Time bending

It's hard to discern what "Vintage" means on the label of Beoir Chorca Duibhne's Vintage Ale. No information is given on the label, other than it's "warm & dark" and 5.7% ABV -- not even a year, which I thought would have been an essential part of the concept of vintage. I'm fine with warmth and darkness, though. Let's see where that gets us.

The beer is ruby rather than black in the glass and smells a little roasty like a porter but with a forest fruit element, like... no I'll save that comparison. There are no sudden twists on tasting. Cocoa and coffee are the beginnings, a mix of sweet and dry, and then there's a gorgeous yet understated mix of blackberry, red cherry, pipe tobacco and liquorice. The bitterness rushes over the tongue before spreading a candyshop sweetness across the palate.

My first impression, referenced above, was that it tastes like English old ale, a beer style that's very nearly dead and unappreciated by every beer writer except me. It's drier and roastier than the classics (Theakston's Old Peculier, Arundel Old Knucker) but it does share that dark fruit and chocolate character. I love it, and I don't care that "vintage ale" is a bit of a daft name for it, though in fairness old ales are rarely old. It's wholesome, deep and complex, offering the fun bits of porter, bitter, brown ale and schwarzbier without fully committing to any of them. This is a beer to enjoy on its own terms, and I did.

Galway Bay provides us with another temporal anomaly in the form of Counting Off The Days. This is an imperial stout of 12% ABV, and although they don't say it, I assume it's the beer which goes into barrels to emerge later as Two Hundred Fathoms. Since they now make flavoured variants of Two Hundred Fathoms I guess it's only fair that they let us try a completely naked version as well. There's understandably very little of it in circulation (although...) and I have the brewery to thank for sending me an unlabelled can earlier in the year.

It's hella viscous, the bubbles struggling to make their up through the dense black liquid on pouring. They settled to a thick cream-textured head the colour of a nicotine-stained pub ceiling. The aroma suggests big bitterness to come: hot tar, Balkan tobacco and green veg boiled to mush. Yummy. But there's much more than that. The flavour is quite busy, with the green-hop acidity rubbing up against luxurious chocolate and a whole lot of booze. It's fun, but I can tell it's not really designed for drinking fresh. Everything going on needs to calm down and mellow out. It would be very interesting to see what happens when this ages without the barrels. If I see any for sale you can expect it on Stash Killer! in seven or eight years from now. For the moment, it's an interesting curiosity, a precursor to what will likely be a superb vintage of Two Hundred Fathoms, but not something I'm clamouring for the brewery to make into a regular release.

And that's time, everyone. Come back soon.

Oldies but goodies

There's an e-mail address from an ancient UK ISP on the label of Arundel's Old Knucker, one of those domain names that will forever be associated with dial-up modems and plain-text websites. It shows that when Arundel do an old ale, they do it properly archaic. Old ale is one of my consistent favourites among UK beer styles but it's almost impossible to get hold of here (Clotworthy Dobbin is probably the nearest approximation we have, though it's dubbed a "ruby porter" by its creators and has more of a hop character). So when I was in Brighton last month I grabbed what old ales they had on the shelves of Waitrose and made off, grinning manaically.

Old Knucker (no I don't know what the name means and I'm not going to look it up) doesn't disappoint either. It has that gorgeous limpid ruby colour topped with a loose off-white head derived from very gentle conditioning. The heady aroma promises chocolate covered raisins, but there's even more inside. The first pull (it's definitely a beer for taking pulls of) confirms that beautifully light cask-like sparkle revealing succulent damsons, milk chocolate and sweet pipe smoke. A rich and comforting beer that I really wish I had more of.

I was expecting something very similar from Hepworth Classic Old Ale, and sure, it poured the same lovely dark red hue. But the taste experience was quite different. Only traces of the fruit and chocolate are present, mostly in the aroma. The taste is startlingly dry and roasty, reminding me a little of the lovely red ale that Carlow make for Aldi. Additionally there's a sulphurous bite making it extra crisp and complex, and very drinkable. This is perhaps not an old ale as I would normally recognise it, but it's still very very tasty.

Hooray for old ale, and more of this kind of thing please.