The blackest day

I confess that I have been most remiss in my marking of International Stout Day up until now. 2017's iteration would likely have passed me by also, were it not for the invitation from Diageo to attend worship in St. James's Gate. The feast day's founder (get well soon Erin!) led the ceremonies at Open Gate Brewery, and for the occasion our hosts had created a couple of new stouts themselves and brought more in from around the world.

Headlining was Guinness's Stouta This World which I got to late in the evening. It's a 6.4% ABV stout with vanilla and bourbon. It didn't do it for me, having too much fizz and not enough flavour complexity. The additions gave it little more than a sweet milk chocolate bar character; maybe a Cadbury's Crunchie on a good day with the wind in the right direction. I'm all in favour of keeping things subtle when it comes to bourbon, but this one omitted even that much.

The best of the house offerings on the night was Guinness Burnt Sugar & Sea Salt Stout. Yes it's very much a pastry stout, totally lacking in bitterness or roast, but it delivers exactly what the long name promises. Sweet and sticky toffee popcorn is the opening gambit, then a long caramel middle, followed by a briny lacing of real salt on the tail. It's hard to argue with the sugary intensity when the sugar is owned up to on the label. A small glass was plenty, even at just 6.3% ABV, but I really enjoyed the unabashed silliness.

Bringing up the rear was Guinness Chocolate and Mint Stout, again at the roughly six-and-a-half per cent ABV mark. This also delivered on the promises but not in a good way. The mint is insanely overdone, so from the first sip it tasted more like toothpaste than beer. When that fades it leaves a savoury herbal effect, like sunflower seeds and fresh grass. It's not offensive, just too weird for my tastes. Sweetening it up might have helped balance it better.

On my very first post on The Open Gate Brewery, back in 2015, I reviewed their Milk Stout, which didn't impress me. Some form of the recipe has now found its way through the Diageo corporate system and emerged as a new, bottled, Guinness Milk Stout. It's still badged with the name of Open Gate, though it would have been brewed using high gravity techniques at the industrial-sized Guinness plant across the street. The ABV has taken a frankly merciful dip from 6.4% to 5%.

It looked good as it poured, a properly dark tan colour to the head. Milk stouts are sweet so I was surprised to find the aroma quite harshly bitter: herbal, with a certain meatiness. The taste is remarkably dry for the style; unacceptably so, I would say. There's a twang which is half iron filings and half smoke, and very little under that, other than plain fizzy bottled Guinness. I used to think that Mackeson's was the basic bottom end of milk stout, but this is a new low. Whoever brewed this must have been a stranger to Left Hand's.

We'll return to Stout Day at Guinness for the next post, to check out the roster of guest beers.

Can do attitudes

Carla aka The Beer Babe is hosting The Session for June and the topic is a bit of an awkward one, being concerned with the secondary beer trade: the farmers, the marketers, the bottle-opener-makers. None of which is stuff I'm usually concerned with on this deliberately beer-centric beer blog. I will say, however, that the recent growth of the Irish malting industry to include the needs of microbrewers is very heartening to see. While I doubt we'll ever have commercial hop farmers again, more's the pity, knowing that the backbone of our beer is at least in part local is pleasing.

But for this post I'm going to jump off the other end of the brewing process and I've grabbed three imported beers, one each from what I regard as the three top importers of beer to this country. They're presented in the order I drank them, and no ranking is to be inferred. Wonderful and all as the Irish brewing renaissance is, this blog and this drinker have always depended on imports, for education as much as for refreshment. So, just this once, let's hear it for the goods-inwards brigade.

First up it's Four Corners, and from their portfolio I've chosen Summer Love, a blonde ale by Victory Brewing in Pennsylvania. The use of noble hops is unmistakeable here as it tastes like a classic pilsner, with that assertive green edge: crisp spinach and aspargus to begin, finishing on heady damp mown grass. It really helps that the rest of the beer is lager-clean with just enough sponge-cake soft malt to give it a satisfying ale body and a reasonable 5.2% ABV. I doubt I'd pass any remarks if you gave me this and told me it was a Märzen or Dortmunder. You probably could knock it back cold and enjoy its invigorating bitterness, but it rewards calm sipping at a more mature serving temperature too. You don't even need to be outside on a glorious sunny afternoon, but it sure helps.

Second shout-out goes to relative newcomers Pro Addition, an offshoot of Galway Bay Brewery, and their Fourpure Oatmeal Stout, from That London. There's definitely no shortage of body here: it pours thickly from the can, forming a lazy beige head. I've never been particularly concerned with the appearance of very dark beers but this one is discernibly murky: where you often observe a ruby edge on a glass of stout, this one shows a hazy cola-brown colour. Heavy treacle and molasses is the main element of the flavour, and a jangling saccharine sweetness that I found a little hard to take. There's an almost aggressive burnt, even smoky, character as well. The extra bulk of the oatmeal is not something this beer really needed and its intense bitter-sweetness offsets the smooth easy-going quality that oats tend to impart.

Maybe it's the black can but the beer this reminds me most of is twangy old Mackeson's Milk Stout, and that's probably not a comparison that is likely to go down well among the cool kids of Bermondsey. This stout is trying to do too many different things and doesn't work for me at all.

The last beer comes via Grand Cru, veterans with a particular penchant for beer from brewing hotbeds California and Colorado. G'Knight is an "imperial red IPA" by Oskar Blues, based in the latter of those states. It's a deep and rich mahogany colour and smells as enticing as it looks: ripe cherries and juicy peach. The flavour is understated: I got nothing for the first few seconds but then there's a waft of menthol across the palate and some light fleshy tropical fruits -- satsuma and mango -- but it's fleeting. Despite the 8.7% ABV this is not a big-flavoured beer. The bitterness is low-key and while it's definitely heavy it's not sweet. You need to take a big cloying mouthful to get much of a bitterness hit. At close to six months since it popped off the canning line, perhaps I'm not getting this beer as the brewer intended. It's enjoyable, sure, but lacks the oomph I was expecting. That it's not a sticky toffee bomb is perhaps praise enough. I commend it to you on that basis alone.

Mixed bag? Yeah, well that's the world of beer for you. There'll always be something else on the next shipment.

Invictus

The sheer dogged resilience of some some beers is staggering. Gold Label (formerly Whitbread Gold Label, before that Tennant's* Gold Label) is a prime example, normally to be found skulking in the corner of the Sainsbury's beer aisle, propping up another haggard old-timer Mackeson Stout, both forced shamefully into garish modern dress for the benefit of a target audience that cares little for them, or anything much else, I imagine. Thomas was kind enough to acquire this can for me: the fact that it comes in four-packs has always put me off, even though it sells for buttons.

So what have we got? 7.5% ABV -- "Strong as a double scotch, less than half the price" ran the strapline: an all-time classic of superliminal advertising -- it's a wholesome dark gold colour. The head doesn't hang around and the body is barely troubled by bubbles. It smells like a fairly typical pale bock: nettles and sugar, though there's also an edge of sherry in there hinting at something more dangerous. And yet it's surprisingly innocuous on tasting. There are no really strong flavours, no tramp-juice sickliness or overdone booze heat. Rather it's smooth, lightly sugary like candyfloss, and with some subtle mango and apple flavours in the background. No, I'm not taking the piss. The alcohol does get more pronounced as it warms, unsurprisingly, and some nasty marker pen and acetone begins to creep in.

Overall, not the disaster I was expecting. I can see how it survived the darker days of 20th century British brewing, offering something with a bit more personality than insipid canned lager or insipid canned bitter. Today it's deserving of some retro cred, I think.

*of Sheffield. Not be confused with Tennent's, of Glasgow. Thanks to Ron and NBW for the comments.

At the cooking stout

I don't cook. I'm married to someone who cooks wonderfully and who hates cleaning up after -- which I don't mind -- so we have a very practical arrangement in place that suits us both. It has me at a bit of a loss for The Session this month, though. Hosted at Beer 47, the theme is Cooking With Beer, but you can't cook with beer if you don't cook. I did briefly consider breaking out the pots and pans and attempting to put something together, but it would no doubt have ended up as awful to read about as to eat.

Instead, I'm sticking with what I know: consuming beer straight up in liquid form. My nod to the theme is that it's a beer which exists primarily for the purposes of cookery. Casseroles, chillis, beef pies, chocolate cakes: all can allegedly be enhanced by the addition of Mackeson Stout, brewed by A-B InBev in the UK (Luton? Magor?) and sold in 33cl cans.

Despite the lightness of 3% ABV, and rather a watery texture, it's totally opaque black. The fizz is gentle, maintaining a light beige froth once the initial head subsides. Soft creamy toffee on the nose, and while the taste begins with sweet and happy fudge, it suddenly becomes jarringly acrid and metallic. Thankfully the thinness means this doesn't last long and we move on to condensed milk in the aftertaste. I have to say that, despite it making no claims to be anything other than what it is, I expected better. Something that has been around this long shouldn't have that sort of off flavour in it, even if the brewery doesn't expect anyone to actually drink it.

It's probably unreasonable to be disappointed in a 3% ABV macro-brewed cooking stout, but this guy had me expecting much better things.

I've a feeling my last two cans will end up being used for culinary purposes after all.