Budget destinations

I'm not in this for the clicks, but I have noticed that for some reason my blog posts about Aldi and Lidl beers are the most popular thing I write. It is a source of some dismay to one of such a refined palate as myself. And much as I hate to give the people what they want, there are very often new beers to try at the supermarket. Aldi tends to have the turnover and the most amusing knock-offs, but today's are Lidl's work, though very much in the same vein.

Birra Bionda (or "Bit of Beyond That", as it's rendered on Dublin's northside) is their  answer to Moretti. The cheery chap on the parchment-coloured background isn't wearing a hat, so it's a completely different look to Heineken Italy's original. This is stronger than Moretti, at 5% ABV, and it poured with a surprise Kellerbier haze. The label gives us no clue as to what country it was brewed in, but there's a definite German influence. The texture is candyfloss-soft, making it feel like a pillowy Munich Helles, and there's a lot of pale malt in the flavour. Then, however, it turns quite Prussian, introducing a spiky and dry herbal bitterness. Unfortunately they don't balance; there's just too much of both, making the beer loud and rough and lacking any sense of Mediterranean chill. I honestly couldn't tell you whether this is a result of a corner-cutting industrial brewery, or a smallscale operation that doesn't know what it's doing; nor whether it's better or worse than Moretti, a beer that's too forgettable to have left any mark on my memory. I didn't especially care for it, however, and I'm sure there's better lager in Lidl.

Is San Martínez one of them? This is borrowing the style of San Miguel, a heavy lager which I actively dislike, though I wasn't expecting this to be any way similar. The ABVs are close, however, with this slightly lighter at another 5% ABV. Are we sure it's a different beer to the above? It is still cloudy, though less so than the foregoing, and it's darker: close to San Miguel's deep amber but not quite reaching it. This still does the aggressive hops vs. sticky malt thing, but it's gentler and nearly palatable, were it not for the plasticky twang of hop extract. This is definitely a big brewery making lager as cheaply as it can. Drink it cold enough and that's not a problem, but it isn't one of those actually-good discount supermarket lagers.

Neither of these are. And isn't it a shame that the type of beer worth copying to get the most drinkers is the current trend for vapid, sunny-clime-coded industrial lager? Why can't everyone like good beer instead?

Where beer geeks fear to tread

Today it's another chapter in the ongoing history of Dublin's Smithfield Brewing Company, last seen in this post from 2024. Back then, a shiny new brewing kit had been installed at the old soap factory on North King Street but there was no sign of the brewery opening, nor indeed of any brewing happening -- I understand there is a well-established contract brewing link to JJ's in Limerick. I suspect that will be the case for a little while yet, as the soap factory has been earmarked for redevelopment into student flats, meaning the brewery will be on the move again.

Smithfield Brewing is part of a company which owns a small chain of central Dublin pubs, clustered around fashionable Fade Street, which are the only venues in which the beer is served. Finding out what they're pouring these days meant going undercover as one of the cool kids, to Drury Buildings, where four unfamiliar Smithfield beers were on tap.

Smithfield IPA looks a bit flag-shippy, leftmost of the tap array and with the least explanation of what it is. 4.7% is the ABV, and it's pale too: a pilsner-clear golden. The badge helpfully tells us its made with Cascade and Citra hops, and there's certainly an American vibe, presenting lemon and lime up front. After an initial spike, the bitterness is restrained, turning quickly to sherbet and chew sweets, finishing on lemon drop candy. That goes with a softness of texture, not like a pillowy New England IPA but more of a multivitamin tablet effervescence. A metallic aspirin tang is the only bum note, but otherwise it's a cromulent take on the Irish pintable version of American pale ale. Customers who just want to point at a badge saying "IPA" and order one of those are well served.

I'm sure Smithfield Lager has been out and about before under various guises. It's not great, but not offensive either. Again the texture is soft and rounded, much more like an ale, and I raise an eyebrow towards the brewery's "lager" brewing protocol. The flavour does the basics on the malt front: clean, with a Czech golden syrup feature. Hops don't manifest, but from the yeast we get a panopaly of pear, passionfruit and lychee which is quite tasty, but doesn't resemble lager as our continent understands it. Again, the non-beer-aligned customer spots lager and orders this, except those people don't exist in the brand-first Irish beer scene. Putting this on beside Moretti won't attract those people, nor the Heineken nor Rockshore people. It still wouldn't if it were a better beer either, so, *shrug*.

Fair play to Smithfield for making a Red Ale, the style that everybody loves but nobody likes. Theirs is on the pale side, and a little hazy. The aspirin twang I noticed in the IPA (which I suspect is a JJ's house trait) is here in spades. It sits next to big caramel and a mild fruitiness. As an Irish red: yeah, it probably qualifies. For independent brands, this style is probably only ordered by tourists, and it doesn't matter if they order another. I doubt they will. This lacks the easy lagerish drinkability of Smithwick's and Macardles but doesn't have the extra craft dimension of O'Hara's Red, say. A pub chain wanting to have their own red ale is cool; this example of it? Nah.

It's not like me to leave the weakest beer to the end, but the name Light Pale Ale didn't sell it to me. I would imagine that other breweries would call this 3.8% ABV job a "Session IPA". Still, when I did eventually chance a pint, the early signs were good. The spicy gunpowder aroma was delightfully unexpected, and the beer has plenty of body, despite the low gravity. The flavour was another surprise, showing lots of complexity, combining zesty orange, a floral bergamot bitterness, and then more of that spice, like a sprinkle of freshly-ground black pepper. It's a fantastic combination, however it's done, and even the return of the aspirin dryness doesn't come close to spoiling it. This is, above all, a fun beer; accessible but with plenty going on too. I'm glad it left me with something positive to say before I moved on.

I imagine these beers will change. Late last year, Dublin City Council granted permission for Smithfield Brewing to open a new brewpub at the bottom of Smithfield Square, beside the Luas tracks. If I'm correct in thinking that the current beers come from JJ's rather than North King Street, then the move presents an opportunity to get that aspirin tang out of them. In the planning application, the owners expressed an intention to open pub hours, which means that in addition to moving the brewing licence and the kit, a pub licence will need to be found and applied as well. All of that takes time, so I'm not expecting to be dropping in for a pint any time soon. Before settling on the name "Smithfield Brewing", the brand was called "Persistence". They've certainly shown that.  

As the owner says in this report, the new brewpub will fit nicely into the beer scene in this part of town, linked by tram to Carlow's Urban Brewing, Guinness Open Gate and Rascals HQ, though it's also all but adjacent to Whiplash's Fidelity pub. That puts it in a prime position to get the cool kids and the beer geeks too.

Haymarket House, Smithfield, Dublin 7. Future home of Smithfield Brewing.

Toro!

It's The Session time once again, and this month's host is Ding, who asks Where do you find value? As someone who does a bit of consumer campaigning, it's a very important topic: whether beer is expensive or cheap, the drinker should feel they're getting value for it. With the highly-marketed mainstream beers in the pubs of Ireland, I think that is very much not the case. For a neophile like me, there's another side to the value proposition. Most beers that I drink are new to me, so I've no idea whether they will prove good value or not. What helps is the existence of this blog. I've long come to view it as a way of getting value out of bad beer. I may not have enjoyed drinking it, but being able to compose and publish an account of why, makes it some way worth my while. And, of course, excoriating reviews are much more fun to write than positive ones.

I was expecting some excoriation to be necessary when I came to today's pair of beers.

The ongoing trend for rustic-branded Mediterranean lager rarely troubles these pages. I am bewildered that there still seems to be space in this sector where Heineken's Moretti and Molson Coors's Madrí are slugging it out. Neither beer is any good, but that hasn't stopped other large breweries trying to attract drinkers away from them with similarly-presented fare.

Damm's effort comes from its brewery in Málaga, and is called Victoria Málaga. It's presented in a 66cl bottle and, like Moretti, the label features an old-timey bloke with a hat -- he's a German tourist, apparently, the beer's mascot since the 1950s, before Damm bought and revived it in 2001. It's a quite a dark one; the clear golden colour having a slight tint of coppery red in it. It doesn't look like a cheapie mass-market job.

Not much happens in the aroma, just a vague graininess which is the sort you get from mass-market lager, though the body is fuller than I expected from just 4.8% ABV. There's a proper malt foretaste, thick and bready, with some quite Czech-tasting golden syrup. Alas, it doesn't last long, fading before the beer's other flavour kicks in. That's a mild zinc-like bitter bite, very much the sort you get from old-world hops, and likely German ones. This too is fleeting, and it finishes promptly and cleanly. This shows some of the features of good wholesome lagers, but its industrial nature betrays it. While it doesn't taste cheap or compromised, there's not really enough depth of taste for me to recommend it. It could have been much worse.

And speaking of: Aldi has taken a direct potshot at Madrí by creating an obvious knock-off, called Grande. Given that these, and there are many of them, never bear any resemblance to the beers they're copying, beyond the label, I had no idea what to expect. It's noteworthy that, unlike Madrí, this one is actually brewed in Spain. Again it's a 66cl bottle, and again it's on the darker side: not quite as deep as the previous beer but certainly an alluring amber. It's much thinner and fizzier, however, and drinking them back-to-back really shows up the Victoria as a better beer made to a more flavourful spec. This isn't much lighter at 4.6% ABV but is a world away.

The aroma is quite sugary, but not in a malt-like way, and suggests that the beer might become sweet and cloying. The chance would be a fine thing. On tasting there's almost nothing going on, with the insistent fizz providing white noise where the flavour should be. I let it warm up a little, in the hope that something of interest would emerge, but nothing of interest is on the cards here. There's a slight tang of green apple and brown sugar, hallmarks of lager done on the cheap, but nothing beyond this. Any bite comes from the carbonation rather than hops. It's not unpleasant, but it is extremely basic. Is it an effective substitute for the price-conscious Madrí drinker? Sure, why not?

I remain none the wiser about the Mediterranean lager trend. These beers are quite different from each other, yet both are being pitched at the same segment of beer drinkers. Neither has TV adverts, though, so I guess they'll continue in the ha'penny place, regardless of any individual merits. I'm certainly not planning to buy either one again, but the four paragraphs above mean I got my money's worth from them.

Aldi beer that's fit to drink

The O'Shea's range at Aldi, brewed by Carlow Brewing, has been given a brand overhaul. Rather than pick out what's new or reformulated in the line-up I thought I'd just take all five and give them a going-over. No harm in refreshing my opinions almost a decade after I first introduced O'Shea's here.

The lager is now called To Helles & Back. Immediate plus points for the appearance here: a rich, almost amber, sunset gold. Shame the head doesn't last long, fizzing away to a thin froth shamefully quickly. Weedpatch noble hops present in the aroma and there's a decent density for only 4.4% ABV. Plenty of flavour too: cake and candy malt contrasting with sharp, slightly tinny hops. None of it is subtle so I don't think Helles is the best style designation for it -- pils would be more appropriate in my view. Sharing shelf space with both Spaten and Rheinbacher puts this in a tough position and I don't think I'd switch my preference from either. I like TH&B's moxy, though: it's bolder and louder than supermarket own-brand lager needs to be, so I absolutely wouldn't dismiss it.

Pale ales make up the bulk of the selection, of course, and we begin with Trick of the Light session IPA. No quibbles about head here: a tall stack of froth rises above the slightly hazy body. The aroma is fun: a sunny breeze of orange and lemon sherbet with a hint of something more serious and bitter behind it. Sadly, the flavour is less interesting. There's a little pithiness, and that sweetshop fruit zing hangs around in the finish, but nothing much in the middle. It's only 3.8% ABV so this shouldn't really be surprising, and what's there is good and enjoyable. I found myself wanting more, however. Nevertheless, this does fulfil the session IPA remit perfectly: a modest dose of hop fun in a beer you could drink several of in a row. Another qualified thumbs-up from me.

We're back to clarity with Pale New Dawn pale ale, promising "tropical and grapefruit flavours" from the limpid rose-gold liquid. Sherbet again in the aroma but this time more of a punch in the flavour. I had been harbouring hopes of a west-coast lime kick, and while it's along those lines it doesn't go the whole way, hampered by a mere 4.8% ABV. It is properly bitter however: dry on the palate, showing the invigorating mouth-watering effect that made American-style pale ales so popular in the first place. There's a little pine resin, a bite of crunchy fried onions, and then a mild soapy twang on the finish, the only feature I didn't like. This is OK but isn't quite the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone that I think they were pitching at. The previous one did more interesting things at a more modest strength so I don't see this as a trade up.

None of the labels tell us about the ingredients in these, but there's an intriguing clue in the name of the IPA: Summit To Say. Mind you, the soft melon and peach tastes more like Mosaic than Summit to me, but I'll take it. There's plenty of bitterness too, delivering a pithy punch of grapefruit. The two sides are complementary and make for something quite enjoyable: a fruit salad up front with a pithy kick on the end. The aroma isn't up to much -- peach nectar and a waft of marker pens -- but no matter. It's clean, nuanced and fresh-tasting. This is the strongest of the sequence at 5% ABV but it rocks the punchy complexity of something a fair bit stronger. Our hop parade is over, and I think the session IPA impressed me most, but this is a close second.

A stout to finish, and very much in the O'Hara's wheelhouse. Good things are expected. Cold Dark Heart is the ominous name, 4.5% the ABV. And it's bang on. There's a cocoa seam running all the way through it, passing burnt toast, Turkish delight and light-roast coffee on the way. On the one hand it's a boringly solid Irish stout, but on  the other, nobody makes new ones of these any more so having even a re-labelled one passing my way was downright thrilling. The texture is perfectly full, no wateriness, and nothing that flags it as a cheapie. There are no high notes; no distinguishing features; nothing, as they say, to write home about, but it's thoroughly enjoyable and more satisfying than any amount of American hop twiddling.

American hop twiddling is what you get from the next pair. Both are released under Aldi's The Hop Foundry label, and while the beer is clear, the provenance is not. I've seen Brains and Hogsback both referenced as possible parents. Let me know if you have the definitive answer.

Hop 'Til You Drop is a 4% ABV "triple hopped pale ale" made with Citra, Summit and Galena. In the glass it's a lager-yellow colour. "Triple hopped" is one of those nonsense marketing terms which should be a bit of a red flag, yet I still naively expect such beers to have a decent hop aroma. They never do, and this is no exception; just a vague cap-gun smoke chemical spice. It's dry, though thankfully not thin, and the hops are present but muted, tasting a little overcooked and certainly not fresh and zingy. There's an overall marmalade effect which puts this much more in the British Bitter category than anything American. It's OK for a cheapie but talks a much bigger game than it delivers. No, I'm not surprised.

We may as well crack on with its stablemate The Hop Stepper, which I was secretly hoping would taste of baa, na na na naaa, na na na naaa, na na na, na na na. It doesn't. It's darker: the amber colour of strong tea, with a tannic aroma to match. First Gold, Summit and Chinook are the hops to look out for so there is some English pedigree. The flavour is rather dull, however, with the biscuits-and-sick bittersweet styling of poor brown bitter. OK, that sounds worse than it is. Mostly this is just heavy and dull, and whoever put "hop forward pale ale" as the description on the can had never tasted the beer, or possibly even hops. If you're hankering after this sort of very basic bitter perhaps you could find a place for it, otherwise don't bother.

Finally for today, another one of those amusing off-brand takes on "premium" lagers that Aldi provides purely, I imagine, for my own amusement. I hope the label designers have fun with them. Moretti is the target this time, Aldi's take being Birra Mapelli. Like the other lager above, it looks the part: golden with a fluffy head, exactly like it belongs on a sun-kissed Italian terrazzo. Its ABV is modest at 4.6%. There's an alluring noble-hop greenness in the aroma while the flavour opens on a dry crunch of pale malt. There's a very slight hop tang behind this, more tinny than vegetal, bringing a modicum of balance. It's still sweet and malt-forward, though, and very much best quaffed cold. A syrupy side wasn't long emerging. Like their Peroni knock-off, this one is better than the real thing. Don't expect fireworks, but if your summer trip to Italy is going to be a virtual one you could do a lot worse than a few of these.

Carlow has the upper hand among this lot. Don't be fooled by the fancy-dan 440ml cans and their backwards-baseball-cap artwork, nor the take-offs of popular brands. Half-litre bottles of Irish is where the real hop action is at Aldi.

Press pass pilsners

Camden Exchange has been open since the beginning of the summer. It's the latest addition to the strip of bars running down Camden Street in central Dublin, already known for its late-night pack-'em-in superpubs. It's big but not huge (have a walk round) and a bit of money has been spent on the faux-industrial interior. The best feature is probably the generous beer garden out back. The food is good and the beer choice extensive, with a mix of craft and macro, Irish and imported, spread across 20 or so taps. But, on my first visit, a €6.50 pint of Metalman Pale Ale left a bitterness that had nothing to do with Summit or Cascade and meant I wasn't in a rush to go back.

In August, Camden Exchange held its gala opening and the management kindly invited me along. The beer was free and the food was free so it was all rather jolly. I started with a beautifully refreshing pint of Camden Hells and left on a fabulously juicy Punk IPA, but in between, in the hope of getting a blog post out of the freebie, I scoured the taps for something I'd never reviewed before. There was just one: Birra Moretti. I'll have a pint of that, so. Stick it on the boss's tab.

Heineken's headline Italian offering is definitely doing its job up against arch-rival Peroni: it has the same watery core and the same unpleasant metallic tang, though is perhaps not quite as gassily vapid. It's still pretty terrible and certainly a totally different species to the Hells which preceded it.

If you're going to Camden Exchange on your own dime -- and do give the food menu a go -- it's probably best to pick your beer a bit more carefully than I did here. Cheers to the team for inviting me.

More recently, I was invited out to a launch evening at Box Burger in Bray. This venue, from the owners of Platform Pizza next door and the Harbour Bar across the way, is situated in part of what was once Bray railway station and has been lovingly stripped out to reveal lots of the original brickwork. The burgers are damn decent and there's a distinct Wicklow tilt to the drinks offer, with beer from Wicklow Wolf and O Brother plus cider by Craigie's. But there are imports too, so my tick of the evening was Camden Town Pils. As I mentioned on Monday, straight-up good-quality lager is something of a stock-in-trade at Camden Town so I was expecting a sharp and refreshing pint here, but that's not what I got. For one thing it was hazy, looking an unhealthy wan yellow, though thankfully the taste was not upset by any yeast interference. But its flavour isn't exactly the profile I associate with pils, being full of soft lemon sherbet rather than grass or herbs. It's smooth and very tasty, just not especially pils-like in my estimation.

Thanks to all the Box Burger crew for the evening's hospitality. It's well worth checking out if you're down Bray way, and that's not just the free truffle-oil-and-parmesan burger talking.

Basque non-separatist

Tapas caught on in a big way in Celtic Tiger Dublin. Of course, it being Celtic Tiger Dublin -- the capital of Rip-Off Ireland -- prices are generally ridiculous (if you want to pay €6 for a dish of patatas bravas, Salamanca on Andrew Street is your only man) thus missing the point of tapas as quick, cheap, high-quality food.

Thankfully, The Porterhouse has come to the rescue. Not content with saving us from macrobrewed beer in the last decade, it's now tackling the Great Tapas Swindle. In 2006 it opened The Port House in a dark South William Street basement. There are pintxos at the bar and a full tapas menu in the main restaurant, with dishes in the €3-€5 range: hardly Spanish prices, but very good for Dublin. The quality of the food is excellent (particularly the churros with hot chocolate), and there's an extensive list of wines, sherries and ports. A second branch, called Pintxo, set up on Eustace Street in Temple Bar last year.

Even before these places opened, The Porterhouse was importing Pagoa beers from the Basque country for sale in its bars. Naturally, these constitute the beer list in the new tapas joints, though I think they have Birra Moretti for the lager-heads too. It was in Pintxo that I sampled the Pagoa Zunbeltz stout I reviewed for November's Session, and I was back to try another a few days ago. This time I went for the red ale, Gorri.

On first tasting I was disappointed: it's a very dry affair with quite a pronounced dusty musty flavour. Musing on this, I munched on some chorizo al vino, and took another sip. The difference was incredible. When put next to the rich meat-and-wine flavours, the beer becomes much smoother and rounder. The sweet malt flavours that one expects from a red ale come right to the front, while the dryness remains at the end, maintaining the balance and making the whole experience very pleasant indeed.

I can see why the management moved this one from their pubs to their tapas bars. I'm very sceptical about the whole beer-and-food pairings thing that our American cousins enthuse over, but this beer simply doesn't work without the accompaniment of bold Hispanic flavours. I'm prepared to allow that, just this once.