Who asked for this?

They've gone all creative at Open Gate for the summer, Lord save us. Classic styles can wait; everything is getting an off kilter ingredient or two. But we shouldn't be too cynical before starting to drink them.

Exhibit A is Cola Radler. It looks like stout: a dark reddish brown with a fine white head. I suspect stout is the beer base and it tastes immediately roasty, plus I think I detect some Guinness tang in the aroma. Cola sits in the middle of the flavour, tasting a little concentrated, conjuring long-dormant sensory memories of the Soda Stream machine in my childhood kitchen. The cola syrup had a particular smell and taste which is echoed here. And that's it. As we saw on Friday, radler is supposed to be quenching and refreshing, and although this is only 3.5% ABV, the lack of citrus means it doesn't work. The cola is overly sticky and clashes unpleasantly with the stout's bitterness and roast. I noticed towards the end a nearby menu board saying that there is lime in the mix here, but there's not nearly enough. You may wince at the very notion of mixing Guinness and Coke, and I'm here to tell you, first hand, that that's an entirely appropriate reaction.

Open Gate becomes the third local brewery, after Rascals and Third Circle, to brew a beer called Dubliner Weisse. Theirs is with hibiscus, blood orange and pomegranate. It's a fun pink colour and 3.8% ABV. I was on the lookout for sourness first and was not very surprised to find it isn't really, hitting dry and crisp but not proceeding beyond that into tartness. The fruit mix is pleasant, though, suggesting cherry, pineapple, raspberry and apricot: all very bright and summery. A twang of yoghurt is the only nod to microflora complexity, but that's OK. It may not be even close to proper Berliner weisse, but this does what it's designed to do. Party on.

Yet another in the recent series of flavoured stouts follows that. With a Coconut Rum Stout it was always going to be tough not to mention Bounty bars, and I'm completely failing at that, because this very much tastes Bounteous: dark chocolate and gooey coconut paste. But wait, there's more. The official description doesn't mention real rum, only "rum spices", suggesting the involvement of Uncle Arthur's housemate, Captain Morgan. That's a big part of the aroma but mild in the flavour, adding hints of vanilla, cinnamon, walnut and smoke without interrupting the headline features. Most pleasingly, the beer is dry not sweet, with a proper bite of roast and a non-sticky texture, even at 5.6% ABV. Excellent work. Yes, it's pure gimmick, but designed and executed in an expert way, paying due care and attention to balance and complexity, while also doing the wacky novelty thing. I'm fully on board for that sort of brewing.

That set was followed swiftly by two further additions, still keeping things weird. I suspect that the Chilli-Mango DIPA didn't hit its intended gravity as it's only 6.9% ABV. It presents a foggy orange colour and smells properly pulpy and tropical, the 45kg of mango in the 10hL batch paying their way. That does mean there's something of a yoghurt kick about the flavour: not sour but creamy with a light layer of vanilla. There wasn't anything I would describe as hop character,  but perhaps drinkers of this type of heavy and hazy IPA don't care about the hops. It's not readily obvious that chilli is involved (three types): I didn't get any spice piquancy, which is unfortunate. Instead, I think all the pepper action is in the finish, where it's dry and a little plasticky, not contributing anything positive to the picture. Hey, Open Gate is a self-described experimental brewery, and this strikes me as a very experimental beer; one that doesn't quite do what it's supposed to. They've got the mango right; the other details need tweaking, however.

Next to it is Port Ellen Part II. I assume that Part I was the one released last summer under the name The 200, a collaboration with Diageo's distillery in the Islay town of the same name. My notes on that one said it was served too cold, hence letting this one sit for a bit. A freshly fried bacon aroma starts us off on the right foot, and the flavour continues in that vein, the sweet smoke suggesting Bamberg more than Islay to me. An enquiry about whether smoked malt was used, rather than simply depending on the whisky barrels, revealed that yes, it's peated malt, though the beer is possibly not barrel-aged. That scans. Though 7.1% ABV, it's not hot or spirit-laden. This sort of brightly smoky stout is right up my street: savoury as the day is long but still clean, drinkable and positively refreshing. I carry a torch for the one Messrs Maguire brewed, once, back in 2007, and this brought me right back there. Smokeheads assemble.

Just one (and a half) missteps with these, and it's not a surprise. Mostly, this is ideal fare for the al fresco drinking season, however short and sporadic it may prove to be this year.

Encroaching darkness

Now that we're properly into winter, I get to look at some of this season's new release stouts. It's called journalism; look it up.

First, we have the return of a beer series from days of yore: Lublin to Dublin. This is a collaboration between Polish brewery Pinta (not in Lublin) with Irish brewery O'Hara's (not in Dublin) and was an annual release stout during the last decade. For the re-up it's a nitro-canned coffee stout and 5% ABV. The nitro works well for the visuals, providing a flat-topped crema over the dense black-brown liquid. For all that nitrogenation deadens aroma, there's a good waft of coffee, all fresh and sweet and oily. The texture is smooth to the point of flat, and the flavour doesn't quite bring the coffee suggested by the aroma. It's sweet and creamy, causing me to check the ingredients for the presence of lactose, but oatmeal seems to be the sole party responsible. Then there's a strange savoury tang in the middle of the flavour: slightly stale and sweaty, with a mineral bitterness, almost sour, meeting the dark grain's sharp roasted edge. I thought this was going to be quite a cuddly beer, but it turns harsh very quickly. I took my time over it but didn't find it softening as it went along. Normally I'm fine with the more serious and grown-up sort of stouts. This, though, didn't sit well. I think it's the disconnect between the joyful coffee-cream aroma and a much sterner flavour. Try to avoid that if you can, brewers.

The Winter Seasonal 2024 from Hope is an Export Stout, and a proper one, with 7.5% ABV and 48 IBUs. It's a very dense black in the glass, with a thin but persistent head. I thought I was in for a bitter one, but it's very chocolatey, set on a surprisingly light body. Though the hops are low-key, it's still good, and has enough character to justify the "export" label while also being accessible and easy-going, having much in common with the lighter sort of session-strength stout. There's an almost wine-like dark fruit leading on from the chocolate, with an accompanying heat. Beyond that, I don't have much else to say: it's enjoyable, in an unchallenging sort of way. If it weren't for that ABV, I could have happily had a few of these in sequence.

Also very much designed with the season in mind is Winterland 2024 from Kinnegar. They've changed the concept again, this year giving us a Salted Chocolate Stout of 7% ABV. There's a slightly Christmassy spiced wine effect from the aroma: mature grape tannins and a dusting of oregano or rosemary. It's fizzier than I would have expected given the style and strength, but does get properly creamy when allowed to flatten out. The chocolate is immediately perceptible in the flavour as the dark and crumbly sort, classy and probably expensive. The bitterness from that segues into a different kind: green and sharp, like cabbage leaf or cooked spinach. I had forgotten about the salt, but it makes an appearance at the very end, just a gentle kiss of salinity, right on the lips. I liked this. Anyone who thinks they're getting a box of Milk Tray in a can will be in for a shock because it's serious stuff: grown-up tasting, but delicious.

Possibly the first smoked stout I ever encountered was the one called simply Imperial, brewed by Cuilán Loughnane during his tenure at Messrs Maguire. It was light-bodied and drinkable, despite being 7% ABV and loaded with peated malt. Ever since, that's what comes to mind when I see the words "smoked stout", though few live up to it. I was ready to try again when I saw Galway Bay had collaborated on a smoked stout brewed by Czech brewery Sibeeria. Tourist Triangle is only 4.2% ABV, however, and the smoke is subtle to the point of invisibility. The aroma is largely caramel or treacle, smelling more like a Czech tmavý lager than an Irish stout. Its flavour, too, is mostly quite sweet, though the caramel is joined by both a burnt-toast roasted grain element and a faint lacing of savoury smoke. I'm not sure I would have identified this had I not been expecting it, although it does build on the palate as the pint goes down, leaving an ashen residue by the end. While it's certainly not kippery or phenolic, this doesn't quite suit me. Mostly I would like more of the smoke -- a bit of barbecue char or meaty umami -- but my main issue is that caramel sweet side, something I associate with breweries that haven't quite got the hang of stout. Maybe the dryness from the smoked malt was supposed to balance that out, but it doesn't: both sit as parallel tracks in a flavour profile that would benefit from better integration.

The archaeology-themed barrel-aged imperial stouts from Lough Gill are also back for another round. This year the newcomer is Oseberg, named for its fermentation with kveik, though the barrels were also an unusual choice: Palo Cortado sherry. I don't think it quite worked. The base beer is a tad characterless, with little more to offer than a basic milk chocolate flavour. Maybe the idea is to keep things simple to let the barrel complexity do the heavy lifting, but perhaps because it's a wine cask rather than a spirit one, the barrel part of the flavour is also low. There is merely a wisp of raisin and prune flavour, but a whole honking amount of booze heat with it. It's 13.4% ABV, so a certain amount of flame is expected, but this has passed well beyond warming and into hot, lacking any mature mellowness. While the beer isn't flawed as such, it's not the equal of the others in the series. Oseberg doesn't need to be back next year.

That was a surprise: Lough Gill doesn't usually put a foot wrong in the strong-and-dark arena. Kinnegar and Hope are still nailing it, though, and I would like to see much more by way of black beer from the latter.

Draught picks

Time for an overdue look at some of the random stuff showing up on tap around Dublin in recent months.

We'll start with Galway Bay, and their Solemn Black double black IPA has been at large for a couple of months now. I found it when it was still brand new, in The Beer Market. 8.5% ABV and €5.40 for a 33cl glass are your vital statistics. The aroma is convincingly zesty for such a dark powerhouse of a beer: there's a citrus quality which is lighter than grapefruit, offering more of a lemon and lime thing. On tasting, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's sweet at first, the dark malts infused with lemon sherbet. Then there's a rush of harder bitterness: the tar, cabbage and molasses that are standard issue for beers like this. Amazingly, despite the resinousness of its hop bittering, none of it sticks to the palate and the aftertaste returns to that light and effervescent sherbet effect. It's a very impressive beer: super-serious but with a lovely spark of fun to it.

Galway Bay's subsequent release was Acid Mother, billed as a lime gose, and quite substantial at 5.4% ABV. It arrived looking forlorn and headless, a moody dark gold colour. Perhaps in keeping with the name, the first sip gave me a vivid and unsettling flashback: Rose's Lime Cordial, the sticky green stuff that used to come in the glass bottle with the embossed lime leaves on it. That. It's not subtle and comes through so loud and brash it almost doesn't taste like it's part of the beer; like it was squirted in as an afterthought. I got a rough, papery, oxidised twang in the finish, while in the middle a massive punchy sourness. A token saltiness is barely present and you can cancel any plans you had to taste coriander. This rather severe and unrefined beer doesn't meet the stylistic points for gose for me, nor is it relaxing or particularly enjoyable to drink. Loud and spiky, my time with it was spent wishing it would calm down.

Moving away from the brewery, but staying in its pubs, a pint of Trouble Brewing's Hello Sunshine session IPA in Against the Grain. Though a mere 3.7% ABV this is a deep and rather lurid Lucozade orange. As usual when trying a new Irish pale ale I made the correct incantations to appease the beer gods and ward off yeast bite but I must have got the words wrong because -- bleuh! -- yeast bite. And it's one of those beers which is a real shame to find pouring dirty, because behind it there's a lovely balance of sweet mandarin juice and invigorating grapefruit and lime bitterness. It's not thin or watery either, which is all to the good. But that raw savoury overcoat in which the whole thing is wrapped really spoiled it for me. There was very little sunshine in evidence on my barstool.

White Gypsy also had a new one on tap at AtG recently, a 7% ABV stout called Old Smoke. When the pub tweeted it was on I made a beeline. I have very fond memories of the supremely peaty stout that Cuilán brewed at Messrs Maguire in 2007 and I harboured a flickering hope that this might be a recreation. But it's not; it's much more subtle and mature and I doubt any peated malt was used. The base is a very good, full-bodied, export-style stout -- soft, comfortable and rounded, even on keg. Smoke wafts around the edges of this, grazing the lips and sides of the tongue. Some sweeter caramel and molasses are present and just a tiny hint of Laphroaigish phenols. Though not hot, it's plenty warming but in such a way that isn't too much, even in a busy pub on a summer afternoon. Overall, Old Smoke is balanced, complex and drinkable: an all-round class act.

The final two beers for now are parts two and three of Eight Degrees's latest Single Hop Series, following on from the Citra one I mentioned back here. Representing Europe in the sequence is Mandarina Bavaria, arriving across the counter in 57 The Headline disguised as a Rascal's beer. Like the others in the series it's 5.7% ABV and, unsurprisingly, orange features big in this beer, starting with the colour. It's quite sticky with hop resins and a lot of the flavour coming out of that is intensely oily orange skin. As this builds I found it shifting sideways into the coconut flavour more usually associated with Sorachi Ace hops. There's a reminder of Mandarina's German roots too, in a very noble herbal flavour as well. That sticky quality means that the finish is a long one, the exotic oranginess hanging around on the palate for ages. For all its foghorn loudness it's a lovely beer and you come away from it with a very clear grasp of what this hop variety is and does.

Unsurprisingly, many of the same qualities can be found in Eight Degrees Galaxy which I located at Bar Rua a few weeks ago. Galaxy is another hop I'd tend to associate with juicy orange fruit, but seemingly not when it's ramped up to the intensity that the brewers have here. This guy is supremely dank, so thick with resins you could tapdance across the surface, creating a bitterness that sucked the malt out of my neighbours' pint glasses. This is a hoppy beer. When some flavour eventually emerges from under the bitterness it's grassy green at first, and then a zesty pith which lasts long, once again, into the aftertaste.

Part of me was disappointed that it didn't really taste of Galaxy, the way that the previous two, intense as they also were, tasted very much of their signature hop. At the same time, however, this edgy and uncompromising IPA stands on its own feet as a beautifully rendered face-stripping hop bomb, and it's nice to give one's palate the occasional shock.

By royal disappointment

Last week the Franciscan Well released its 2009 Christmas ale, under the jolly seasonal name of 3 Kings. Having adored last year's mad maple syrup and ginger confection, Phúca, I was well up for what Russell and the Cork gang had for us this time round. When I heard there was rauchmalt involved, I was off to the Bull & Castle at the earliest opportunity.

Unfortunately the reality didn't live up to expectation. Yes, there's smoke there, but rather than the hammy goodness I love, it's the rather harsh iodine-like smokiness you get in the likes of Laphroaig scotch. The late great Messrs Maguire Imperial had this as well, but it was balanced against the sweetness of dark roasted malts. Here there's just more bitterness and no cheery seasonal spices or warming sweetness. It rounded out a little as it warmed, and I did manage to get through two mugs of it -- Mrs Beer Nut not able to handle more than a mouthful -- but it was a disappointing experience.

Thankfully, Colin and 9 Bean Row of California Wine Imports were on hand to whisk us us away from all the pain. It was Colin's birthday and celebrations were in full swing at the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art -- celebrations which included a keg of the fabulous Speakeasy Big Daddy IPA. When this ran out it was replaced with Gordon Biersch Märzen, just as solid a lager on draught as it is from the bottle, and nice to get a full pint of. Thanks for a fun evening, guys.

And back to Irish beer to finish. Carlow Brewing now have an Irish red -- Traditional Irish Ale -- in Aldi's own-brand line-up. When I first heard of it I assumed it was rebadged O'Hara's Red, and the ABV is the same, but anyone I know who's tried it has said it's different. Only one thing could settle this (well, I could of course have asked the brewer, but where's the fun in that?): a taste-off.

They're both the same colour, and I got a better head from the Aldi one, though I put that down to it being at a slightly higher temperature when serving. First impressions confirmed that these are not the same beer. They're similar, though, and it took me a while to figure out how. The Aldi ale is heavier and warmer than O'Hara's, and finishes drier. It might not look darker, but it tastes it. The O'Hara's compensates with a bit more spice shining through the sweetness.

Interesting that Carlow have opted for the world "traditional" on both beers. This is a tradition that doesn't date further back than about 1960, when Guinness finally took complete control of Irish ale brewing and set about downgrading the national pale ale to appeal to a wider audience and extend its shelf life. As a result, beer that was probably indistinguishable hitherto from English bitter, became what Michael Jackson in the following decade dubbed "Irish red". It follows that when English breweries followed suit -- kegging and blandening their beers -- they'd end up with the same thing. I got to put this theory into practice recently when Dave set up a blind tasting of red ales that I went along to, with Mrs Beer Nut, Laura and Séan.

O'Hara's came away as the favourite of most -- that signature piquancy comes out far more in the keg version than the bottle. Just about no-one in the group was able to express a preference between Smithwick's and kegged Bass, and it was a 50-50 for who could guess which was which (they're both watery rubbish). They are, essentially, the same beer, proving my theory. One of the upshots is that if one were foolish enough to decide that "Irish red ale" is a beer style all its own, then you'd have to include John Smith's Extra Smooth, and the keg versions of beers like Worthington's in there too. Probably kegged London Pride and Bombardier, for that matter. Daft.

Nevertheless, I hereby claim Watney's Red Barrel as the sovereign territory of Irish ale. Where's my flag?

The main event

And so I was off to Cork on a bright and sunny Easter Saturday morning for the headline event of the Irish beer calendar. This year, the Franciscan Well's posters were proclaiming it the "Easter Craft Brewing Festival", which I think definitely has a better ring to it than the old "Easter Beer Festival" or "EasterFest", especially since this year the importers were left out of the line-up and everything on sale in the refurbished covered yard was genuine Irish beer.

A couple of old favourites were making their last public appearances at the gig, including a 20-month-old cask of White Gypsy Cask No. 1 aka Messrs Maguire Imperial. The Laphroaig smokiness was as present as ever with barely a hint of sourness about it, and the cask dispense added a sweet milk chocolate dimension to the stout which I'd never got from the keg version. I also said my goodbyes to Phúca, the Franciscan Well's marvellous celebration winter ale, still tasting as fresh and spicy as it did four months ago. And it was hello and goodbye to Kinsale Lager, the last ever outing of one of Ireland's pioneer craft beer brands. The lager itself, a very pleasant smooth and full-bodied thirst-quencher, was contract brewed at Beamish & Crawford, but with production at the brewery winding down following Heineken's takeover, that arrangement has come to an end. The Franciscan Well festival is a fitting farewell.

But one door closes and all that -- the kit from the Kinsale brewery itself, which made everything but the lager, is now operational in its new home in Templemore. Here, Cuilán Loughnane's long-anticipated White Gypsy brewery has finally started producing beer in its own right (Cuilán remains the brewer at Messrs Maguire, where previous White Gypsy-branded specials had been produced). His first regulars are a Dunkel Lager (recipe still being finalised -- what was on tap was rebadged MM Bock) and an Indian (sic) Pale Ale. The IPA is very much in the English style, a little bit sharp but mostly light and lemony. It's a welcome new addition to the Irish beer scene, though I'm a little disappointed with the whopping 5.2% ABV -- it tastes like it's about 4% and it would be nice to be able to down as if it were.

Though not open a wet week, White Gypsy already has a new brewing company under its wing, in the form of Barrelhead, registered in Dublin but brewing in Templemore. Bull Island Pale Ale was the offering here, and I think it needs work. A very pale yellow ale served on nitro with the accompanying dullness of taste. There's a little bit of sweet caramel to it, much like there is with other smoothflow nitro ales. I can't say I approve, but if it gets a foot in the door for another Irish brewer then I reckon I'll let it past. I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for new stuff from Barrelhead in Dublin.

As usual, the team from UCC's pilot brewery (pictured teaching Cuilán a thing or two, left), who I'm told work closely with their counterparts in Weihenstephan, had something vaguely Germanic up their sleeves. This year it was Swiss Pale Bock and I rather liked it. The sugariness in it was rather grainy and it stayed light and crisp rather than heavy or syrupy, despite a sizeable 6% ABV.

The only other new scoop for me was Ireland's Call, a dark ale commissioned by J.D. Wetherspoon's from Hilden. Though very sessionable at 4.3% ABV, it's rich and full of character thanks to a generous dose of chocolate malt. I made my pitch to the brewer for more of their superb wheatbeer, Barney's Brew, but I don't know how far I'll get with that, especially since we don't get to see much of Hilden on this side of the border.

And that was the Easter Festival for another year. It was great talking to my fellow beer aficionados and the brewers, and congratulations to the winners of this year's ICB awards. I'm always so optimistic about the future of Irish beer when I get back from Easter in Cork.

The Irish and the Oirish

Ireland was very poorly represented at the European Beer Festival, with Hilden the only Irish-owned brewery exhibiting. They had recently launched Titanic Quarter -- named after the big urban redevelopment scheme currently underway in Belfast's shipyards -- and it was available bottled. This is the second beer (after Galway Hooker) to brand itself an "Irish Pale Ale". It is, however, a very different proposition, having the paleness and aleness of the British variety rather than Hooker's American roots. It's exceedingly pale, in fact with quite a bit of haze. Tragically, I could detect very little flavour to it. I guess it's designed as one of those unchallenging by-the-pint quaffers, but I was disappointed nonetheless.

Everything else from Ireland was by Diageo: their usual export brands. One enterprising Danish micro -- one with especially good lawyers, I assume -- has produced an organic beer called Geniuss Extra Stout. They've pretty much nailed what they were going for, it being nitro-cold, thin, vaguely dry, and generally a complete waste of effort. There is perhaps a smidge more of a malt character than you get with a certain other stout, but not enough to make this worth drinking. Bryggeri Skovlyst made a much better fist of an Irish-style stout worth drinking. Their Full Stout is admittedly thin, but still manages a creamy texture without nitro and is packed full of chocolate flavours -- just how I like my Irish stouts.

For some bizarre reason, Søgårds Bryghus in Aalborg has taken it upon itself to recreate traditional Irish recipes. I tried just one from this Irish House range, the Irish Ale. It's a very strange beast indeed, totally unlike any actual Irish ale I've had. It's really thin and watery but is possessed of a very strange milky-lactic sweetness which, when mixed with sweet crystal malt notes, gives it a sort of Cadbury's Caramel effect. It's not unpleasant, just... surprising.

That was just the start of the weirdness. Over at the Polish stall, there were two beers available which claimed some sort of Irish heritage. Irlandzkie Mocne first, and the comedy English programme (p.232) tells us "It owes its mysterious character to match special components, which are a secret of brewery." Well, quite. What you get is an immensely sweet dark red ale -- sugary almost to the point of being saccharine. It's still easy drinking for all that; its secrets aren't really worth the pondering. Next to it, the bar was serving Irlandzkie Zielone. To whom, I don't know, since the beer's most notable characteristic is its lurid green hue. A single Irishman with a morbid fascination for beers connected to his country? Quite possibly. Anyway, it's basically just lager with green syrup in -- dull, sweet and a lot more Polish than Irish.

Perhaps if the festival Saturday hadn't clashed with the first Bord Bia Septemberfest in Dublin, there might have been a better showing from my locals. I was kicking myself I missed it too, since the elusive MM Imperial was there on cask. I have to content myself with the vicarious pleasure of sampling through the eyes and palates of Wobbler, Beer Novice and Laura. Still, I don't think I'd have swapped.

State of the nation

Whoosh! There went the 2008 Great British Beer Festival, in just six and a half glorious hours of great beer and excellent company. Especially big thanks to Maeib, who spotted me on my tod and introduced me to his fellow RateBeerians (Chris_O I should have known already as I met him last year: sorry Chris). Other People of t'Internet I met included Chris and Merideth of BeerGeek TV, Young CAMRA's Dubbel, the elusive Tandleman and the very obvious and very purple Stonch. I saw the back of Pete Brown's head from a distance as he whizzed past looking very busy. Zythophile: sorry I missed you. I was looking for the bloke in the cream jacket but it was like a bloody Martin Bell lookalikes' convention in there.

And of course the leading lights of Irish craft brewing were there, hovering by the Irish section of the Bières Sans Frontières bar (which was decked out in livery announcing it as "Leprechaun Lane": we do like our bit of casual racism in CAMRA). Whitewater also had a couple of beers on across the way in the miniscule Northern Ireland section. I have to say I was a little disappointed with Clotworthy Dobbin on cask. I love this beer from the bottle: full-bodied, leaning towards heavy, but still eminently gulpable and full of rich fruit and chocolate flavours. It could well be that several barrel-aged beers and a spicy pork pie had numbed my palate by the time I got to this, but I really felt it lacked the robustness of the Clotworthy I usually enjoy.

I found the same only more so with Galway Hooker on cask. Keggy fizz really brings out the American-style hoppiness of this, while still leaving the very Irish crystal malt sweetness at the back. From the cask those hops are toned down and a sort of raw grainy character comes out. Nevertheless, I heard some very positive reactions from the English tasters, and no less a personage than Stonch gave it his seal of approval (get your coat, Aidan mate: you've pulled).

Top of my Irish hitlist was the sublime MM Imperial, but I went whoring after some of the fancy American brews first and within a couple of hours the Imperial was all gone, and none of it to me. A firm self-inflicted kick to the The Beer Nut's shins for that one. I comforted myself with a glass of Messrs Maguire Extra instead, a beer I've not had in ages and never written about here. I had actually gone looking for it in its home pub last week -- where it's served on nitro, natch -- but they were all out. From the cask it produced a similar sensation to fresh Porterhouse Plain Porter: big roasty notes on the nose followed by chocolate flavours on the foretaste. It finishes with the classic Irish dryness, just catching the back of the throat. A superbly balanced, high quality, plain drinking pint of Irish stout of the sort that is almost completely unavailable in Ireland (Carlow's Druid's Brew -- available for two days each year -- is the only one that comes close).

The festival continues until Saturday as will, I expect, my posts about it. At least. But before I leave Irish beer for a while, I thought I'd throw in a quick note about a beer Thom had a go at recently: the mysterious one called Shiva, made exclusively for Monty's Nepalese restaurant in Temple Bar. It's a fairly heavy dark-golden lager with some major fruitiness about it. I can't say I spotted Thom's Nepalese apples, but it does carry a definite suggestion that the lagering was done at temperatures higher than they should have been. I found it quite drinkable with my spicy Nepalese lunch all the same, but then I like Cobra, so who the hell am I to judge?

Shiva is named after Monty's owner, but there's nothing written on the label to say who makes it. I seem to remember from the last time I had it -- about six years ago -- that Celtic Brew in Meath were listed as the brewer previously. Back then, Celtic Brew was a going concern and a major player in Irish craft beer, best known for the Finian's range. Brewing stopped a year or two later and the company now concentrates on its import business. The proprietor, Dean McGuinness, can be heard on the "Movies and Booze" slot on Sean Moncrieff's Newstalk show on Fridays. My suspicion is that he's still making this to keep his brewery ticking over. I also suspect that he's behind Mao's house lager, since both beers look like they've come through the same half-arsed labelling machine. Tenuous, but as good a theory as any.

(Mao news just in: I won one of the prizes in the Bubble Brothers' Mao/iKi beer compo. Watch a video of me getting lucky here.)

Anyway, apologies for the interlude into dodgy Irish lager. More and better from Earl's Court to follow.

Chuffing great

Pete Brown: you're a genius.

On Impy Malting a while back, Pete suggested in a comment that us bloggers try and blag our way into the Great British Beer Festival trade session on the strength of our journalistic credentials. Of course, not even I would have the brass neck to imply that my meanderings here are worth special treatment from an organisation as big and important as CAMRA, so I did the blagging from my role on the editorial board of a Proper Beer Website. And they bought it too. So, barring disasters, I shall be nipping across to London on the morning of Tuesday 5th August and home again the same evening. From noon until 5 I will be at Earl's Court. Drinking.

I thought I'd use this post as a sign-up sheet for anyone else out there in the beer blogosphere who might be going. It'd be great to say hello in person.

To get a bit more mileage out of my post title, I'm covering a beer which was another donation from Thom out of his CAMRA quarterly goody bag: Station Porter from Wickwar Brewing in Gloucestershire. You don't need the golden CAMRA rosettes to tell you this is real ale -- just pour it into a glass. It foams lazily at the top, with just a handful of large bubbles giving way to a light tan skim of froth on the surface. Unsurprisingly the texture is wonderfully smooth, accentuated by a dense velvet body.

There's a dry and bitter aroma, followed by a mild yet complex flavour: dark chocolate and smoke spring immediately to mind. I'm not seeing any reference to smoked malt being used, but it has that Laphroaig-like medicinal quality reminscent of MM Imperial, though not as overpowering.

It would be very easy to drain the whole glass in no time if it wasn't for that body and a big 6.1% ABV. In general I prefer my sippers to have bigger, bolder flavours, but I don't object at all to the mildness in this one. The texture more than makes up for it.

Out and about

An enjoyable side-effect of being a beer blogger is the news, information and plain old gossip I receive from other beer fanatics. At the weekend I spent a few hours trawling selected pubs in Dublin following up on some leads I'd received, as well as doing some research for The Session this Friday.

My first port of call was Thomas Read opposite City Hall. Thomas Read is probably the nearest thing Ireland has to a pub chain. We have lots of businesses which own multiple licensed premises, but (apart from the Porterhouse) the Thomas Read group is the only one that will use the same name for new branches, so there's now a Thomas Read in Smithfield and several at Dublin airport. The brand name came from a seventeenth-century cutlery firm which ran a shop on Parliament Street -- the oldest shop in Dublin -- until the 1990s. The pub owners closed it down when they bought the site, opening the first of their pubs next door and leaving the original shop in its current derelict state.

It was very much a café-bar for the beautiful people when it first opened. I've no idea where it stands in the fashion stakes now as I don't keep track of these things. Anyway, a friend (hi Nick) was telling me that they are currently selling a stout under the Murphy name, but which wasn't branded with the normal Murphy's logo and which came in a fancy stemmed pint glass. Murphy's is, of course, Heineken's property, and big transnational brewers aren't known for their variation and localisation of their brands. So on Saturday I called in to find out what was going on.

Sure enough, there was the pump clip, featuring a naked lady where one would expect to see the sober and authoritative Murphy's badge. The accompanying beermat tells us this is Marie Louisa Murphy (1737-1814), whose steadfast work getting her kit off for Parisian artist Francois Boucher provided venture capital for her family which went on to set up the Cork brewery.

The new stemmed pint glass reminds me a lot of the chalice that InBev are currently touting for Stella Artois, claiming its design helps keep the beer cold. My pint of Murphy's was certainly very cold indeed and it took a while before I was able to taste the sweet roasted flavours that confirmed that this is plain old Murphy's stout.

The whole thing intrigues me: it's so out of character for big soulless breweries to stray from their homogenous branding. Whether Marie Louisa's rosy cheeks are displayed here purely for the jaded poseurs of Thomas Read or whether they're part of a wider rebranding remains to be seen.

My journey around the city also brought me to Messrs Maguire, to follow up on a conversation I'd been having with Knut about their Imperial stout. Was it possible there was a new lower-strength version? The answer is no: in fact, the batch of Imperial had just run out which suggests it was the same big 7%er it has always been. I hope we'll be seeing it again before long. I made do with a pint of MM Best: the cask ale made by MM's brewer for the festivals, guest taps in UK pubs, and other such cask outlets. In its home pub it's bunged into a keg and served on nitro to resemble, as Knut accurately observed, nothing so much as Boddington's or similar crashingly dull English keg bitters.

Not all of this excursion was on foot of third-party observations. I had noticed a couple of days previously that Dublin's eastern European late bar, The Czech Inn, had a sign out advertising a new range of draught beers. They'd taken it in by Saturday, the better to advertise the day's big screen football, but the beers were still there. They're from the Konrad range made in northern Bohemia. Konrad Premium is a pale lager and reminds me more of the Munich style than anything Czech. It's a big 5.6% ABV, and quite sweet with it. Thirst-quenchingly good.

Konrad Dark is sweeter still, almost to the point of being slightly saccharine, but just restrained enough to remain drinkable. At the very end there's just a hint of coffee to add a bit of complexity to an otherwise straight-up no-nonsense sweet dark lager, considerably less demanding than The Czech Inn's test-card-tastic wallpaper.

After that, all that remained was for a quick trip to the Bull & Castle for a couple of Hookers and then home. So concludes the third year of this blog and, while I predicted a fairly limited amount of travel a year ago, it has been a busy time with lots of new beers. I'm not intending to let the momentum slow. Sorry, Mr Liver.

Munster mash bash

The Irish beer calendar is a short one and mostly concentrated in the latter half of year, with Hilden in August, the GIBF in October and CAMRA NI's Belfast festival in November. The main event, however, is the first of the year and happens on Easter Saturday and Sunday at the Franciscan Well brewpub in Cork. This is where the nation's craft brewers gather to sell their wares side-by-side and meet the drinking public. This year there were stalls from Hilden, Hooker, Carlow, White Gypsy, the University College Cork Pilot Brewery and the 'Well itself. Whitewater had just sent some bottles along, and The Porterhouse phoned in a keg of their Oyster Stout but left it to the hosts to serve it. Unfortunately there was a supply problem with the new Dingle brewing company (Beoir Chorca Dhuibhne) so I didn't get to try their beers.

For the second year, the Irish Craft Brewer contingent among the festival-goers used the opportunity to award prizes to the best beers available, and this year the top gong went to a cask version of the Franciscan Well's Purgatory pale ale. I had it in its kegged incarnation last year, and quite liked it. On cask, however, I was blown away. It was superbly balanced with big mandarin fruit flavours sitting comfortably next to a sherbety hoppy bite, all attached to a full smooth body. A deserving winner and hopefully we'll get to see more of this.

A runner-up award went to Messrs Maguire Imperial, which I have already raved about at length. The MM brewer is about to launch his own range of bottled beers under his new White Gypsy brand. He says that, the market for Irish craft beer being what it is, most of this will go straight to export. It's a shame, but I'm depending on the usual suspects in the retail drinks trade to get hold of at least a few cases of these for the locals. This stand was also selling MM Best, a beer which does the festival circuit in the UK and beyond, but is rarely seen in Ireland. The pub where it's made used to have a regular cask ale (called Pale, if I recall correctly) but it, and its beer engine, disappeared some years ago. Best is a light-bodied golden session ale with a slightly astringent bitterness. All of the cask beers were being served through sparklers and I used this one to decide my opinion in The Great Sparkler Debate. Having tasted it with and without the plastic tap attachment (picture, right), I confess to not being able to ascertain much difference.

Third place went to last year's champion Galway Hooker. As the only winning beer produced on a year-round basis, Hooker clings to its premier position in the pantheon of Irish craft beers. Still daring and still fresh even after a couple of years on the market. As I mentioned on Friday, their Irish Coffee Porter was made for this event and it was available in both keg and cask varieties. I didn't try the kegged one to see how it worked with the right gas mix, but the cask one was definitely a different beer to the one I was drinking in the Bull & Castle. The foamy head carried all the coffee essence that I thought was missing from the keg version last week. Fuller, smoother, and altogether more flavoursome. It could be that there's some truth to this notion of cask beer being somehow better than keg...

Another cask beer walked off with the prestigious Beer of the Festival award, decided by popular acclaim rather than any formal voting procedure. This was Carlow's Druid's Brew, made especially for the Easter festival each year and modelled here by the lovely Cormac. It's a powerfully bitter stout with a real back-of-tongue dry tanginess in addition to bags of full-on stout roastiness. Its texture is fascinating, being very similar to the sort of creamy smoothness you get with nitrogenation. This, I guess, is the effect the Guinness scientists were going for when they developed nitro beer back in the '50s.

UCC's Pilot Brewery had two beers on (though not when this picture was taken). Frithjofs is a lager which looks for all the world like a Belgian witbier: cloudy and pale yellow-green. It has you thinking of lemons before even taking a sip. In reality it's not really lemony, but it does have a tangy fruitiness to it, to my mind more like a light German weiss than anything else. It's also quite dry and crisp and probably works well as a summer refresher. The other tap (eventually) dispensed UCCinator, a dark bock, though a bit light-bodied to count as a doppelbock, despite the name. It has quite an overpowering sweet-and-sour character, reminding me more than anything of boiled sweets. At 7.4% ABV it's probably just as well I couldn't drink much of it.

As well as their own beers and the festival visitors, the 'Well also had a small range of Belgian beers on tap in the upstairs bar. I tried the Barbar Winter Bok, a deeply dark brown lager brimming with sweet sweet fruity flavours and concentrated essence of banana. Another one not to be taken lightly, but good in its own sweet way.

The Festival continues today but I'm back in Dublin, my cup having truly runnéd over with Irish craft goodness. The buzz among the brewers mentioned the possibility of a Dublin beer festival along similar lines. Going to a beer festival then home to sleep in my own bed would certainly be a pleasant novelty.

Banished from these shores

It's that day of the year when central Dublin becomes a no-go area and I'm holed up at home with a couple of beers to keep me company.

This year I have something a bit special: O'Hara's Celebration Stout brewed by the Carlow Brewing Company to commemorate ten years of O'Hara's beers, something similar to what The Porterhouse did with their own superb Celebration stout nearly two years ago.

From its distinctive 75cl swingtop, it pours thick and highly carbonated, rather like bottled Guinness. And it has a similar dryness, but at 6% is much heavier, inching towards Foreign Extra territory. On the nose there's a hoppiness which is very unusual for an Irish stout, as well as the roasted barley character one would expect. Moving past the fizzy texture, there are the chocolate notes I love in normal O'Hara's, though these are understated against the hoppy dryness. At the very end there's a metallic tang of the sort I most associate with certain English ales and I'm wondering if it's a feature of the English Northdown and Fuggles hops with which the stout is laden.

O'Hara's Celebration is a considered sipper, as against a quaffable pint of plain. Since Diageo are the only people making something remotely like this for the Irish market, it's great to see one of our own taking them on.

And that brings me on to a more general point this St Patrick's Day: Carlow Brewing were one of the pioneers of the Irish craft beer movement, and one of its success stories. They are the only real Irish brewer to have made much of an impact on the international scene, exporting bottles to the UK, US and further afield. Indeed, here's the rub: O'Hara's Celebration appears to have been made specifically for this market, with 3,000 bottles from the limited edition destined for the States. I don't know how limited the edition is, of course, but it looks like the company know which side of the Atlantic their bread is buttered on. Several of the independent off licences in Dublin that I spoke to had not been allocated any.

Naturally, I don't blame Carlow. I'm just miffed that it's so hard to convince Irish people to drink decent beer, to the point where our good brewers constantly look for outlets abroad: Black Pearl going in its entirety to Russia and Scandinavia is another scandal. And when they're not shipping it out, they're making the good stuff in limited quantities, like the two aforementioned Celebration stouts, or the Imperial from Messrs Maguire (currently enjoying a glorious return to the pumps, but for how long?)

And so, on our national day, I urge any Irish reading to support our locally-owned breweries. We can't expect the situation to get better if we don't do our bit.

Cry havoc

What is it about craft beer branding and canines? We have those well known American breeds Flying Dog and Dogfish Head, and now there's the Scots terror: Brew Dog. The Aberdeenshire microbrewery opened just last year and is already producing an impressive range of beers, bottled and on cask (my notes on cask Hype are in this post). Reviews have been generally positive, so I requested a mixed case as a Christmas present from a UK-based family member (cheers, sis).

Because the brewery is new, I'm not terribly upset about what happened next. In small business terms it's probably classified as an oversight or teething troubles: the dozen 33cl bottles were shipped without any protective wrapping on them. As a result, one of my Rip Tides arrived in several pieces, with the cardboard box receiving the full benefit of the imperial stout within. I trust the brewery will be rectifying this dispatch issue soon, if they haven't already.

I started with the "laid back amber beer" The Physics, immediately struck by the cuteness of a best before date written in biro. It's a dark amber colour, reminding me of American lagers like Old Scratch and Boston Lager. Not much aroma, just tiny sugary sweetness and even tinier hops if you inhale deeply enough. The first sip delivers a big, and quite unexpected, hoppy punch: brimming with a very heavy vegetal bitterness of the sort found in the more full-on English bitters. Think Landlord. The bitterness lingers and is joined by a rich caramel sweetness and the overall sensation is like sucking on a candy-coated hop cone. Er, probably. The Physics is tasty, complex, and not at all laid back. With all those hops in this one I moved on to the IPA with trepidation.

The first shock of Punk IPA was from the colour: a very bright, pale yellow and suspiciously clear for a handcrafted beer. Yes, I know that my suspicions are unfounded and that craft brewers can make clear beers too, but I like a bit of cloud in my ales. There's probably a chemical additive you can get... Anyway, second shock was that Punk isn't an aggressive hop monster. The aroma, again, is slight and has a citrus quality which is carried through in a big way in the flavour. It's very zesty, with lemony overtones, and also quite smooth and more-ish. Punk isn't about being smooth, but it is about being shocking, I guess, so the name can stay.

Rip Tide was a bit more normal, in a special sort of way. It pours a very opaque black with just about no head. There's a bit of a prickle in the mouthfeel, but mostly it's rich and thick. The taste is quite subtle, and nothing leaps out immediately. Rolling it around the palate it's quite dry, but there's just a hint of chocolatey sweetness in the mix there too. It leaves a bitter taste at the end as a prelude to the next sip. I think my preferences lean towards the caramel-and-coffee school of imperial stouts, which left me intrigued as to what happens when you send Rip Tide off to live in a whisky cask for a while.

It gains two ABV percentage points and turns into Paradox, is the short answer. The one I have here is from an Islay cask: batch 8 -- Bowmore. The smoky peat is apparent even from the narrow neck of a slightly cold bottle, and even more so when poured into a wide-bottomed glass, where a tawny head makes a brief appearance but is gone in an instant. The fullness of the Rip Tide mouthfeel is there, as is the lasting bitter aftertaste, but before that there's the earthy scotch buzz dominating everything. The 10% ABV is well hidden among the smooth and balanced whisky flavours. Its Laphroaigishness reminds me a lot of Messrs Maguire's fantastic, but now heart-breakingly gone, Imperial which I raved over back in the autumn. Paradox is a superb beer: uncompromising, innovative and chock full of the Brew Dog spirit. Well done, lads.

I look forward to trying some of the other beers Brew Dog have out. And I look forward even more to being able to buy them in Ireland where I can be fairly sure I'll get them home in one piece.

A storm brewing

There's no doubt that the beer market in Ireland is currently undergoing an upheaval. Choice on the shelves has never been greater and several new Irish breweries are said to be on their way. However, I'm sitting here (offline: I'll post this later) in the pub with the truest indication yet that the revolution is at hand: it's a pint of draught Irish stout without a nitro head. Ten minutes ago I would have told you such a thing was unthinkable, and that consumer taste in Ireland -- sculpted by Diageo to its own ends -- would never stand for it. But here we are. Only marginally less odd is the fact that it's being brewed and served in Messrs Maguire, a Dublin pub known for its laissez faire attitude to the often excellent house beers.

The beer itself is Messrs Maguire Imperial Stout, and it's a cracker. Light for an imperial at only 7% ABV, but style-shmyle. It hits the nose with powerful roasted aromas and follows them with a bitter and almost mediciney foretaste, followed quickly by a chocolate middle, the classic Irish stout dryness at the end and ohhh that rich mouthfeel of a purely carbonated draught stout.

Clearly a well-deserved poke in the eye for our domineering Uncle Arthur. They should have called it anti-Imperial Stout.This is the third delicious new beer in a row I've found following intelligence received on the IrishCraftBrewer.com forums. So I'd just like to say thank you to any ICBers who may be reading for making my drinking life so much better. And a special cheers to the site's management (they give me free homemade beer sometimes, so I'm basically owned, but I'd probably say it anyway...).

Here's to the future: may the only nitrogen be outside the glass.