The blackest day

I confess that I have been most remiss in my marking of International Stout Day up until now. 2017's iteration would likely have passed me by also, were it not for the invitation from Diageo to attend worship in St. James's Gate. The feast day's founder (get well soon Erin!) led the ceremonies at Open Gate Brewery, and for the occasion our hosts had created a couple of new stouts themselves and brought more in from around the world.

Headlining was Guinness's Stouta This World which I got to late in the evening. It's a 6.4% ABV stout with vanilla and bourbon. It didn't do it for me, having too much fizz and not enough flavour complexity. The additions gave it little more than a sweet milk chocolate bar character; maybe a Cadbury's Crunchie on a good day with the wind in the right direction. I'm all in favour of keeping things subtle when it comes to bourbon, but this one omitted even that much.

The best of the house offerings on the night was Guinness Burnt Sugar & Sea Salt Stout. Yes it's very much a pastry stout, totally lacking in bitterness or roast, but it delivers exactly what the long name promises. Sweet and sticky toffee popcorn is the opening gambit, then a long caramel middle, followed by a briny lacing of real salt on the tail. It's hard to argue with the sugary intensity when the sugar is owned up to on the label. A small glass was plenty, even at just 6.3% ABV, but I really enjoyed the unabashed silliness.

Bringing up the rear was Guinness Chocolate and Mint Stout, again at the roughly six-and-a-half per cent ABV mark. This also delivered on the promises but not in a good way. The mint is insanely overdone, so from the first sip it tasted more like toothpaste than beer. When that fades it leaves a savoury herbal effect, like sunflower seeds and fresh grass. It's not offensive, just too weird for my tastes. Sweetening it up might have helped balance it better.

On my very first post on The Open Gate Brewery, back in 2015, I reviewed their Milk Stout, which didn't impress me. Some form of the recipe has now found its way through the Diageo corporate system and emerged as a new, bottled, Guinness Milk Stout. It's still badged with the name of Open Gate, though it would have been brewed using high gravity techniques at the industrial-sized Guinness plant across the street. The ABV has taken a frankly merciful dip from 6.4% to 5%.

It looked good as it poured, a properly dark tan colour to the head. Milk stouts are sweet so I was surprised to find the aroma quite harshly bitter: herbal, with a certain meatiness. The taste is remarkably dry for the style; unacceptably so, I would say. There's a twang which is half iron filings and half smoke, and very little under that, other than plain fizzy bottled Guinness. I used to think that Mackeson's was the basic bottom end of milk stout, but this is a new low. Whoever brewed this must have been a stranger to Left Hand's.

We'll return to Stout Day at Guinness for the next post, to check out the roster of guest beers.

Any given Friday

When I first visited The Open Gate Brewery, Diageo's Dublin brewpub, I expressed some concern about its lack of, well, openness: that you need to plan forward and book in advance to visit, and how this is likely to keep the masses away from what is intended as a reaching-out gesture. I've been back in a few times over the intervening months, though always as part of invitation-only events and I was very curious to see what The Open Gate is like on a typical Friday evening. So, having waited for the brewing roster to turn out some new stuff, I made arrangements a few weeks ago and headed in.

Pleasingly, the system does seem to be working. It was a mixed crowd, including the inevitable tourists, though very much of the prior beer-enthusiast persuasion. And then groups of locals: either workplace groups or friends using it as somewhere to congregate before moving on to the rest of the evening. And the spirit of the venue was also being observed: folk leaned in as the bar staff explained the beers, others wandered from table to table, inspecting and sniffing the jars of assorted hop pellets. It was a bar themed around beer the way almost no Dublin bar is. Score one for the geeks.

But I wasn't there just to look round me. There was beer to be evaluated. The headline draw was 1516 Anniversary Pilsner, created by ex-Alpirsbacher brewer Jasmin Winterer as the Guinness tribute to 500 years of Reinheitsgebot. The sample I got in my introductory flight looked a bit sad: the perfect clear shade of spun gold, but lacking any sort of head. I traded up to a pint before leaving and that's really how this beer needs to be enjoyed. And enjoy you will: a classically grassy noble hop aroma starts it off, as well as a soft rub of light diacetyl. On taste it's perfectly crisp with a light green Saaz bite, gentle white pepper and a mild baked-cookie malt note. The only fly in this ointment is a tiny one: a finish that's just too abrupt, leaving this drinker hankering for more of a bitter smack on the end, where there's only mineral water fizz. But otherwise it's an extremely well executed pils and a beer I would happily drain many pints of were it more widely available.

A tough act to follow, and next along was Offset Rye IPA, launched in association with the Offset design festival a few months back and causing a storm of controversy after the organisers cancelled a previous sponsorship arrangement they'd had with Kinnegar Brewing. Well, as far as the liquid is concerned, the brewers of Rustbucket have no cause for concern. While Offset does contain enough rye and hops for both to be tastable, it's dominated by a sweet toffee flavour which belongs in a red ale, not here. There's a mild rasping rye grassiness and a token tang of generic citrus but not enough of either to make the beer worthwhile. If you came to Open Gate to learn about IPA, this will leave you with a false impression, even if you enjoy the beer, as some people apparently do.

Last of the new ones is a Chocolate & Vanilla Stout, bearing some resemblance to the Milk Stout they were serving at the opening, in strength at least, at 6.3% ABV. I wasn't quite sure what it was trying to achieve. Yes, there is both chocolate and vanilla in the flavour, and it is predominantly sweet, but I think there's been an effort made to avoid cloying sickliness and this has toned things down to the point where the beer lacks distinguishing features. It's quite bland, in other words, and I ended up hankering after the mild sour twang that defines Guinness stout. The body is lacking as well, and the sweetness grows while it warms. Brewing a beer that's both overly sweet and overly thin is definitely a mortaller.

Antwerpen, the microbrewed version of Special Export Stout, was still on tap and I filled out my flight with one of those: and there's that sour twang. I got it to compare with some that they've been ageing in a rum barrel for a few weeks. It's made a huge difference as well: the sap and sawdust of the wood is very apparent, and there's a little of the sugary spirit as well, but what really interested me is how much has been lost: all the lactic elements, and the smooth creaminess is stripped out. The end result is still weighty and warming but the flavour just isn't as complex. It has been dumbed down. I've occasionally suspected that barrel ageing isn't always in the beer's best interests and this is very much an example of when it's not.

So, pilsner aside, I'm coming out of The Open Gate yet again rather disappointed by the quality of the beers. But chalked up on the blackboard was a forthcoming "Tropical IPA". Nothing can possibly go wrong with that, right?

What Arthur did next

The Guinness glasnost initiative has gathered pace over the last year and a bit, from a handful of nosy parkers being shown round the pilot brewery last September to now: the opening of a dedicated bar for serving beers directly from that brewery. Under the new dispensation it's possible to taste Guinness beer which bypasses the multitude of impedances that have, for decades if not centuries, separated the brewers' handiwork from the drinkers' mouths. New hire Jason Carroll, having previously been getting creative at Franciscan Well, is now tasked with brewing fun and exciting, and possibly even unGuinnessy, things, ten hectolitres at a time, for serving at The Open Gate. As he tells it, he has a free hand, access to all the technology and raw materials that Diageo commands and, I think crucially, is brewing at sale strength rather than high gravity. It's an exciting vista and when they invited me to one of their launch evenings to have a look and a taste and a chat, I jumped at it.

The Open Gate has its own entrance from James's Street at the western end of the old Guinness site. The bar is a cordoned off section on a lower level of the building, looking through at fermentation vessels and pipework, though the brewhouse itself is a level up, out of sight to visitors. Decor is minimal: schoolhouse-style distressed wood-and-steel furniture and vintage brewery signage whose authenticity I don't doubt. In keeping with how normal corporate rules don't apply in this space, there's no individual branding on the eight keg fonts: mainstream Guinness and Smithwick's beers are served, but without their tacky illuminated badges: they take their place on the blackboard with the small-batch stuff.

Imperial Dunkel Weisse and Nitro IPA

One intriguing initiative of The Open Gate is to serve those beers that are brewed across the street on the big-boy kit for export but aren't marketed in Ireland. I'm sold on that idea alone. So, first off, I got to taste the much-maligned Guinness Nitro IPA, currently bringing the same bafflement and dismay to the American palate that we Irish drinkers have been experiencing with nitrokeg Guinness for years. First impression, unsurprisingly, is that it's bland and creamy, like every other smoothflow ale. There's an unpleasantly artificial perfume sharpness at the front and a bizarre dry catch in the finish, and then it's gone, leaving no aftertaste. Ordinarily, I'd be happy to leave it at that and move on, but it was free, so I asked for another, and this time took a bit more time over it. There is a proper hop character in this, buried way down and only present when it has warmed a bit. But it's not the bitterness you'd expect in an IPA brewed for Americans; it's the spicy biscuit-laden flavour you'll find in dodgy brown English bitter, though at 5.8% ABV this beer is almost double the strength of one of those. It might be interesting to try it served on cask: I think those hops would get more of an outing. But to be honest it's probably best to leave it aside and pretend it never happened, like so many other Guinness brand extensions.

There were three in-house beers on offer, and I may have detected a bit of new-brewer nerves in them as all were strong and dark. It's hard to go wrong with strong and dark, right? The weakest, at 6.4% ABV, was a Milk Stout, considerably overclocked for the style, I think. It wasn't served on nitro, but was very cold so tasted quite plain to begin with. My first impression was that it was spot-on for this generally pedestrian style, but it woke up later, revealing a sharp carbonic bite and a heavy roast that vied for supremacy with the sweet lactose tang. It's a tough sort of beer to impress with, but I guess there wasn't anything wrong with it per se.

Pictured to the left of the Nitro IPA above, there, is Open Gate Brewery's "Imperial Dunkel Weisse". So not a doppelbock or a weizenbock, then? No. They used Guinness ale yeast for this, so a fully Germanic name didn't seem appropriate. It's 8.4% ABV though doesn't taste it, with the sticky caramel foretaste balanced nicely by a properly bitter finish. It's not Aventinus but it's definitely swerving in that direction: less chewy and with more of a burnt complexity. As an experimental brewpub beer, from any brewpub, it would get a bemused thumbs up before we move on to something else.

You can't be proper craft unless you're doing some barrel ageing, and The Open Gate has got hold of a Scottish whisky barrel from presumably somewhere else in the Diageo empire, though nobody seemed to know exactly which distillery it had come from. They've brewed a dark strong ale and it had been in the cask for about two weeks when we got to it, the ABV hitting 7.4% and rising -- a special arrangement had to be put in place with the resident Revenue official and the cask remained in bond with just the spigot poking cheekily through the wire into the bar. This Barrel Beer wafts vanilla in a big way from the aroma but tastes very harshly woody, yet oddly not of whisky. There's a chewy caramel centre but not nearly enough to balance it. This guy needs bunged up and left somewhere for at least six months to mellow, I reckon. It tastes very much like a first effort.

edited to add: I tasted this again three weeks later and it was much improved: far rounder and smoother than previously, though with a bit of an appley tang.

We were all sent home with a bottle of 6.4% ABV Strong Ale which I'm guessing (though am open to correction) is the base beer that went into the whisky cask (edit: confirmed, it is). It's dark red and smells strangely rubbery: an odd mix of forest fruits and tyre fire. It's rich and heavy; toffee and caramel at the front but immediately overtaken by an almost tart bitterness with a tang of metallic molasses. This is not a nice beer; it's a serious, grown-up and old fashioned one. But that just makes it a bit of a chore to drink. I can see why you'd want to smooth out the edges in a barrel, if that is indeed what they've done.

edited to add: the old-fashioned quality shouldn't be surprising as this is a tweaked version of the Smithwick's Barley Wine recipe, last brewed at the Macardle-Moore brewery before it was closed by Diageo in 2000. It's stronger than SBW's 5.5% ABV and uses Galaxy hops which of course would have been unheard of.

So, while I'm impressed at the concept, the set-up and the scenery at The Open Gate, I remain to be impressed by the beer. On the night, I reverted to Foreign Extra Stout fairly soonish: it was still the best beer present. I hope they don't lose track of the beer as the point of the exercise. I'm also a little dismayed at the access arrangements: they're limited to opening for five hours on just Thursday and Friday evenings, and as a result, you have to book. That's fine for beer tourists looking for an alternative to the showy soullessness of The Storehouse, but I can't see Dubliners making much use of it like that. I do hope a practical solution to allow for walk-ins can be found at some stage. A new beer is promised every fortnight and it would be nice if trying it didn't mean buying a €6 advance ticket for a flight that includes it.

That said, something pale and hoppy would be good next. Is there spare sack of Mosaic lying around?