Time gentlemen

It's hard to believe we're already on year five of Messrs Mogg and Dredge's annual round-robin beer awards thingy, The Golden Pints. As with all regular awards programmes, it's hard work striking a balance between the same parties getting the nod every year and the pass-the-parcel effect where taking the gold is just a matter of waiting until everyone else has already had it. In past years I've tried to avoid these pitfalls but it has reached the point where it's making the whole thing awkward, so for 2013 I'm paying no attention at all to what has gone before and writing down my gut instinct answers to this year's categories.

To assist me in composing my justifications for each winner I'm joined by a large bottle of Kerkom Winterkoninkske, which has been sitting in my stash for a couple of  years now, awaiting its moment to shine. At 13% ABV it's strictly for the darkest depths of winter, and the stiff rubber cork really makes you work for your beer. When I eventually got it open, what poured out is a flat and slightly syrupy-looking dense black beer, briefly forming a loose head which disappears before I can even raise the glass. There's a savoury, autolytic quality to the aroma: the teriyaki glaze effect familiar to fans of Samuel Adams Triple Bock. It's all about chocolate in the flavour, of the top-notch milk variety, accentuated by the silky smooth texture. There's alcoholic heat and no rough edges at all, just a tiny metallic ping from a molasses taste at the finish. For all its strength and sophisticated presentation it's not actually all that complex, but it's just the liqueur substitute I'm after for some end-of-year musings.

The Golden Pint Awards 2013

Best Irish Cask Beer: Moonbeam.
A tough one to kick off. I loved Hilden Number Four when I found it at the Irish Craft Beer & Cider Festival: it's a beer that showcases the richness and depth of flavour that comes with cask dispense. But then so does Moonbeam, and this dark ale by Metalman does it with hops too. Ordering a repeat pint at the Bull & Castle is a rarity for me, but sinkable Moonbeam made me do it, so is my Irish cask choice for 2013.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Of Foam and Fury
Well duh! Galway Bay's 8.5% ABV hop explosion is the beer everyone's been talking about, because it's the beer everyone's been waiting for. I've just got over the novelty at this stage and am actually able to order other things in Galway Bay pubs, but it was a real desert island job for a while there: all the complex subtlety and all the loud brashness you need from a beer, in a single glass.

Best Irish Bottled or Canned Beer: Amber Ella
This pale ale from Eight Degrees impressed at the ICBCF in September when it made its draught début but I didn't go chasing the bottled version until it popped up on special at 57 The Headline. All that mango and mandarin  freshness is still present in the bottle and makes for a magnificently invigorating zing-filled experience.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Edelstoff
A big shout-out for Sharp's Panzerfaust here, which quietly appeared at the Franciscan Well Easter Beer Festival but hasn't been seen since, alas. But while that's a fun novelty, my top foreign draught experience this year was an old favourite: the inhaleably smooth Edelstoff at the Augustiner Keller in Munich last March. Great beer enhanced by excellent company in wonderful surrounds.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer: Quetsche
Having missed it at the Zythos beer festival I was overjoyed to find Tilquin's plum lambic afterwards in Moeder Lambic Fontainas. The way it stimulates one's salivary glands to create a genuine taste explosion brought me back to my early lambic experiences and a reminder of why this sort of beer is for me. That it's the dearest beer I've ever had (€30 a 75cl bottle) is neither here or there.

Best Collaboration Brew: Adnams Supremely Self-Conscious
This was also a contender for Best Overseas Draught, though it's hard to do any sort of meaningful comparison between it and Edelstoff. A session-strength dark ale brewed at Adnams in collaboration with Stone and served at JD Wetherspoon in the autumn. Crazily hoppy yet exceptionally drinkable, Moonbeam turned up to 11; a masterpiece.

Best Overall Beer: Quetsche
Flavour, aroma and texture are all well and good, but for its sheer physiological impact, my favourite beer of 2013 was Tilquin Quetsche.

Best Branding, Pumpclip or Label: Otterbank Brewing
I was about to troop after everyone else who nominated Partizan -- their graphics are endlessly entertaining -- but a late Irish entrant shades it for me. This Golden Pint goes to new gypsy brewing operation Otterbank, and their all-business mascot, designed by Twisted Doodles (aka Maria). I wear ties that way too.

Best Irish Brewery: Eight Degrees
Where output, innovation and distribution are concerned, Eight Degrees were first rate this year, and the quality of their products was pretty damn good too. Putting out three simultaneous winter seasonals was a ballsy move, and that deserves credit.

Best Overseas Brewery: The Kernel
2013 was the year I finally "got" hoppy Kernel beer. I don't know if they just happened to be using varieties I like when I drank them, or if it's personal lupulin threshold shift going on, but I really enjoyed the Kernel IPAs I had this year; their dark beers are as consistently brilliant as always; and then there's London Sour.

Best New Brewery Opening 2013: JW Sweetman
Technically I think this was a late 2012 opening, but it was definitely 2013 when Dublin's one and only brewpub made its presence felt. First and foremost, the product quality under brewmaster Rob has been exceptional. In a Dublin pub scene where prices appear to be spiralling insanely upwards it offers easily the best value around. And there's a real sense that the serving staff actually give a shit about the product, which was rarely the case in its previous incarnation. So three cheers for Barry, Dave, Rob and all the team at JWS, and somebody please steal their business model: Dublin needs at least three more of these.

Pub/Bar of the Year: The Bull & Castle
There are many contenders for this, but I can't go past the Bull & Castle. Literally, in fact. The range of Irish beers and the turnover of specials and seasonals has been phenomenal. It remains the best venue to get a handle on what's happening on the national scene.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2013: 57 The Headline
And hot on the B&C's heels is Geoff's new venture on Leonard's Corner. A solid core of quality beers plus ample space given over to rotationals, with a suburban local feel which is conveniently in my end of town. Having only opened in October it's still finding its feet so we can expect the offer to improve even further in 2014.

Best City for Beer in Ireland: Kilkenny
Yes, I'm overlooking Dublin, Cork and Belfast -- all of which I enjoyed drinking in this year. But the most fun was a summer weekend in the Marble City, centred on the fabulous Brewery Corner pub.

Beer Festival of the Year: Borefts
BräuKunst Live! in Munich was certainly educational, but my other half didn't attend, which immediately means it wasn't as enjoyable as it could have been. Borefts, then, takes the prize for beer quality, atmosphere and company -- plus a greatly enhanced food offer this year.

Supermarket of the Year: Fresh, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7
They accidentally underpriced a shipment of Moor beers this year, and Alex didn't manage to snaffle all of them before I got in.

Independent Retailer of the Year: DrinkStore
I actually have to make a concerted, conscious effort to go to other off licences now. DrinkStore is there, and has everything. Job done. They're the reason I'm not giving out a Golden Pint for online retailer of the year, and if I were they'd probably get that too.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: None
Books? Sure haven't we the Internet?

Best Beer Blog or Website: Zak Avery.
Because this.

Best Beer App: Janetter
It's just a general-purpose Twitter client, but it has a mute-by-app function which means I can switch off other people's Untappd updates. This has massively enhanced the quality of my Twitter experience.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: @Thirsty_Pilgrim
So many great Twitterers out there, local and international, but I'm a particular fan of the window on the world of beer revealed by Joe.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: Galway Bay Brewery
A slick new website, and regular Twitter updates from both owner and head brewer. Real engagement too -- not just an endless retweeting of praise. If your business Twitter account is in the habit of retweeting other people saying nice things about you: Fucking. Stop.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year: Bourbon Barrel Ale with Bellingham Blue
The beer's pretty poor and the massive sweet oak totally overpowered the excellent steak it was supposed to be paired with at Alltech's reception launching their festival next February. But the acidity of the cheese really put manners on it.

A big thanks to everyone who nominated me for Golden Pints. There'll be more drinking beers and then writing down what they taste like next year.

Rebalancing

It's very much a topic-of-the-moment for The Session this month. Derek is hosting at It's Not Just the Alcohol Talking, and he asks "Is Craft Beer A Bubble?" I can't really speak for anywhere beyond my own doorstep, and I'm guessing wildly even there, but for me the answer is no. The recent growth in Irish microbrewing -- and the bubbling potential which occasionally spills over into an actual real new brewery -- is a re-normalisation of sorts, a return to the days of local breweries and local beer which aren't really that far outside living memory.

And, as before, it's likely that the new smaller brands will exist alongside the big national and multinational ones: at the upper ends of the craft sector we're already seeing a certain porousness in the boundaries between craft and macro. Conversely, not everything is rosy for the start-ups: there are brands and breweries that I'm sure won't be around when times get harder and the modest fashion for craft beer begins to wane, which it will. But just as with wine thirty years ago and coffee ten years ago, it's hard to imagine Irish beer going back to where it was in the late 20th century. I believe there has been a small but significant change in the taste of enough drinkers to keep the craft niche alive, supplied and with still plenty of growth space.

Don't ask me to predict what the Irish beer scene will look like a few years down the line, however. At the moment all roads lead to Dublin and most breweries send their beers this way sooner or later. White Gypsy were the first to pull all their draught taps back to the local area -- a hugely encouraging move, if a little inconvenient for me. And as demand for craft beer spreads slowly from the urban centres, I doubt they'll be the last to do it. What the styles will look like is another mystery: against all the odds, red ale shows no signs of dying out, though American-style pale ale is now a standard feature of Irish brewing, and since Diageo jumped on that bandwagon I'd be very surprised if a taste for hops proved to be a mere trend. The rate at which the small breweries are turning out short-run special editions is ever increasing and it remains to be seen whether this will ever settle into a regular calendar of seasonals. I don't seen any reason why it should.

New in that vein from Waterford's Metalman is Smokescreen, presented with no further information than it's a "smoked beer" and 4.5% ABV, so I rocked up to the Bull & Castle bar armed only with the prejudice that smoked beers from Irish breweries are often not very good. The first thing that surprised me about Smokescreen is that it's black, or at least dark brown, and murky reddish around the edges. That was a relief: dark smoked beers suffer much less from kipperiness than amber ones. The second big surprise was the hopping: fresh tangerines lead the flavour, finishing slightly metallic. I'm suddenly reminded of Moonbeam, Metalman's not-a-black-IPA-honest. The smoke element is there, but is little more than a seasoning, contributing a roasty dryness which enhances the beer's stout-like quality, as well as adding a certain pipey sweetness to the finish. Overall I found it quite understated and sessionable, and a beer I'd like to see more of.

More, and more different: that's my hope for Irish brewing, and I'm going to keep buying the limited editions from out-of-town breweries for as long as the market allows.

Out to launch

The Irish Craft Beer Festival rolled in to the RDS in leafy Dublin 4 last weekend, the second time it has been held here. A combination of great weather and Leinster playing at home in the stadium next door ensured a brisk trade, with somewhere over 6000 punters crossing the threshold over the three days, easily accommodated in the spacious Victorian splendour of the Industries Hall.

Alongside a couple of the new-wave cider producers (McIvor's, Tempted? and Stonewell), some homebrew show-and-tell from the Beoir fermentationists and assorted ancillary food and drink retailers (Pieman Café, I bloody love you), most of the country's independent breweries had a stand. And lots of them were using the event to launch new products or limited specials. Lots of scooping potential, then.

There was one totally new beer brand in the form of Bo Bristle, the Co. Offaly brewery formerly known as BrewEyed. Bo Bristle IPA is the flagship, a big sticky-sweet 5%-er in something of an English vernacular. Lagery golden syrup is the heart, lightly laced with citrus and finishing floral. Bo Bristle continues to brew Carrig under contract and has produced a new beer to go with the pale lager: Rower, an Irish red. Yeah, I know: Irish red, yawn, but it's one of the better ones, with lots of toffee plus a solid hop bite. This extra oomph means it does get a bit heavy as it warms up, but overall a decent take on the style.

The O'Hara's range had two new additions, making appearances on draught: Natural Blonde is a dark golden ale loaded with weighty banana esters, far away from the thinner paler lagerlike blondes one normally sees. O'Hara's Winter Star is their first ever seasonal, a lurid orange-coloured winter ale of 4.3% ABV. Orange peel, cinnamon and coconut provide the excitement here, and while I got a hint of marmalade in the foretaste, the aroma and finish are coconut in a big way. The cinnamon has completely disappeared, and it's light on malt and hops, so a little bit one-dimensional, but simple and interesting.

And much as the new ones from Carlow were the centre of my attention, there was also an oak-aged version of Leann Folláin stout on cask. This was beautiful: massive vanilla wood in the aroma but with plenty of rich and smooth chocolate stout flavours still making themselves felt in the flavour. Great balance and one of the best oak-aged beers I've tasted in a while. Less convincing was one of the American guests at the festival: Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale. It's not unpleasant, per se, it just tastes powerfully of whiskey, shooting its 8% alcohol right up the back of the nose. You'd be better off with an actual glass of bourbon, to be honest.

Whitewater were also at the barrel game, with a limited supply of their oak-aged Clotworthy Dobbin for sale in bottles. I sneaked a taste before I purchased and it really lives up to the hype: big Christmas cake flavours with sweet cigar tobacco, all on a very sippable lightish body. From their beer engine there was Down Pilgrim, a new cask ale. The USP here is all-local barley from a neighbouring farmer coupled, as the name suggests, with Pilgrim hops. You get a light-coloured pale ale which begins with a little bit of toasted biscuit, following it up with a sharp bitter finish. One of those sessionable beers with character that are always great to settle into. I wasn't so keen on Whitewater's McHugh's 300, a 3.5% ABV keg blonde brewed for the Botanic Inns chain, a big customer of the brewery's. I found it just too sharp -- pretty much acetic -- to be enjoyable.

From the Odd Experience file, we have my first ever taste of Beal Bán from Beoir Chorca Duibhne. This blonde ale had a weird phenolic twang, and apparently a dash of smoked malt went into the recipe, which would explain things. There's also quite a bang of boozy heat from it, at 5.3% ABV: another golden ale that's anything but bland. And then there was a dry-hopped version of Dungarvan's Copper Coast. You know the ad for Best Western that they show on Dave? Where the brewer says his beer has "A hint of coffee with a nice green apple finish"? That.

Dungarvan provided three of my favourites from the whole gig, as well as a chocolate stout I could take or leave but seemed quite popular. Standout star of the show -- of the festival -- was Rye-PA. Normally I'd run a mile from rye in beer, disliking the harsh grassiness it normally creates. But there's only a hint of that in here, the cloudy orange beer being awash instead with massive succulent nectarine hop flavours. Of course there wasn't enough of it to keep the punters content and both casks sold out soon after being tapped. There were also limited supplies of a 6% ABV IPA which I only got a taste of (thanks Oblivious!), another mouthwatering full and fruity one. And briefly we had an unnamed dark beer with a wonderful bitterness to it. It's one of those where I couldn't tell it was dark when tasting with my eyes closed so could probably be safely badged as a B***k I*A, were the brewery so inclined.

The beer I heard most good reports about was the new one from 8 Degrees, a Märzen called Ochtoberfest: celebrating the number eight and in no way, shape or form connected to any trademarked seasonal German beer event. I was wary at first as it's quite a dark shade of orange, the same colour as all those undrinkably sticky American Märzens and Oktoberfestbiers. However the proper bready aroma set my mind at ease, and on tasting: wow! They've pulled the usual 8 Degrees trick of taking an established style and moving everything up just a notch. Or maybe two. So from a big dose of Saaz and Hallertau there's a nettle flavour rising to a rocket-like pepperiness, as well as all the rounded and filling Munich malt. Proof perhaps that you don't have to be VLB-trained to make kick-ass lager, but it helps.

Staying in Cork, another festival favourite of mine was Franciscan Well's Mi Daza. This stout is a commission from the owner of several pubs in Cork city so isn't meant to be seen elsewhere, and certainly not in the posh end of Dublin. But there it was, and splendid too: light of body but with a strong vegetal hop tang, like a lighter, more sinkable version of Porterhouse Wrasslers XXXX.

Time was, getting a new Irish beer onto this blog meant drinking a glass of it and writing down how it tasted. Increasingly these days it has become a multi-stage project. So it was with the latest one from Metalman: Moonbeam. The first version of it I tasted was served from the cask and had some bonus cranberries added dry. It was nice as it went: a smooth and dry dark ale with a tart finish and just a whisper of sweet red berries. Later I got to taste the unhacked keg version and found it quite different. The tart finish spreads throughout the flavour to become a full-on bitter hop tang. The hops also leap out in a wonderful spicy green aroma which is sadly absent from the cask edition. Another one the brewers could go calling a *lac* *P*, y'know, if they wanted to.

A bit of a dry account of the new beers at the gig there: such is the nature of this blog. I also had plenty of old favourites, including Hilden's Barney's Brew: first time I'd met it in Dublin, and some fantastic dry-hopped cask versions of Franciscan Well's Rebel Red. I haven't even mentioned the splendid new bottles from White Gypsy, due to hit the off licences in the next couple of weeks, but since I took one home with me (thanks Cuilán!), those notes will be coming later.

Above all, my abiding impression was that the Irish Craft Beer Festival was not simply a big hall with beers for sale, nor a three-day piss-up, but a proper celebration of beer in Ireland as it is now, with plenty to excite both wary newcomers and jaded old hacks like me. I'm looking forward to many more years of this event.