Hazy recollection

It's the season for pointless time-consuming traditions and dull end-of-year lists: yes, The Golden Pints are upon us once more. 2018's deliberation beer is one I acquired at the Mikkeller takeaway bar in Copenhagen airport with my final fistful of kroner. Hazy is a New England IPA of 6.6% ABV, an opaque orange-yellow, topped by a thick white head. In the minus column there's a pinch of dreggy yeast and a rising garlic note as it warms; the principal plus, however, is a massive juiciness -- mostly sweet orange but there's a balancing citric bitterness too, from the Simcoe, I'm guessing. Three months on from canning and this was still a perfect example of this style done well. It does need to be consumed cold, though: I was only half way through deliberations when it warmed up to the point of losing juice. A lesson for me to make my decisions quickly. Anyway, without further review, here are...

The Golden Pint Awards 2018

Best Irish Cask Beer: O Brother: The Whippersnapper
This cask-conditioned Berliner weisse ran a close race against another oddity, Third Barrel's Raspberry Stout, but just pipped it.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Urban Brewing: Barrel Aged Sour
Barrel-aged pale farmhousey beers rocked my world this year. Extremely honorable mentions go also to Rascals for the Chardonnay Sparkling Ale and DOT's Dainty Wood. This one, while perhaps not the most complex, had the best mix of classic wild-fermented and wood-aged flavours, very like an authentic Belgian gueze. I hope they can recreate it, and that there are customers in the local market who appreciate this sort of thing.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Larkin's: Baltic Porter
This award is based not solely on the quality of the beer -- though that is consistently excellent. It's almost as much the availability: this one has been there for me at regular intervals throughout the year; occasions when I just want something unfussy but great to drink. It looks to have been renamed now, as "Dark Matter", but it still tastes perfect.

Best Irish Canned Beer: Hope: Hop Hash DIPA
My standout from The Big Grill Festival this year translated perfectly into canned form. Citric hoppy deliciousness.

Best Overseas Draught: Purpose: Smoeltrekker #68
Another one of those barrelled sour blondes, hailing from Colorado but showing up on tap at the Leuven Innovation Beer Festival back in the spring. All the oaky spices.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Sierra Nevada: Tequila Barrel Otra Vez
I've been a bit grumbly about Sierra Nevada's harmless gose-alike but I was genuinely wowed when I happened across a bottle of the tequila-barrel-aged version.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Collective Arts: Ransack the Universe
In Ireland, "Overseas canned beer" is mostly going to mean "some murk from England with an abstract design on it" -- there are a hell of a lot of those on the market at any given moment and I don't bother trying to keep up with them. So instead I'm picking some murk from Canada with a sort-of abstract design on it, and very nice it was too.

Best Collaboration Brew: Jester Zinne
This one from De La Senne and Jester King -- barrels, funk, sour: you get the picture -- could equally have been awarded Best Overseas Bottle but I'm slotting it into the collaboration bracket where there's less competition instead.

Best Overall Beer: Urban Brewing: Barrel Aged Sour
Scouring the above for the most memorable, pupil-dilating, beer experience of the year, and I think this is the one.

Best Branding: Kinnegar
The Donegal brewer switched its minimalist monochrome designs to the new busy cartoon bunnies and their associates. I haven't seen it on a label yet, but I loved the design for Rustbucket, featuring the late eponymous doggo.

Best Pump Clip: Beerbliotek: Shakes Fist Angrily
Still amused by the sheer daftness of this.

Best Bottle/Can Label: YellowBelly: Covert Operation
The Molloy's guys and YellowBelly are up to something. With a fox.

Not a skull to be seen.

Best Irish Brewery: Rye River
2016's winner returns to the top spot, though for different reasons this time. It still does excellent contract-brewing work, and the Brown Ale and Saison for Lidl were two very strong new strings to its bow, but the five limited edition seasonal launches really marked out the progression of 2018, and we got hints too of a pilot series a few weeks ago. The Rye River brand has come of age, and attached itself to some very fine beers.

Best Overseas Brewery: The Exchange
In a busy and diverse drinking year, no single overseas brewery stood out for me. This award is going on visitor experience, then, and the smart, bijou taproom of this place in Niagara-on-the-Lake, visited in September. It brews good stuff too.

Best New Brewery Opening 2018: Four Provinces
OK technically this was a 2017 launch, but it was 2018 before the new range started getting out and about. Láidir in particular was the best new regular-production Irish beer of the year, but there's no Golden Pint for that.

Pub/Bar of the Year: UnderDog
In the grand tradition of the previous year's Best Newcomer winning Best Pub this time round, UnderDog takes the prize. Anyone who's spent any amount of time there will know why. It's always entertaining and only a small part of that is because of what's on tap. Shout-out to Paddy, Barry and Chris who make it what it is.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2018: GIST
I think I'm right with the timing here: I don't see any reference to its existence prior to last January. Anyway, Brussels has a new star in its pub firmament; a lovely blend of traditional cosy brown-café vibes with a bang-up-to-date modern beer list. A most honorable mention goes to the Metalman bar in Waterford which opened just over a year ago, pouring great beers and hosting fun events on the city's quayside.

Beer Festival of the Year: Hagstravaganza
The only Irish beer festival that people talk about; the centre of the calendar for the last two years; performing stellar geek-service while also being just a fun day out. After a few hiccups in year one, the 2018 outing nailed it.

Supermarket of the Year: Lidl
Time was this was a back-and-forth between the supermarket near work (Fresh in Smithfield) and the supermarket near home (SuperValu Sundrive) but both have lost crucial staff resulting in the loss of elite status. I'm going with Lidl instead this year, largely because of the Rye River commissions above, as well as the exotic oddities from the summer. More tickworthy exotic oddities please!

Independent Retailer of the Year: Stephen Street News
Unlike the supermarkets, Martin's and DrinkStore have done nothing at all wrong, but here comes the disruptor, jumping on the aluminium bandwagon and making exemplary use of price-points and social media to corner the poorly-served ubergeek end of the Dublin beer market. Long may it continue.

Online Retailer of the Year: YellowBelly Brewery
I don't usually award this because I don't buy beer on the internet, except this year I did: I joined the first outing of the YellowBelly Beer Club which meant four six-packs in the post. As I mentioned in relation to the last one, they weren't all brilliant beers, but there's still a bit of fun in parcel-post beer delivery, especially when it's a local outfit rather than a, say, Scottish or pseudo-Danish one.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: The Good Beer Guide To Belgium, 8th ed.
The mostly-annual award for The One Beer Book I Read This Year goes to Joe and Tim for this one. It is genuinely good. You don't get Golden Pints, or any pints, for putting out dreck.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Every Pub In Dublin
I've mentioned in previous years how I'm a sucker for a grand project. Dublin has two which came to my attention this year, attempting to visit all the pubs in Dublin (for a given value of "Dublin"), so shout-out to Dublin By Pub, but for sheer indefatigable doggedness, and regular laugh-out-loud pen portraits, this one goes to Cian.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: @Bill_Linane
It was well worth keeping a blackboard record of how many times each Twitter account amused me during 2018. The final tally shows Bill to be out in front. Well done Bill.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: Eight Degrees
The most frequent winner of this category takes it again and godammit it shouldn't be this easy for them. It's not rocket science for breweries to put information about their new releases out on the internet so customers can see what they're buying when they're buying it, yet Eight Degrees is the only one that has the information to hand when I want it. A spirited, and much appreciated, attempt was made on Instagram by Whiplash but they still didn't manage to document all their own releases (Love is Lost? Hello?). Meanwhile, every other Irish brewery: pleeease do this better.

And there we are. Can you believe that that's ten whole years of Golden Pints? Madness. Big thanks to Mark and Andy, of course, who originated the categories, ones which are looking a bit clunky for the current beer scene, but my unhallowed hands shall not disturb them, or the beer world's done for. See you in 2019!

Sierra all the way

I honestly thought they had just changed the can design. It's an indictment of slow-moving beer in Irish shops that I didn't bat an eyelid when both designs sat side by side for month after month. A conversation with the eminent Bodge about the place of lime in brewing led me to the revelation that there were, in fact, two forms of Sierra Nevada Otra Vez gose, the new one with Lime and Agave. In my defence, the writing is very small.

What Bodge was saying was that lime tends to completely take over the flavour of anything it's in, and that's definitely the case here: there's a sweet hit of lime ice lollies (or sorbet if you're posh) right from the outset and nothing much else gets past it. Maybe some of the sweetness is agave syrup, but that doesn't save it from being quite one-dimensional. Like way too many beers with the word "gose" on the label there's only the faintest, and missable, hint of salt and absolutely no coriander.

This is pleasant in an unbeery, fizzy lime cordial sort of way. I can imagine it quenching many a desert thirst in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. A dismal autumnal evening in Dublin didn't really give it any contextual advantage, however.

My Otra Vez explorations continued a while later at a Sierra Nevada extravaganza hosted by The TapHouse in Ranelagh. Among the line-up here was a third iteration: Tequila Barrel Otra Vez, a natural progression, of course. This was far from one-dimensional. A honeycomb aroma introduces it and the flavour is sweet and dessertish with a sticky texture to match, while also being sharp and tangy thanks to the irrepressible lime. Mead came to mind, as did Tokaji: it's that sort of effortlessly classy complexity. I'd never have thought that a novelty beer like Otra Vez could be poshed up like this, but it seems all you need is a tequila cask.

Among the bottles on the go was Sierra Nevada Vienna and I was startled to learn I had never tasted it. It's a Vienna lager, of course, though looked a little pale in the dim light, golden rather than the copper shade I would expect. This is a beer of understated balance, with a smooth biscuity sweetness and a tang from noble hops which doesn't turn acridly grassy as they sometimes do. I miss the dark malt richness, the melanoidins, but that doesn't seem to be the direction the brewery has taken this one. While unexciting, it's very well-constructed and doubtless exactly what it was intended to be.

And there was another quartet of little green cans, following on from the Fresh Hop set last autumn and the Southern Hemisphere ones several months ago. This time each uses a single iconic variety of American hops.

Citra IPL is 5.5% ABV with a decently clean grain base. Onto this is grafted a mild lime bitterness, very noticeably citric but not overdone. There's a surprise peppery complexity in the finish as well. India Pale Lagers rarely wow me, and this one doesn't, but it's fun and refreshing which is all that's required of it.

We go up to 6.7% ABV with the Amarillo IPA and I got a shock in the aroma here: caraway! That's not something I've ever associated with this hop breed. There's a surprising, and disappointing, lack of fruit in the flavour. Instead it's all seed husks, fried onions and alcohol, very far from orangey Amarillo and therefore a poor showcase for it.

Matters got even worse when it came to the Mosaic DIPA. This is harshly savoury, as can happen with Mosaic, and there's none of the juicy tropicality it imparts when used well. Somehow it also comes across dry and plasticky, the 8% ABV giving it a cloying claggy quality. No fun at all.

I missed out on the fourth one in the set on the night, El Dorado Session IPA, but picked it up in an off licence a few days later. It's clear and golden, with a muted aroma, though one which does show the signature tropical chew-sweets of the hop. Phew! It tastes lightly lemony, dusted with a citrus perfume and has a smooth and easy-going texture, filling out its 4.6% ABV fully without being any way thin. It's not quite as fruity as I was expecting, the hops bringing a bitterness I don't associate with the breed but which helps balance it well. I could definitely imagine a session on this.

Not for the first time the lighter ones in the set are the most enjoyable.

We finish on a different lighter note: I was surprised and intrigued when I first saw Sierra Nevada's California IPA on tap in 57 The Headline. It's a rather inauspicious name. Turns out this is their 3 Weight session IPA rebadged for the European market. It's a very sessionable 4.2% ABV and an innocent pale yellow colour. There's a beautiful, luscious soft fruit flavour, all fresh peach and honeydew melon. This contrasts with a more serious oily-dank aroma. A certain dirty yeast grit creeps in as it warms but that's very mild and does nothing to dull the zingy fruit. Dare I throw in a Little Fawn parallel? Go on then: it's very nearly that good. This is the beer to choose on dark evenings when you need a reminder of what summer tastes like.

Thanks to all at The TapHouse and Grand Cru Beers for providing most of this lot. I'm never stuck for something to write about with Sierra Nevada.