Up before the Beak

I've left it late getting to Beak, a brewery which shares its Sussex home town with the redoubtable Harvey's. But it looks like they complement each other well: Harvey's being staunchly traditional while Beak is colourful, playful and very much down with the non-bitter-drinking kids. I opened my account with a small assortment of the dozen or so Beak beers currently on sale in Dublin.

"Life-affirming ales" is the brewery strapline, but it says nothing of their lagers. I started this lot with Déšť, an unfiltered and naturally carbonated (can-conditioned?) pilsner, presumably in the Czech style, judging by the name. An actual unfiltered Czech pils would be cloudy but this is barely hazed at all -- not that I'm complaining; I was merely a little surprised. The aroma is divine, the fresh-mown summer lawn of Saaz cutting past anything more serious that the Hallertau Mittelfrüh might have imparted. That seems to be in the flavour, where we leave the garden and encounter a harder hop bitterness, one that's a little plasticky to my palate. I got used to it though, and before the half-way point it had changed from unpleasantly harsh to bracingly assertive. That's helped, of course, by the malt side, which brings the rich and rounded crusty loaf quality of really good Mitteleuropa lager. I wouldn't be able to pin this as a clone of any particular Czech or German beer, but to my mind it channels their important attributes beautifully. The paltry 440ml serving format is, of course, an insult.

The next one is rather more run of the mill: Parade, the flagship IPA. Here, "unfiltered" means full-on murk; a medium beaten-egg yellow emulsion. The aroma is brightly fruity, as cloudy IPA ought to be, and there's a strongly tropical character, of mango and pineapple. Enticing. The murk typicality continues in the texture, which is soft and creamy, and happily lacking in unpleasant grit. I expected more from the flavour than I got. Citra, Mosaic and Idaho 7 feature in plenty of big-tasting IPAs, but this isn't one of them. It's not unpleasant, and frankly the lack of garlic and plasterboard off-flavours is a point in its favour, but... There's a subtle blend of fruit salad elements, mostly pineapple and mandarin, but the intensity is dialled way down, starting slow, building to little and fading quickly. That makes for an easy pinter, I'm sure, but it's also 6% ABV, and that should mean a bigger flavour all round. There are, of course, double- and triple- brand extensions, but I didn't think I would need them to get a proper hop hit.

We leave such concerns behind for the finishing imperial stout, Oak, brewed in collaboration with 3 Sons of Florida. Alarm bells began ringing when the can claimed it tries to recreate barrel-ageing without actually doing it, via "innovative barrel-derived extracts, wood additions and micro-oxidation". Beak does Innis & Gunn, by the sounds of it. Further unease was caused by the can, once the beer was poured. I know what an empty 440ml can feels like, and this was heavier, like something weighty was stuck to the bottom of it. I pushed it away and turned to the beer. It smells great: a bit oaky and quite vinous, not far from those lovely barrel-aged imperial stouts that I used to look to De Molen for, in happier times. It's quite flat and very thick, even for 10% ABV. The flavour opens on black cherry and soft toffee, though shies away from the chocolate and coffee which are far more common features in this sort of stout. The wood arrives next and, as expected, it's a very poor substitute for real barrel maturity, adding a dry and splintery tang, then a rough metallic rasp. The overall effect of this high-tech process is half maple syrup and half pencil shavings. The fundamental big stout party is still there, but it hasn't been any way enhanced and, between the sweetness and the tang, is hard work to chomp through. I consider this a misstep, however well intentioned.

Seems to me the life-affirming work of this brewery is indeed done with their lagers. I'm sure I'll be back to Beak in due course, but I don't feel I'm missing anything by not charging out immediately to fill a basket with more of their IPAs.

Eternal return of the same

Today's beers were released late last year by Galway Bay Brewery but strictly speaking they're not new ones. They were brewed and sold as versions of The Eternalist sour ale, and bottled about three years ago. I only ever had the raspberry Eternalist, back in 2015, so both of them are still new to me.

The first they've called Ash, and it has added cherries in, as well as vanilla and tonka beans which aren't mentioned on the label. It's a deep purple colour with a firm pink head and smells strongly of the cherries: ripe and luscious and real. It's sour but not sharp; tangy more than tart, I'd say, and with a big and rounded body, reflecting the substantial 6.8% ABV. I can't say I was able to identify the tonka or vanilla, but there is a certain sweetness which can't be assigned to the cherries alone. It's entirely complementary with the sourness and quite different to the sugared-up effect of Belgian candy-kriek. Here, it's an added richness, of the sort you get from an amber-coloured malt. This does come at the expense of the wildness: I thought that a barrel-aged beer with wild yeast would be funkier but there's only a very faint trace of that here, right on the very end. On the other hand, I like cherry beer to actualy taste of cherries and this does so, quite beautifully. So while it's not as serious as many a cork-stoppered wild ale, it's very enjoyable in its own fun way.

The companion piece is called Oak, and this time the added ingredient is apricot. It's a plain golden colour, and the aroma shows little sign of the fruit, instead exhibiting a mineral spicing of the sort you often find from geuze: that brick-cellar nitre effect. It's even stronger than the last one, at 7% ABV, and again the mouthfeel is weighty, almost chewy. This offsets the sour punch, but here there isn't all the fruit to counterbalance the flavour, so it's plainer overall; or more subtle, depending on one's viewpoint. There is a certain tang from the apricot but it's far from central in the taste. For the most part, this presents like an unadorned lambic, albeit a strong and weighty one. There's a wax bitterness, the same mineral spice as I found in the aroma, and a lightly citric acidity which makes it refreshing and clean, despite the high strength. This is a classy character, wearing the added fruit and the barrel ageing lightly while exhibiting very proper wild beer characteristics.

I had skipped the two new versions of The Eternalist when they first came out, and that appears to have been a mistake. I'm very glad to have been able to catch up, even though I didn't know it's what these were when I bought them. Both belong in the canon of high-end wild Irish beer, and since there likely won't be any more, I recommend picking them up if you see them.