charms and flaws which come with that. Again, it would be fun to have this as your local beer, made by people you know, but at a time when Irish breweries are starting to make a name for themselves on the world stage it's not in the same league.

To finish, Cold Turkey, a collaboration Bog Hopper created with YellowBelly, down in the opposite corner of the country. No style is given on the bomber bottle but it's 6.9% ABV and a dark mahogany red. It smells rich and wholesome, of ripe strawberry and dark chocolate. Savoury yeast is right at the front of the flavour. It seems to be covering up the sweeter malt underneath: milky coffee and floral rosewater. There's the makings of a very nice porter in here but the rawness and the roughness spoils the whole party. Even moreso than Hairy Bullocks this tastes like the sort of bottle-conditioned English beer where the purity of the process is far more important than the purity of the flavour.

Fun, silly, but could benefit from cleaning up their act: as true for Bog Hopper's beers as it is for their branding.

Life after death

With Diageo winding up operations at the Smithwick's St. Francis's Abbey Brewery and moving all brewing to Dublin, Kilkenny's native beer looks to be getting a new lease of life. I suspect that the company is extremely wary of experimenting with the Guinness brand -- one of the world's strongest, but one which works best as an immutable monolith in its home country. Smithwick's, on the other hand, is nowhere near as precious. It has long been a minority interest, playing third or fourth fiddle in the portfolio, and when the other brands were given expensive makeovers over the last decade, Smithwick's was last in the queue and I was half expecting it to be quietly retired. I mean, who drinks ale these days? But the run-up to the brewery's tricentenary in 2010 saw it finally get a revamp, all hinged on one concept: craft.

Smithwick's ale was now a craft beer, crafted by craftsmen for centuries. In 2011 the first new brand extension came out: Smithwick's Pale Ale. Not at all a bad effort, and a beer I've occasionally been very glad of in pubs with nothing better. And very much pitched at the new demographic of "craft beer drinkers", about the only growing segment of the industry in western Europe. There's even a new Smithwick's poster campaign arguing that centuries of experience is required to make properly crafted craft beer. For the independent breweries of Ireland it must seem like we're at stage three on the Ghandi scale of conflict.

That Smithwick's is now being pitched as a niche product is certainly borne out in the press release for the latest new addition: Smithwick's Winter Spirit. It's only 260 words, but Diageo makes sure to tell us the new beer "is set to impress craft beer drinkers" and "will be enjoyed by craft beer lovers", while that TV ad with the squirrel "grabs the attention of craft beer drinkers". It would seem that if you're not a "craft beer drinker" you can go to hell as far as the Smithwick's people are concerned.

So I took my craft beer palate out of the deep freeze and carefully fixed it in place, knowing full well the dangers of experiencing craft beer without being fully prepared in advance. Some of those flavours would take the head clean off a novice, so they would. Winter Spirit is a very dark garnet, very nearly brown. It smells like regular Smithwick's: that mix of sugary malt and gently metallic hops which for me always invokes the adjective "beery" -- it's how I remember beer smelling when I was very young. The malt is the main driver of the flavour -- "brown sugar" says the label, and I get that, but only a little; "biscuit" and "roasted nut" are also promised, but it's nowhere near as complex as that. The finish is provided by those understated hops: vegetal and lightly peppery. This is very plain fare indeed, reminiscent of a million bottled brown English bitters. At 4.5% ABV it's slightly stronger than regular Smithwick's but delivers pretty much nothing extra for that, and I don't see why anyone would trade up to this.

The blurb says this is the first in a series of new Smithwick's seasonals: a worthy project and one I hope they keep running with. Anything that serves to make Ireland's beer scene a more interesting place to drink is all right in my book. But, all sarcasm aside, they are not going to win over the craft beer market with beer like Winter Spirit. It just doesn't deliver the taste. The market research bods would do better to spend less time looking at who the craft beer drinkers are and more on what they like to drink, why they like to drink it, and how the brewer achieved that. Until they get the hang of that, Smithwick's will just be another macro brand in the Diageo portfolio, next to Bud and Macardle's. The makers of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout can and should be giving us better.

Zero sub-zero tolerance

I was in Egypt a couple of years ago. It's not, you may be surprised to learn, the world's greatest beer destination. A frequent hazard of drinking Egyptian bottled lager (Stella Export for preference, Saqqara at a pinch) was the possibility of it being ceremoniously poured while partly frozen, and having to either send it back and explain why, or try to drink round the beery ice chips. I was highly amused, therefore, when I read the label of a Lebanese beer I had last night. There with the ingredients, strength and provenance of the bottle of Almaza was the stark proviso in red lettering: DO NOT FREEZE. It's nice to know that in Lebanon at least, someone is looking after the fussy drinkers like me.

Alamaza isn't half bad. It's made with sweetcorn -- and lots of it, I suspect -- so it has a very sweet and grainy taste. The mouthfeel is smooth and quite Germanic. Making beer with maize sounds like a terrible idea, but the flavour here was at least interesting, which is not something one often gets with middle eastern beer. And there aren't many 33cl bottles of lager to be had in the Dublin on-trade for €3.50. I think I got value for money.

Some closer-to-home sweetcorn beer next. After my mezze I was in Mulligan's of Poolbeg Street for the evening. It's one of the few establishments with Macardles on draught. I'd only ever had this Irish red ale, made by Diageo in Dundalk, from a can before and was hugely unimpressed. On draught, however, it's not half bad. There's not a trace of the hollow wateriness of the canned version. Instead there's a full body and a powerful sugary sweetness, tempered by a dry and bitter finish. Few Irish reds are this complex. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. And the maize? Well, Iorwerth Griffiths, in his indispensable Beer & Cider in Ireland: The Complete Guide, tells us that the McArdle's recipe includes flaked maize for head retention. Isn't it great when someone else does my tenuous linking for me?