Q4 results

Today I'm wrapping up my coverage of Open Gate Brewery's 2025 output, with the late autumn and winter offerings from Diageo's Dublin microbrewery at St James's Gate. 

Marking Halloween, presumably, they produced a pumpkin-spice beer, with no actual pumpkin, called Spicy Friars. The latter part of the name is because the beer is based on Smithwick's, albeit at a much higher gravity than that flagship red ale, finishing at 6.2% ABV. It's a clear dark garnet colour, so darker than Smithwick's too, I'd say. The menu tells us that nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom and apple have been added, though one of these completely dominates the others. The aroma is like warm Christmas cookies, huge on cinnamon, plus what I perceived as a menthol effect, however that was generated. Unsurprisingly, that's all the flavour does too, leaving little room for any beer character. While it's quite sweet, there's a tannic finish that helps dry it out, and as long as you can tolerate the exceedingly unsubtle spice, it's not a bad beer. I noted they hadn't given it a Halloweenish name, and couldn't help wondering if the intent was to migrate it seemlessly into being a Christmas seasonal. That would work, though it was gone from the taps before the tree went up.

In the half-pint beside it, Dublin DIPA. I guess the name is meant to be a pun on "double"? It's 7.5% ABV, murky ochre in colour, and very typical of the sort of IPA Open Gate tends to produce. That is to say, it's really not very good. Instead of bright and fresh hops, the flavour is muddy and imprecise. Gloopy lemon curd and chemical perfume leads to a slightly toasted finish which doesn't belong in the style. There's no bite to it, and neither west-coast sharpness nor east-coast softness. Just like the Nitro IPA and Citra IPA produced at the big plant across the street, this tastes overly processed and industrial, though I suspect that the hop-killing Guinness yeast may be the real culprit. It's a disappointment, but at least it's a predictable one.

I'm not usually a fan of the various stouts that the brewery produces, but they hit me just right with the Pistachio Choco Stout which arrived at the same time as the above, and did stay for Christmas. This has been beefed up, but not excessively, to 5.3% ABV, and it is absolutely packed with milk chocolate, smelling like a children's breakfast cereal. Although it's carbonated, the texture is nicely smooth, and the flavour offers plenty more chocolate, in a kind of a fluffy and truffle-like way, plus a bonus nuttiness which must be the pistachio but tasted more like plainer hazelnut or peanut to me. There's a parallel richness of alcohol and coffee, like the liqueur-drenched sponge of a tiramisu, as well as a floral rosewater effect and enough vanilla to bring Baileys to mind. So although the chocolate is its dominant characteristic, and lasts long into the finish, there's plenty more besides. Those who miss Porterhouse's Chocolate Truffle Stout would do well to get hold of this before it disappears. I think it's an even better beer than that one, and one of the best dessertish by-the-pint stouts I've ever had.

Staying dark but switching styles, we also got a new Munich Dunkel, and Open Gate generally knows what it's doing with dark lagers. This one is a very dark brown and was served a little too cold for comfort, but I wasn't in a rush with it. The first sip was a bit bland, but that's cold beer for you. Given a bit of time it reveals itself to be quite a modest and shy Dunkel, low on bitterness and roast. It's still pretty good though, mixing sweet milk chocolate with bitterer cocoa in a expertly balanced way, and holding back on the fizz. That allows one to appreciate a body which is beautifully full for a mere 5% ABV. One wouldn't mistake it for something served from a counter-top holzfass, but the level of smoothness makes it the nearest you'll find in Dublin on a winter afternoon. My final thought as I finished the pint was that I would be very happy to settle into another.

But there was another beer to be ticked: Espionage, a pale ale. There's a story with this one. They say that the brew didn't go according to plan, and the recipe includes squid ink, so maybe it was an attempt at a black IPA. It looks very far from that, being pale orange and mostly clear. Crispness is promised in the description and, OK, it's not flabby like Open Gate pale ales generally are, but it's more bland than crisp. There's a plain white toast base, spread with a thin layer of hop marmalade, and that's it. There's plenty of substance from its 5% ABV but it fails to do anything with it. I'm all for owning one's mistakes, but what is this for? It presents as a pale ale, but hasn't the hops to make that interesting. I'm left thinking of pale milds I've unenthusiastically chewed through in England, but they at least tend to be low strength. This is one of those beers which is unpleasant not because of how it tastes, but because of how much of my time it wastes. It passes as saleable beer, though this brewery could have discreetly disposed of it instead of putting it before the jaded and cynical drinking public, or at least this member of it. Pour one out for the utterly wasted hops.

The Christmas decorations were up when I popped in to try the Winter Cherry Ale. I don't know what makes this wintery, other than the calendar, but cherry it has, being pink and strongly fruit-flavoured. The aroma hints it might be overly syruped but there's a balancing tart zing in the foretaste, more sherbet than jam. It still doesn't taste like real cherry and has a lot in common with the more lurid sort of Belgian cherry beers, the ones where if there's any lambic component it's purely tokenistic. The bite does mean none of it hangs around, leaving a clean albeit watery finish. For 5% ABV there should have been rather more substance, but as-is, it's accessible and fun. As it's essentially a tourist attraction, not many of Open Gate's clientele have much interest in beer, and I can see this suiting that cohort nicely. It's a valid niche, and poorly served in Irish beer.

The season was fully inaugurated with the arrival of Plum Pudding Porter, apparently in its fifth year of brewing. The strength keeps going up, hitting 8.4% ABV this year. The recipe is a convoluted one, with currants, sultanas, two kinds of cherry, vanilla, mixed fruit peel, prunes, pistachio, nutmeg, star anise, cloves and allspice. I can't imagine that's all necessary, though the chocolate and cherry aroma is highly enticing. It's suitably heavy and has a good bitter kick to balance what's otherwise quite the confection. Up front it's the chocolate and cherry again, and really that's plenty by itself. The spice takes a moment to come through and is rather dry and acrid, tasting like dusty beige powder in the jar at the back of the cupboard, which tends to be nutmeg and allspice's destiny, round my place. I understand why they added it, but it doesn't really work. The end result does not taste like a Christmas pudding. It is, however, bloody lovely. The rich combination of big portery chocolate with succulent cherry is a winner and I'm really not bothered about the accuracy. Our national dearth of strong seasonal beers on draught makes this a welcome tradition.

I don't know if Open Gate will be taking its customary extended January break, but I'll be back in the new year regardless, to find out what they put on next.

Real blackcurrants, fake strawberries, and two unexpected pineapples

Time for another random round-up of recent Irish beers, from the usual suspects of hyperactive new releasers, as well as a couple of surprise specials from the quieter ones.

O Brother bopped out another fruit beer as a follow-up to watermelon Walt a few months ago. The Smasher answers the apparent demand for grapefruit pale ales which seems to have almost every brewery making one. And while I stand by my conviction that fruit has no place in a hop-forward beer style, I did rather enjoy this one warm evening in 57 The Headline. More than grapefruit, it tastes like orangeade to begin with: a fizzy and sweet jaffa effect that does wonders to quench a thirst. There's a fairly plain, lightly bittered, pale ale underneath, and then a sharp burn of acidic grapefruit skin in the finish. The hops and fruit don't fight, for a change, though only because the beery element rolls over straightaway. For all that, it's a fun and enjoyable summery sup, if not exactly cerebral or complex.

Also kicking the fruit vibe is Wicklow Wolf Summersalt, a blackcurrant gose. I see what they did with the name there, but don't blackcurrants belong in autumn? (wait, no, that's blackberries. Thanks Simon!) At 5.1% ABV it's a heavy and sweet affair, tasting as jam-filled as the purple colour suggests. There's almost no sourness, and only a vague salinity, meaning it misses on the cleansing, refreshing side of the gose equation. I found it quite sickly, overall, too heavy on the Ribena for my liking.

YellowBelly released a set of classic-horror-themed beers, two of which I tracked down to UnderDog, although the pub's craft-clean styling and lack of tap badges means you don't get the benefit of the usual YellowBelly artwork.

Frankenweisse is 5% ABV, so on the weak side for a weissbier, and the oddness doesn't end there. It looks the part: a hazy yellow with a generous foam topping, but whatever they've hopped it with has produced a crazy combination of sweet apricot and vanilla. The only nod to the classic versions of the style is a pinch of clove; everything else is pure renegade. And it's highly enjoyable for all that: still soft textured, full-bodied and fruity as it should be, just heading off to a different region of flavour country.

The vampiric one of the set was Pale & Interesting, a pale ale which UnderDog was serving on cask. It's excellent too: just 4% ABV and brimming with the complexities that make good English bitter worthwhile. At the centre is juicy peach and apricot, laced around the edges with a floral perfume and finishing with a stern assertive bitterness. It's up to you to decide whether you want to sip and savour it or quaff it down and order another since cask pints are an extremely reasonable €5 in UnderDog.

It just gets pipped at the post where value is concerned by JW Sweetman New England IPA, coming in at €4.90 a throw when you have a JWS Guild Member card. This is may be a little underclocked at only 5.3% ABV but it doesn't suffer in any way from thinness or lack of flavour. On the contrary, behind the yellow murky front there's the classic smooth and creamy NEIPA texture, giving it a rich mouthfeel and superb sinkability. The bitterness is relatively high, the middle flavour full of pith and perfume, but that doesn't last and the finish is delightfully clean without a trace of yeast bite. This beer showed me that this silky style is really well suited to drinking in quantity. If you're sipping tiny tasters or sharing around cans you may be missing the point.

Last of the summer pale ales came from The Porterhouse, the veteran Dublin brewer going for a whole new angle with Grand Day. It's canned, for one thing, and for another there's a prestige combo of hops billed on the label, including Citra, Amarillo, Calypso, Belma and Bravo. Wot no Galena? Though only 4.2% ABV it's a beautiful flawless deep gold colour and smells of strawberries, which the blurb tells me is the Belma at work. Very summery anyway. That's still present on tasting, but there's a more serious lime bitterness backing it up, and also a sizeable dose of biscuit malt and a grainy dryness. While impressive to begin with, once it settles onto the palate it gets a little one-dimensional. Perhaps that's part of the design, however: it's a summer beer being sold at 4-for-€10 and meant for refreshment, not sipping. The little citric jolt it carries in its back pocket certainly helps achieve that.

From session to not-so-session and Yankee Doodle, a new special from Rascals. The story here is that the brewery didn't have enough Amarillo for a the regular run of their white IPA Yankee so used up their last 10 kilos on a double version. It's 7.5% ABV and looks just like Yankee: the same milky colour. The flavour is amazingly clean and well balanced with no sign of the extra strength. In fact, it's not strikingly different from regular Yankee, maybe laying on the orange pith a little more strongly -- that'll be the Amarillo -- but the herbal, floral side is much the same, which isn't a complaint. This is dangerously drinkable and maybe my not-so-session judgement was premature. Approach with caution.

It took me a bit of searching to track down the latest single hopper from Eight Degrees: Denali IPA, the sixth in the series and steadfastly sticking to the fixed ABV of 5.7%. I don't think I've ever had a beer using Denali, a new high-alpha American variety with lots of Nugget in its ancestry. Expecting big bitterness I was surprised by quite a sugary foretaste, syrupy yet tropical, like tinned pineapple. There's a very mild weedy dankness and then the sweetness returns as a kind of lavender floral quality which lingers long into the finish. Rather like its immediate predecessor, the Lemon Drop IPA, it's quite lacklustre, and really missing the big hop punch of the early beers in the series. I'm happy to see the sequence continuing, but I'd like to have the hop volume returned to the higher settings like before.

The Taphouse, meanwhile, has commissioned an exclusive house lager from Trouble Brewing and I nipped over one Saturday evening to give it a try. Situated in leafy Ranelagh, the Taphouse rips through quite a bit of Heineken, I'd say. Parklife is an attempt to give the collars-up brigade an alternative. Manager Adam says the spec was influenced by Weihenstephaner Helles, which is ambitious to say the least, especially given the low 4.2% ABV strength. It does a great job, however, coming out crisp and clean, wearing fresh spinach leaves up front and finishing with sweeter brioche, all on a bigger body than the ABV suggests, with a sessionably low level of carbonation. The price is pretty sessionable too at €5.40 a pint. I'm sceptical of its ability to displace the macro brands but I'm certainly glad that there's a decent quality good value lager available.

I visited Limerick for the first time last weekend, taking in the Treaty City brewery and many fine drinking establishments. There'll be more on what I found there in a future post. But I couldn't resist giving the new outreach beer from Guinness a go: Open Gate Citra IPA. Entirely as expected and in keeping with most of the IPAs they've brewed, this is a greasy beast, thickly textured and resinous. I'm sure that goes some way to explain why the hop flavour is lacking: there's no bite or bitterness, just a vague sense of orange oil at the beginning and no follow-through at all. It's inoffensive, I guess, but I can't see it pleasing the fans of the Citra hop.

Brand spanking new from Galway Bay is Baby Legs, a cryo-hopped IPA with Vermont yeast. I had thought, from my previous cryo experience with Black's Marching Powder, that cryo was a low-bitterness strategy, and Vermont yeast certainly usually is. But this guy goes big on bitter. From the pale and murky pint I got a seriously dank aroma, brimming with weedy resinous funk. The first sip underlines that with a heavy and oily herb flavour full of garlic, thyme and fennel. It's like a Sunday roast without the meat, two veg and gravy. The taste is set on a palate-stripping acidity that ignites the tastebuds in a gloriously fun way. This is how to do savoury hopping properly, with no mild caraway, just a big burning punch in the gob. Towards the end, after it had warmed a little, I thought I detected a smidge of pineapple juice lurking in the background, but if so it was slight and fleeting. Baby Legs is definitely one for the old school west coast IPA fans, in spite of the high-tech hops and on-trend yeast, and it's a better beer for that.

The next beer isn't a new one but it's important to me. I have been searching for Black Donkey's Arigna dark saison for ages but it always eluded me. Fortunately my puppy-dog eyes worked on brewer Richard at Big Grill last Friday and he kindly gave me a bottle of the 2016 vintage. It's rather good too. Lovely and smooth, with light banana esters, a sprinkle of white pepper, some juicy peach and a rich chocolate undercoat. All very jolly, so what's the ABV? Holy shit! 8.3%! This is a monster! In a very convincing disguise. There's a lot of good quality dunkelweisse in the taste, and the feel of one too. Where one might expect the hard alcohol there's just a leisurely herbal aniseed taste. It's a fascinating beer: a sideways twist on saison in several directions at once, but all integrated, with the flavours naturally complementing each other. I would say this, but it deserves to be more available.

To conclude, the first beer from the Carlingford Brewing Company to grace this blog. I've tasted trial versions of various batches over the last year or so but I was never sure if they were the finished product. But this Barrel Aged Red Ale is, because I bought it in DrinkStore. It's based on their Taaffe's red ale, boosted to 7.5% ABV by an ex-bourbon Irish whiskey cask. It's a hazy brownish red colour and smells of oak. The texture is smooth but far from flat, livened by a gentle sparkle. In the flavour the classic summer berry flavours of Irish red ale meld with the boozy oak, though nothing in it suggests whiskey to me. The body is as big as the number suggests, chewy in the mouth and warming in the belly. Not the most complex of whiskey-aged beers, and it never quite escapes its Irish red nature, but it all works rather well.

That's it for now. Tomorrow I'm off to The Great Irish Beer Festival in Cork for the first time and hoping to tick off a few more there.