Time and tide

Another year over. Time to wrap up, take stock, award meaningless prizes for things I thought were good. It's year fifteen of this, and I may be the only person still keeping to the old ways, as set out by Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg in the heady year of 2009, and later revised. But before that, a tradition of my own: the beer I drink while making up my mind.

I acquired this bottle of Beer Hut's Ebbs & Flows on my visit to Bullhouse East in Belfast last month. It came with the Simon Boyle seal of approval, so if this goes horribly wrong it's all his fault. It's a mixed fermentation blonde ale, aged in barrels for a year and finishing at 6.7% ABV. The cork under the waxed cap was saturated in beer, which was worrying, but it looked well in the glass, the bright gold suggesting it hadn't been oxidised. The aroma says Golden Delicious apples to me. The flavour is greener and more acidic than that, into the Granny Smith zone. It's assertively sour, but still has enough malt density to prevent that being a full-on burn, and so it only hints at white spirit vinegar. That's pretty much all it has to say, really. The barrels in particular don't make much of a contribution: little wine character and no oak spices. It is at least clean, but I don't think I'll be distracted by the taste as I set to work on...

The Golden Pint Awards 2023

Best Irish Cask Beer: Land & Labour Geimhreadh
It means "Winter" but I drank it in April. This is Land & Labour's take on geuze, and it's a pretty accurate rendition. While one might not expect such things to be served on cask, as this was, one does not pass it by either. The same brewery's Bière de Rhubarbe runs it a close enough second to effectively share the award.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Whiplash Oxen
We've been blessed with a selection of delicious barley wines from Irish breweries this year, with Wicklow Wolf, Kinnegar and DOT all stepping up to the plate. My favourite of them, however, was this bourbon aged delight which appeared on draught at the brewery's bar in Dublin.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Black Donkey Yes Marm
Land & Labour aren't the only ones getting the hang of wild yeast in Belgian-type recipes. Black Donkey had a number of wild fermented specials, of which this one, with a subtle hint of Seville orange, was my favourite. 

Best Irish Canned Beer: Lough Gill Blue Blue Sky
I'm surprising myself by putting a hazy IPA in as the winner of possibly the most competitive category. But this isn't about the cerebral analysis of the year's drinking, it's remembering the sheer impact of a load of fresh New Zealand hops, hitting the back of my nose as soon as the tab was popped. From first impressions onwards, the beer didn't disappoint: bright, fresh, fruity and just bitter enough. 

Best Overseas Draught Beer: The Kernel India Double Porter
This little keg found its way all the way from Bermondsey to celebrate the re-opening of UnderDog during the summer. It wasn't, it turned out, the beginning of a whole new wave of Kernel beers on draught in Ireland, but what's rare is beautiful, and this hits all the right chocolate-and-flowers notes for a 7.5% ABV porter. It's nice to read about historic beers, and this feels as though it's as close as we can get to drinking one.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: De Dochter van de Korenaar Rien Ne Vas Plus
Another award based on my memory of our first encounter. I had no idea what to expect from this experimental take on the port wine method, but applied to barley wine. If you'd asked me, I would have said no way any beer would be the better for six years of barrel ageing. There's no disputing that here: six years made it amazing. Brewers rightly get a bit of stick for claiming to be daringly experimental when they tip a canister of blueberry syrup into a pale ale. This is what proper creativity looks like, and how it pays off.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Hoppy Road Coco En Stock
This was a bit of a tricky one to award. My home drinking of overseas beers was fairly down this year in favour of drinking locally. Rummaging through the records, however, I did uncover this fantastic coconut imperial stout which I bought from the Hoppy Road brewery in Nancy.

Best Collaboration Brew: Wide Street / Land & Labour Many Hands
The funky lads are now co-located at Wide Street HQ in Longford, but before Land & Labour moved in, they created this blend of mixed culture beers from both sites, aged two years in Chardonnay casks. You can't tell that there are two different underlying beers, but you do get a massive amount of flavour complexity, spritzy and funky, all at once. It shows that they really know how to do the blending bit to maximum effect.

Best Overall Beer: Land & Labour Geimhreadh
I love that spontaneously-fermented beer of this quality exists in Ireland, and is perhaps even getting a little more commonplace. Land & Labour has certainly had a good year of beers, honing its ability to make future classics rather than throwing out endless new brews. Everything it does pays off in the glass.

Best Branding: Out of Office
It's such a strange theme, but is endlessly fascinating. The Belfast microbrewery has paper darts on its glassware and produced beers such as Pencil Pusher, NSFW and Kelly From Marketing. I'm curious how long they can keep it up, but I'll be continually entertained while they do. A very honorable mention goes to Hopfully for their fun and subversive can art.

Best Pump Clip: Brewster's Decadence
They continue to go out of fashion here, so I'm turning to the year's selection of English cask beer for this award. You need to like Art Nouveau to appreciate a Brewster's clip, and this one is no exception; the lounging lady expresses the beer's name in a most appropriately inappropriate way.

Best Bottle/Can Label: Canvas Bella
In almost a reverse of the previous one, I loved the simplicity of this: lots of white space and nature being left to do its thing. In a very small rendering, the artist has also managed to capture the body language of bossman Moss perfectly.



Best Irish Brewery: Black Donkey
I had a bit of chasing to do to find the Black Donkey specials this year, but I'm very glad I put the effort in. They are one of the leading lights of wild fermented Irish beer, though don't seem to get the same level of nerd attention as the others. If it's been a while since you tried their beer, I suggest you start getting caught up with the likes of Yes Marm, Hive Mind or Phraseology.

Best Overseas Brewery: Boon
I had the good fortune of spending a couple of days at the Belgian lambic brewery back in Spring, including its new tasting room. It's become very much part of the landscape when I'm in Belgium, as I was on three trips this year. There are lots of vintages and blends to explore and it's all good.

Best New Brewery Opening 2023: Mo Chara
Now here's a category that's of its time. New breweries aren't springing up every couple of weeks, as they were a decade ago. In fact, I don't have anything I can report on from a newly opened brewery. So I'll spin it sideways and allow a contractor in. Mo Chara, a bar in Dundalk, has done a range of collaboration beers in various styles with various Irish breweries, and now has a lager all of its own. They look like their hearts are in the right place, so they get the award.

Pub/Bar of the Year: 7 Stern
I made my third visit to this Vienna institution in January and was delighted that nothing has changed, from the bustling multi-level rooms to the wacky-for-the-1990s beer list (Chilli! Hemp!). I feel very at home here. If you want my favourite nerdy beer bar of the year, that was Taplokaal Gist in Utrecht.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2023: UnderDog
It shouldn't really be possible to win this two years in a row, but UnderDog completed its brief sojourn in The Legal Eagle and moved around the corner to North King Street. The offer is the same as it ever was: an ever-changing selection of interesting draught beers and good company. The bonus addition of lunchtime opening hours has done wonders for my ticking workload.

Beer Festival of the Year: Mullingar Wild Beer Festival
It was the second outing for this one, and while it may not have been bigger or better, it was just great to see it back. We have an excellent little scene around this sort of beer in Ireland now, and I love that it gets focused into a dedicated event once a year. May there be many more.

Supermarket of the Year: Aldi
Bit of a shock, I know. Normally you would go to the other one for beer things. Aldi has had some good special editions, however, and the DOT Spin Off Series is what tips it for them here.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Blackrock Cellar
I always come away with more than I went in for. The shop does a very good line in beers that I just don't see elsewhere, and was my primary stockist for those lovely Black Donkey ones. The closure of The Three Tun Tavern means I have less reason to be in Blackrock these days, but the Cellar means it's still worth a special trip now and again.

Online Retailer of the Year: Craft Central
I could just copy and paste from last year. Craft Central makes buying new release beers extremely easy and I still buy far and away the majority of mine there.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Hop Glossy
Issue 3 of Radka's snazzy look at everything going on on the Irish beer scene landed last week. It's a magnificent endeavour, and done, we're told, just for the fun of it. Long may it continue.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Boak & Bailey and A Better Beer Blog
I mean, who's left? I'm jointly awarding this category for the specific activity of posting a weekly round-up of links to things going on in the beer world -- Alan on Thursdays, Boak & Bailey on Saturdays. They're a regular reminder that there's still life out there for those who care to look. Stan Hieronymus's Monday links are also appreciated though haven't been quite as regular.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: @BeerFoodTravel
Who's left, part 2. Liam's posts of beers, glassware, food and vinyl have made for cosy and comforting viewing through the year, so he takes my Johnson for the first time since 2019.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: Whiplash
The stream of new beers and revisited recipes from this lot has been phenomenal. Generally, they back it up with lots of background information about what they've produced, and where to get it. I'm rarely left wondering, which is the whole point of breweries being online.


And there you have it. Another year over. I can see the first of 2024's beer winking at me already. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for yet more of the same in The Beer Nut's forthcoming 20th year.

Return to the wild

One month isn't too much of a delay? Swifty Simon was critical of my general tardiness in writing up beer events when we met at the second Mullingar Wild Beer Festival. If there's one thing all the brewers there understood, it's that you can't rush quality.

Nobody demonstrated that better than Land & Labour, which had a sizeable line-up of old favourites and exciting new offers. The Spon 4-Year Blend which impressed me at BXL last year was back with a new season-specific name -- Geimhreadh -- and was still tasting marvellous. Irish winter is followed by Irish summer, and Samradh is brewed with elderflower and gooseberry. It gets a superb complexity from that, the elderflower very prominent amongst the flinty sour notes, with added peach and apricot soft stonefruit. There's a very slight sweaty tang in the finish but it doesn't spoil things: the whole remains calm, integrated and very classy.

Also new for me from the Land & Labour stall was Aibreoga, a geuzealike with actual apricot. This didn't work so well for me, tasting powerfully sour, like spirit vinegar. It does taste of apricot but only as an afterthought past the initial acidic rush. I took a while over it to figure out exactly what's missing, and I think the answer is mellowness. There's none of the rounded mature oak flavour that is an essential, but often overlooked, aspect of the good sour beer experience. Maybe a few more years will fix that. I'll come back to it then.

Land & Labour played host to Wide Street when they collaborated on Many Hands, a blend of mixed-fermentation saisons from both breweries given two years of ageing. The result is magnificent: light-bodied and golden, the flavour opening on a fun and refreshing spritzy citrus. This turns funky quite quickly, summer zest giving away to cool misty orchards and strong warming tea. I liked that it has all the in-depth multi-faceted nature of serious sour beer for chin-stroking grown-ups while also being zippy and zingy and happy to drink. That can't be easy to achieve.

Wide Street had also given their Mill Pils the wild treatment with an addition of Brett to make it Brett Pils. That does seem to have thoroughly removed any proper pils-like elements: no crispness and no grass is on display here. Instead the Brett brings a combination of ripe peaches and spicy pepper in the fortaste, turning to bitter grapefruit and a hint of soggy cardboard late on. I liked it, but the expectation of calling it a pilsner wasn't met -- it has become something else and the name should reflect that.

Otterbank missed the festival last year, so it and I had a lot of catching up to do. The cask engine on the bar was serving a new version of the Cake Dealer Chocolate Brownie imperial stout. The first version had been aged in mezcal barrels while this one, still 10.5% ABV, was treated to rye whiskey. It worked much better. The mezcal brought too much of a sourness whereas this let the stout speak for itself, with a glass of whiskey to hand. The overall effect is similar to an Old Fashioned, bittersweet and spirit laden, with added elements of espresso and gooey chocolate sauce. That all sounds a bit busy, and it is, but it's an excellent sipping beer to take time over. Not that I did.

As plainer fare, Otterbank had Just the One, and I wasn't sure if the name was meant to be ironic or not because although it's a substantial 6.7% ABV it's quite thin and poured a little flat. The flavour, however, is spot on for something attempting to be lambic: all the damp and bricky nitre spices backed by citrus pith and hard bitter wax before a quick, clean and refreshing finish. It doesn't really bring the firework intensity of geuze but would pass as a good example of straight and uncomplicated lambic. That's still damn impressive. I'd love to see something like this become a readily available core beer from some Irish brewery.

There were a couple of stronger and darker offerings from the Donegal brewer, including A Wee Drop: kveik fermented, soured with Roeselare yeast, funked up with Brettanomyces and aged for two years in whiskey barrels. House! The result is 7.1% ABV and does manage to cram in elements from all of its convoluted production history, tasting a lot like an Irish coffee with a glass of blousey Spanish red wine on the side. I was rushing a bit by the time I came to this one so may not have fully fathomed what it was offering, but I liked what I found.

And stronger still was the Burgundy coloured Brothers, aged in and blended from actual Burgundy barrels. It's broadly in the Flanders red category, and raspberry notes feature big on both the flavour and aroma. In the latter that mixes with heady forest resins while in the flavour it accompanies rich and smooth notes of cherry and dark chocolate. 8.2% ABV makes this one not a beer to rush, and as I sipped I appreciated the smooth and round maturity, where the sourness is brisk but not sharp, staying mellow from end to end. If it were a Flanders red it would be one of the special edtions in the 75cl bottles. Not for the first time on the day I felt that lashing through these to get to my train wasn't really the appropriate context for the beers on offer.

That was it for the Irish beers on show but four UK breweries also brought, or sent, beers for the gig. The brewer from Glasgow's Epochal did a good job of selling The Primum Mobile stout to punters (me) as they gathered early doors. This is 8.8% ABV, loaded with Brettanomyces and apparently based on an historical recipe from a Glasgow brewery. It didn't work for me, in the way that soured stouts generally don't. The Brett is fully in control, bringing busy and cloying notes of aftershave and sweaty horses, much like Orval, although quite thin as well. There's chocolate next to that, but who wants watered-down chocolate-flavoured Orval? Not me. A small glass was OK, and let me appreciate the many things happening in the flavour, but I doubt I could handle any more of its busy antics.

There were two offerings from Cambridgeshire brewery Pastore and I got to try them side-by-side. The darker one on the left is Black Shuck, breaking my rule that beer with a colour in the name should be actually that colour. This 6%-er  was aged in sherry barrels but unfortunately doesn't taste of sherry, being very tart and mixing balsamic vinegar, sweet white wine and citrus zest. Mostly, though, it's just sour for sour's sake, lacking any deeper or more interesting character. Meh.

Sometimes, beers with complex production process do get away with a lack of complexity, and Pastore's other offer was a case in point. Cuvée di Rabarbaro is, as the name suggests, a rhubarb beer. And it is extremely rhubarb, to the point of tasting squeaky. There's a little bit of vanilla for complementary balance, but that's your lot: rhubarb is offered and rhubarb is delivered, in bulk. I liked the single-mindedness of the flavour profile and enjoyed the beer as a result.

Little Earth Project sent a strong but sippable beer in the form of White Horse Reserve (right of picture), an amber-coloured mixed fermentation saison at 7.4% ABV, given 18 months of barrel ageing. A spicy geuze-like aroma contrasts with a substantial, but welcome, hop bitterness and then a touch of coconut in the finish. Though the flavour is sharp, the texture is smooth and it makes for relaxing drinking. It feels like they've taken a very traditional geuze recipe in an interesting and different direction. I'm here for that, when it's done this well.

Finally, I was faced with a choice for my single Burning Sky beer. It was late enough at this point that I eschewed the Table Beer and went instead for Wild Rose at 6.5% ABV, another mixed fermentation saison. It's a hazy golden colour and has a wonderful balmy-summer aroma of elderflower and meadowy herbs. The flavour is rich and fruity, suggesting white grape to me, concentrated and tasting almost botrytised. It's absolutely delicious and I wasn't long getting though it despite the heft.

That brings MWBF II to a close, and not a Rennie in sight. The organisers did a great job in improving on the original, expanding the offer while maintaining the boutique atmosphere. I'm not sure how much space for further expansion there is in Smiddy's but you might get a few more tap lines, and it would be fun to have other international guests of the same calibre swapped in. One suggestion I would make, if it's feasible, is to have more/some information available on the beers: perhaps a printed guide. Regardless, all going well, I will be back for round three.