End of

Oof. I'm glad I'm not in the business of making predictions, because the things I merely hoped for in this post last year did not work out. No, don't go and check; let's leave 2024 in the rear view mirror, with 2025 now ready to join it.

It's time to run through the highlights of the year just gone in the time-honoured (17 years!) fashion. My trusty assistant for the work at hand is Brewers At Play 48 from Kinnegar. It's a 10% ABV barley wine so should be up to the task. It's as viscous as one might expect, pouring slowly and forming a thick puck of cream-coloured foam over a murky mahogany-red body. The aroma combines bready malt warmth with some summery fruit: cherry and red grape in particular, a reminder that the style was named for its mimicry of wine. It opens with a bitter, herbal bite, something like a brightly-coloured Italian aperitif, with a hint of oak vanilla too, even though it hasn't seen the inside of any barrels. That settles but never quite goes away, while the fruit from the aroma makes a return, forming the centre of the flavour. The brewery says plum, and I get that, but I think it's more intense, suggesting damson, blackcurrant and raisin. Towards the end there's some pepper and nutmeg spicing, meaning there's a very decent degree of complexity on offer here. Coupled with the heavy texture, it's a sipper for sure. That's copperfastened by a growing warmth as it progresses. You don't need me to tell you this is a beer to take time over, and there's lots to explore and ponder. But I have a different sort of pondering to do. 

And so, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats and pray silence for...

The Golden Pint Awards 2025

Best Irish Cask Beer: Otterbank: The Magic Road 
It hasn't been a bad year for Irish cask, with Lough Gill and Brehon Brewhouse joining Hopkins & Hopkins in the rotational cask selection at Dublin's Porterhouse branches. The winner comes from a festival, however: Belfast, last month. Otterbank presented The Magic Road as a strawberry sour beer but there was much more happening than that short description conveys.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Wide Street: Cuvée Spontanée
This could also have been a cask contender, though was a little green when first presented, at the Mullingar Wild Beer Festival in April. By Hagstravaganza four months later, it shone on keg, delivering by-the-numbers classic oude geuze flavours.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Rye River: Grafters Night Shift
Dunnes Stores takes a gamble on the American-style brown ale that Rye River previously supplied to Lidl. I hope it stays here longer, because the combination of brightly floral hop fun with indulgent chocolate is rather special, while the teeny price tag is almost unique for a beer of this quality. Please do your bit to keep it on order at Dunnes. A very honourable mention goes to WhiteField for their joyously no-nonsense Irish Stout.

Best Irish Canned Beer: Lough Gill: North Star
Unsurprisingly, there were lots of contenders for this one. Lineman cornered the market for hop-forward styles, Third Barrel aced the lagers, but Lough Gill continues to reign supreme in imperial stouts, and gave us a dizzying array to choose from. Sherry-aged Solera was a strong contender, but the one with the Christmas spices -- crucially, not overdone -- was my top preference.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: 't Pomphuizeke: Peper Lambiek
Preference is an important factor in these awards. I'm not saying that the spiced lambic from a Belgian brewery I'd never heard of was the best overseas draught beer by any objective measure, but it's very much the sort thing I like, and enjoy finding when it's done well. This one, from this year's Borefts Beer Festival, goes full-on novelty while still retaining its core lambic character. Superb.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Tommie Sjef: Flint
More sour beer from the same festival. No gimmicks here, just spontaneously fermented and barrel-aged flavours, exactly the way I like them. A reminder that lambic, and lambic-a-likes, don't necessarily need spices to taste spicy.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Dois Corvos: Magnetic Poles
The Portuguese brewery puts a dent in my theory that classic lager styles are best not given wacky, craft-era, recipe twists, with this tonka'd up Baltic Porter. What if tonka, but just the right amount? This is the first beer I've ever encountered that's done that.

Best Collaboration Brew: DankHouse and De Molen: Dank & Dutchies
Is it just my imagination or did black IPA have a wee bit of a resurgence this year? Not much, but it seemed noticeable. Not all of them were great, but this collaboration for Borefts was everything the style ought to be, which is a near guarantee of an award from me. 

Best Overall Beer: Cuvée Spontanée
One does not simply walk into the brewhouse and begin making beer like this. Wide Street's abundant enthusiasm for the style and years of honing its processes has paid off handsomely, and I think that deserves recognition. In place of proper recognition, however, I can offer only this meaningless plaudit. Bottled Cuvée Spontanée is out and about at the moment, and deserves to be snapped up.

Best Branding: Wicklow Wolf
I've long been a fan of the way Wicklow Wolf presents itself, and there have been some lovely variants on its consistent house style this year. The contrasting colours on the tap badges for Pacific Heights and Cliff Walk looked striking side-by-side at Tapped back in April, while the glow-in-the-dark Halloween label and the Troy Parrott football celebration lager showed a wonderful sense of fun.

Best Pump Clip: Galway Bay: Forbidden Cats
More fun from Galway Bay too. Rock on, racoon!

Best Bottle/Can Label: Hopfully: Snowboard
For the second year on the trot, the best label goes to a beer I haven't published a review of yet. This was the work of Laurynas Butkus, a student at the National College of Art & Design. I loved the geometry and economy of the picture. I hope we'll be seeing more of his work on future Hopfully beers. And indeed, more named artists on beer label smallprint generally.

Best Irish Brewery: Lough Gill
I've never gone back to count the number of Golden Pints that Francesco Sottomano is responsible for throughout his years at various Irish microbreweries, but I bet it's a few. This year he has been absolutely killing it at Lough Gill across a range of styles and formats. I hope the team up in Sligo enjoys making the beers as much as I enjoy drinking them; they have a lot to be proud of. 

Best Overseas Brewery: Hill Farmstead
This award is on the strength of only three beers (one of them, yes, at Borefts) but they confirmed my conviction that Hill Farmstead is not a brewery whose beers one passes by when they're available. Their output is quite different to how European breweries do the whole wild beer thing, but if there are more operators like this in the US, please send those our way too.

Best New Brewery Opening 2025: Priory
It's a re-opening rather than an opening -- the kit in Tallaght hasn't moved an inch since it was installed in 2017, but this year it exited an extended Covid-era suspension and began brewing again for its new onsite taproom and tank bar at the Priory Market food court. The beers have largely been excellent too, with particular shouts-out for the Helles and stout.

Pub/Bar of the Year: La Fleur en Papier Doré
Another welcome back to a long-closed establishment. I was delighted to be able to enjoy a beer at this Brussels icon back in the spring, making it my favourite pub experience of the year.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2025: Daphni
A tough category, with openings of good beer outlets very much in negative growth around here -- RIP UnderDog. The new bar from Animal Collective, at Bolands Mills, wins by default, though I was genuinely impressed, by both its beer offer, and the setting: it's the sort of high quality renovation of an old industrial site that we don't see enough of in Dublin.  

Beer Festival of the Year: Borefts
It supplied three of the award winners above, so it shouldn't be a surprise that De Molen's festival gets this prize again. Third year running, but last year ever, following the brewery's closure in September. The field is open for 2026.

Supermarket of the Year: SuperValu Sundrive
The era of specialty beer being one of the front lines in the endless War of the Supermarkets is long over, but nobody seems to have told my local SuperValu. It continues to stock a first-rate range of core beers from Irish breweries, as well as solid classics from Belgium, the UK and further afield.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Martin's of Fairview
I only trekked up to the far distant northside on a couple of occasions this year, but I came away both times with beers I hadn't expected to find, or didn't know existed. Add in their fondness for commissioning special beers from local breweries, and you have everything you want from a neighbourhood offy. If only it were in my neighbourhood.

Online Retailer of the Year: Craft Central
Four years running. I'm not even going to pretend there's anyone else in contention. I click the beers, I pick them up, and the rest of this blog flows from there, by and large.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Filthy Queens
It's the battle of the books this year, with two works of beer history, taking very different approaches. Kudos must go to Martyn Cornell's monumental Porter & Stout: A Complete History. It was a slog to read, but even before I finished it, I was using it as a reference resource. It will stand for the ages, and double-fastens the author's legacy. Christina wins on narrative grounds, however. Her book is one of people and their stories, rather than cold numbers and diagrams. It's an account of the real lives lived by the people -- mostly women, it must be said -- who brewed and sold Ireland's beer down through the ages. There has not been a beer book like it.

Best Beer Blog or Website: The Drunken Destrier
I had this flagged for greatness since the spring, but the flurry of entertaining beer reviews petered out in late May. In the hope of some revived activity -- I mean, how hard is it to drink a beer and write down what it tastes like? -- I'm slinging a Golden Pint in Kill's direction.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: barmas.bsky.social
Yeah, it's mostly for the dog pictures, but you knew that.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: Rye River
This was the year that I made a firm and final break with Twitter, in favour of doing much the same sort of timewasting on Bluesky instead. Like the media outlets I used to follow, not many breweries have made the switch, but Rye River have, and regularly post their beer news and other fun stuff from around the brewery. I'm hoping to see more of my favourite producers posting to The Nice Place in 2026.


And with that, the awards table is empty for another year. Thanks for reading in 2025, and here's to more award-worthy beer in the year to come.

Crow flight

In the interests of balance for what follows, I did buy one IPA from the range of Dois Corvos beers which arrived in Dublin from Lisbon recently. There were numerous options but I picked Funchal Drift, the New England-style one made with Citra and Motueka. That sounded interesting, though the unappetising pale yellowish green emulsion it poured as, less so. A worrying kick of vanilla and plasterboard manifests in the aroma, alongside an assertive lime bitterness. Hello Citra. From the foretaste I got an initial waft of that chalky mineral effect I smelt, followed by hot yeasty dregs and vegetal leaf bitterness. At least a part of this is down to the Motueka, adding a eucalyptus medicinal effect which dovetails neatly with the grit and the murk, but not in a good way. The Citra fails to come to the rescue; where there might be a zesty citric finish, it's only smoke and burnt plastic. Any dessertish custard softness has been thoroughly drowned out. I took a gamble and I lost. This beer presents a catalogue of reasons for calling the whole haze phase to a halt sooner rather than later.

Ugh. With that out of my system it was time to move on to the stuff which attracted me more. I began on Café Racer, which is as good a name for a coffee stout as any. Funny, it doesn't smell of coffee. It smells, and bear with me, of the things that coffee smells of. Toast, hazelnuts, tar and tobacco. I didn't say good coffee. It is intriguing though. The body is surprisingly light and fizzy, and the flavour primarily dry. 5.4% ABV means it shouldn't necessarily be a big and creamy fellow, but I was still surprised by how gassy the whole thing is. Nuts are at the centre of the flavour, with a bit of the aroma's hazelnut and even more dry peanut shell. A certain amount of dark chocolate surrounds that, though oddly no coffee. A tang of burnt salt is all the finish offers. I really wanted to like this, but it's all harsh and pointy; neither refreshing nor comforting. It doesn't smell like good coffee and it doesn't taste like good coffee stout. Maybe I should have expected that. 

Our last last best hope is Magnetic Poles, a Baltic porter with tonka beans. Normally I'm very much not in favour of microbreweries adding their own kooky twist on classic European lager styles, but I was so desperate for something good at this stage that I was determined to give it a fair shake. It's 8% ABV and densely dark brown with a tobacco-stain head. The aroma is oddly sour, of old sherry and cherry liqueur. It doesn't say it's barrel aged but I might believe it is. The cherry note continues in the flavour, even sharper, and joined by an oily tobacco leaf effect, classy dark chocolate, rosewater and Christmas cookies. It's the first beer that almost manages to put tonka in its place, turning it into a surface-level seasoning instead of the beer's whole deal, though the dusting of cinnamon is a dead giveaway of what's going on. It works beautifully, however. Strong tonka-laden stouts tend to be stickily sweet, but by adding the lager dimension this one retains a level of crispness which makes it far more drinkable than one might expect given the strength and other specs, which is of course the Baltic porter way and why we love the style. Never before have I encountered a beer that managed to put manners on tonka's busy confectionary, but if one style was going to do it, it would be this one. Baltic porter purists need not apply, but I found it a perfect melding of old fashioned meticulous decency and frivolous craft creativity. Fight me.

I've had a few Dois Corvos beers over the years, and their hit rate is generally better than what we have here. While I may have chosen poorly, I am not rushing back to try more of their hazy IPAs.