A lesson in lager

I was very sceptical going in to Franciscan Well's latest collaboration, with their Molson Coors stablemates, Staropramen. I'm not even sure what the name is: the badge says "Franciscan Well Docklands Series Staropramen x Pilsner", so pick the title out of that word salad. Staro is far from the top tier in the Czech lager stakes but does perfectly acceptable stuff by Irish standards.

And this one is more than acceptable, heading fully into good. It's a lovely rose gold colour with perfect head retention, looking built for one of those hefty handled Bohemian mugs. The aroma suggests Saaz and nothing but: moist grass and slightly spicier rocket. That continues in the flavour, joined by quite a strong buttery note, extremely similar to that found in genre-definer Pilsner Urquell. It's set on a wholesome biscuit base while the finish delivers a burst of flowers and minerals, like classy bathsalts.

I've seen a brewer describe collaboration beers as a form of professional education, and I fervently hope that this is the case here, that the folk from Prague came in to show their Cork colleagues how to make pilsner properly. If Archway had tasted like this I would have consumed a lot more of it.

Lager season

It's nice to see breweries and pubs making a bit of an effort around seasonality, and Oktoberfest time brought multiple opportunities around Dublin to drink appropriate lagers.

That said, I've had Sun Spots from Outer Place Brewing sitting in my fridge since the summer, which has been far too long. They describe this as a West Coast Pilsner, although there's a haze on it which calls to mind the other sort of IPA. I take it that the description is meant to imply hops, and it certainly has those, smelling like fruit candy and tasting extremely zesty with a sweet backing, like cloudy lemonade or lemon drizzle cake. That's down to the presence of Citra, Mosaic and Idaho 7. I know there aren't any real lines between hopped-up pils and cold-fermented pale ale, but for me this falls more into the latter. The fruit character doesn't leave room for pils crispness, and without that I don't think it can claim to be a pilsner. Regrdless, it's a lovely beer. 5.2% ABV is perhaps a little on the strong side for something so refreshing and thirst-quenching, but if that's what it took, that's what it took. Outer Place doesn't have a core range, that I know of. This beer is a better candidate for any hypothetical one than all of their haze.

It was nice to see The Porterhouse leaning into its new status as a contract brewer by flagging that their seasonal Festbier was brewed by WhiteField. It shouldn't be a mystery and WhiteField is a trusty brewer of traditional European beer styles. So, I would love to say that this is a good example but -- oof! -- the diacetyl. There are those who say it isn't necessarily a flaw. Pilsner Urquell has a substantial fanbase, after all. After the initial shock of big butterscotch, I did begin to adjust. It's a sweet lager, bringing hints of brown sugar and fruitcake. I guess, as a party beer, it's meant to taste bigger and bolder than the norm, but it needs hops to balance the all-in malt, as any Urquellite will tell you. It's also not especially strong at 5% ABV. I'm really not sure whether to flag this as flawed or simply not to my taste. Either way, I wasn't feeling the need for a full litre.

More autumn lager is a bonus. Nobody said they had to be precisely to style, however.

Two faces of pale

I like that we've got to a stage in Irish brewing where the top tier do more than merely say "here's a lager and a pale ale". We get details, sub-genres, and I'd like to think that's more to do with consumer demand than brewers' boredom. Consumer demand is what will ultimately lead to better beer quality. All of which is a blathery introduction to this lot from Galway Bay Brewery: two pale ales of the hazy New England sort and a self-consciously Czech-style pale lager.

A pale ale called Little Feelings featured in a round-up last May. That turned out to be merely the first in a series of pale ales of the same name, the second of which is brewed with Azacca, Eldorado and Idaho 7 (or "Azaccza" as the front of the can would have it). The ABV drops a little, from 5% to 4.6%, though it's still opaque and bright yellow. I expected sweet and fruity candy from these hops but it's actually quite pithy, with a touch of coconut. If you'd asked me without telling me I'd have sworn that something like Sabro was involved. The low strength makes it easy drinking while the oats prevent it from turning thin. You get your money's worth out of the hops, to the point where it's maybe a little too intense for a session, but one can was good fun.

Little Feelings: Nelson Sauvin was hot on its heels, and the strength is rebalanced with 5.3% ABV this time. Still yellow, but it looks a little less murky to me; translucent rather than opaque. The aroma is subtle, though the ripe lychee funk of Nelson Sauvin is unmistakable in it. The flavour too is thoroughly Nelsonised, starting on a flinty mineral bitterness before proceeding to gooseberry, white grape and a mild guava tropicality. There's a less typical damp-grass effect as well, presumably a throwback to Nelson's German roots. That adds to the overall bitterness and, like with the previous one, the effect slows down my drinking. Though broadly New Englandish neither of these has the smooth vanilla and/or juice that tends to come with haze. I'm not complaining: here is yet another assertive and flavourful expression of Nelson Sauvin from an Irish brewer. I am far from bored with them.

And so to the lager. Bitter Pil is, I think, the first Irish beer to describe itself as "světlý ležák", specifically of the 12º variety. It's a bold claim given the tight strictures under which Czech beer is produced. So... yes to decoction mashing, yes to Saaz hops, yes to a Pilsner Urquell yeast strain, yes to 5% ABV and yes to three months of lagering. Even still that wasn't enough to make it clear so we're very much dealing with the nefiltrovaný sort of thing, with the resulting slightly fuzzy texture. There is also the fuller, slicker body you get with decoction and lots of an almost rye-like concentrated bitterness from the Saaz. In combination that creates a long-lasting bold flavour; no generic fizz here. The aroma is surprisingly slight for all that, with just a faint malt sweetness and herbal piquancy. Purely on personal taste, I think I would prefer more crispness to the whole picture, so it's either back to the tanks for another three months or, dare I suggest, a spot of filtration. As an Irish take on a Czech original, however, it's pleasingly convincing: a wholesome Urquell clone, minus the nasty diacetyl. I was delighted to hear this week that a tmavé will follow and I'm looking forward to seeing the same attention to detail applied to that.

It's refreshing to see a brewery that isn't simply chasing trends in an effort to seem relevant. I sense a genuine love of the art here.

Good night, Vienna

Carlow Brewing Company has really begun to flex its international muscles this year. I covered the arrival of beers from London's Gipsy Hill a few months ago. Then Vienna-based brewery Muttermilch landed in to Urban Brewing for a night in April. They brought two from their core range and a collaboration they'd done with Carlow.

You won't find me passing up the opportunity to try a Mitteleuropa pilsner so I started with Bitta Von Tresen, a pale yellow 5.1%-er. It's as big-bodied as the ABV suggests, with a creamy butteriness not at all dissimilar to Pilsner Urquell. And like Urquell this is balanced against crisply bitter fresh-cut grass. The tap was playing up so servings were slow and foamy, but I could have quaffed a lot more of this, given the opportunity.

But I had to move on, to the inevitable Vienna lager, Wiener Bubbi. The copper colour was proper, though the aroma strangely sour. That was present in the flavour too, though toned down by more orthodox bourbon biscuit. The bitterness level was higher than I like in the style, and failed to bring with it any pleasant hop taste. The end result was a jangly disjointed beer, lacking smoothness and impossible to relax into. A taster was plenty.

The evening's novelty was Coffelia O'Hara, a stout which was a joint effort between the breweries. Its aroma is quite severe -- sharply metallic -- and the texture rather thin, even for just 4.7% ABV. The flavour rescues it somewhat, being sweet with a luxurious coffee-cream chocolate truffle effect. Subtlety and complexity are not included with the deal, and you really need to like coffee to enjoy this. I don't mind the occasional coffee sledgehammer of an evening, however.

Cheers to the Carlow Brewing team for the event. There was Hungarian cider too, which was enjoyable, but not my beat. And there's more to come from the O'Hara's import trolley in a future post.

Slav to the rhythm

A swift dash along the taps in Dublin's top Czech pub Pifko today.

Lately the management seem to have hung their hat on the Moravian Pivovar Litovel as the house brand, beyond the usual standard ones. Moravan is the pale lager, one with a slightly buttery aroma starting out. Heh, who do you think you are? Pilsner Urquell? Heh. For better or worse (better, IMO) this doesn't come out in the flavour and instead there's a wonderful unexpected floral taste, all lavender, violet and other breezy bucolic blooms. It's not sweet with it, offering a dry carbonic bite to balance it, and then finishing flawlessly cleanly, disappearing politely off the palate, ready for the next mouthful. This definitely has a character all its own, not just another Czech lager. I was intrigued to find out what happens when the brewery goes dark.

Litovel Dark is, predictably, the result. It's only 4.8% ABV but crams the favour profile of a beer twice its strength into that. From the powerful rubbery aroma, to the thick treacle texture, to the throat-scorching roast, this beer fights any effort to relax into it. As such it's not very enjoyable and almost the opposite of what I want from a Czech tmavý lager. This might suit some weirdo out there looking for a session-strength Baltic porter, but it definitely wasn't for me.

There's a nod to the non-tradtional styles on Pifko's bar, in the form of Flying Cloud IPA from Pivovar Vysoký Chlumec. In the way of eastern European brewers making IPA, they seem to have decided that it should be a huge and sticky maltbomb infused with a powerful floral perfume. The citrus notes that have made American-style IPA a desirable commodity worldwide do not appear to have been part of the plan. An exotic jasmine spiciness helps offset the heavy strawberry syrup sweetness a little, and the base beer is lager-clean, not spending an unwelcome amount of time on the palate. It's still not a great example of an IPA however you slice it, and again tastes much stronger than its actual ABV of 5.5%.

I went to Pifko looking for a good alternative to světlý ležák but the golden lager was the best thing on.

Maybe the Slovaks can help. A few months ago I encountered Zlatý Bažant's Medový Porter. The name means "honey" and while it's sweet, and a strong-ish 6.7% ABV, it's quite a gentle beer, offering comforting chocolate and plum notes with a pinch of light roast. There's a certain liquorice bitterness which calls Baltic porter to mind once more, while the fruit side introduces elements of dark Belgian ales. Nothing fancy and nothing difficult, it's an all round pleasant dark beer. Thanks to Reuben for sending it my way.

A new dawn

It was a dark and frosty midwinter morning when I arrived in Andrew Jorgensen's car to Boyne Brewhouse. Andrew is head brewer at the brewery outside Drogheda and he had invited me along to witness a special moment in Irish brewing that totally wasn't just yet another beer being created out of the usual stuff. The plan was what we believe to be Ireland's first, and still only, decoction-mashed lager. This slow process is commonplace in Czech and German brewing and involves taking small volumes of wort out of the mash tun, boiling it, and putting it back in as the mash progresses. The idea is to maximise the efficiency of the grain but in doing so it's also said to alter the beer's texture and flavour and is what gives Czech lagers in particular their famous character. (If you want to read more on the technicalities, and words like "betaglucans", Andrew's account of the brewday is here.) In order to use up some Vienna malt that was lying around, the recipe was for what became Boyne Brewhouse Vienna Lager rather than something pils-y. And at the Alltech Brews & Food festival at the end of February it went out to meet its public.

I only had a little taste of it at the festival, which isn't the best way to test out a 5% ABV lager, but I definitely got a sense of central Europe from it. In particular it's the body and the sweetness, the big fluffy candyfloss roundness I associate most with Pilsner Urquell. The flavour has a golden syrup quality, more like Budvar, given a strong greenly bitter kick from the Tettnang hops. What did surprise me, however, was the colour: it's a clear bright gold, as best I could tell through the awful festival beaker. I'd have expected redder for a Vienna lager, and a touch of toffee in the flavour too, but that wasn't there either. No matter. It's a very nice pale lager and a sign that maybe there is something to this decoction business after all.

That was one of a number of new releases from Boyne Brewhouse at Alltech. Up until now, in 17 months of operation, they've only been brewing their core range under their own brand. Now those three have been rebadged, with the names Born In A Day, Long Arm and Pagan's Pillar consigned to the same retirement home as the McGargle family. Born In A Day, now "Boyne Brewhouse Pale Ale", has been reformulated somewhat to be smoother and less bitter. And joining them we had...

Boyne Brewhouse Imperial Stout, available in a number of barrel-aged iterations. I only had a taste of the raw oak one, the barrel presumably a bonus from the company's nascent whiskey-making project. It's 10.8% ABV and very much down-the-line for the style, lots of sticky brown sugar and a serious grown-up bitterness to balance. There were no madly loud oaky flavours, indeed it tasted less oaky than many a bourbon-aged stout I've met, but there was vanilla: balanced, well-behaved vanilla. I'm sure this stout is a great base for all sorts of projects but it works just as well by itself.

I mentioned the brewery's IPA yesterday, leaving just Boyne Brewhouse Saison as the other new one I got to try. No surprises that it's a bang-on, true-to-style iteration of saison, though in the stronger sub-bracket, despite a modest 5% ABV. What I mean is it's big on fruit, with the classic strong-saison melon rind and concentrated peach nectar. There's a definite alcohol heat to all this which makes it a bit tougher to drink than I'd like and which isn't properly held in check by the bitter hop bite or white pepper spicing. It does all the things saison is meant to but I'd prefer if it did them more quietly.

Boyne Brewhouse wasn't the only brewery with new beers to show off at the festival. Tomorrow I'll have a look at some from the other bars, plus some brand new brewers as well.

Clinical pils trial

Pils nut Velky Al is helming this round of The Session on the topic of... pils. "A few, " he requests, "compare and contrast." I haven't done a blind tasting in ages so I was well up for some of that. Al, who lives in the US now but previously in Prague, is of the opinion that nobody does this style better than the Czechs. It seemed obvious that a comparison of American and Czech iterations would be fun.

Representing the master-of-all-styles US beer scene is Lagunitas Pils (355ml, €3.20). My standard-bearer for Team Bohemia is Praga (500ml, €1.49), seemingly produced at Budějovický Měštanský Pivovar, the oldest brewery in České Budějovice (fka Budweis). And while I was selecting that I decided on impulse to add a familiar global brand. Nothing too obvious: solid, middle-of-the-road, UK-brewed Grolsch (500ml, €2.09) should make things a bit more interesting. I have had Grolsch in the past but not any time recently, while the other two were entirely new to me. Here we go then...

Beer 1 was perfectly golden: clear, pale and very attractive looking. The pure white head was composed of large bubbles, just about clinging to each other. The aroma was sweeter than expected but definitely within the boundaries of pils. Though not especially fresh smelling, there was a hint of Urquell: butter, and a little green apple. A pleasant herbal quality was the kernel of the flavour, with a refreshing bitter bite to finish -- waxy rather than grassy. Overall it did come across as a touch plasticky and cheap, but very passable for the style.

Beer 2 was more yellow than gold; a little anaemic looking, though topped by a handsome tight mousse. There was basically no aroma: "smells like the inside of a clean fridge" say my notes. And there's nearly no flavour also, just a sad, stale musty twang. I couldn't pick out any hop notes, let alone anything resembling Saaz or the like. This is grim drinking, a post-apocalyptic pils for opening only when everything else has run out.

Beer 3 was the big outlier. It's orange! The bright clear lurid colour of fake cider, and with a non-existent head to match. The aroma was super sweet, golden syrup spread liberally on brown toast. Like the previous beers this tastes cheap, but in a different way: it has a heavy brown sugar and caramelised sugar flavour, a bit like tramp-strength lager, plus a similar sticky heat. You can pretty much forget about any hop character: there's just a squirt of greenness under all the buttery malt. At the homebrew club it would be deemed a valiant attempt at Pilsner Urquell; as a commercial equivalent it's a total failure.

So nobody of these three is exactly covering themselves in glory; nobody hitting the precise demanding targets of good světlý ležák. But what does it tell us about how pils is brewed in these three countries? My conviction was that decent but unexciting Beer 1 was Czech Praga; that dull, just-about-beer, Beer 2 was Grolsch, and that kooky weirdo Beer 3 was Lagunitas.

Wrong on all counts.

Beer 1 was Grolsch, Beer 2 Lagunitas and Beer 3 Praga. Wow!

It's amazing, for one thing, that the strongest of them -- Lagunitas at 6% ABV -- had the least flavour. Maybe that tells us something about the American approach to pils: that they don't realise it's supposed to taste of something. I know very little of the intricacies of Czech beer production, but might the extra caramelisation of decoction mashing be behind Praga's dark brown sugar quality? Although it's not something I recall in any other Czech beer of the same style. And Grolsch... well... a small round of applause for Molson Coors UK and their expert game of fake-out.

As for pils generally, maybe the famous reliable brands are the ones to stick with.

Born. This. Way

Hop Rocker, 77, Fake: BrewDog has had a number of goes at the pale lager category and none of them has impressed me much. The latest attempt is called This. Is. Lager. and was launched last summer. Understandably wary, I decided to give it a head start by drinking it on a sunny afternoon after mowing the lawn, when little is demanded of a lager other than refreshment.

And I think it exceeded the minimum requirements of the task. Yes it was wet, and cold and crisply fizzy but there's also enough malt body to avoid being hollow or watery. The hops, meanwhile, are in that East Kent Goldilocks zone of imparting a refreshing bitter bite -- grassy, slightly metallic -- lasting long on the palate but without being overpowering. While the body is dense enough to pass for higher than 4.7% ABV, it's not any way sweet or bready. Most of all, the classic lager cleanness infuses the whole making it an absolutely perfect patio quaffer. Put it in a grown-up serving size and you'd have a rival for Pilsner Urquell.

From there to a more recent release from the Scottish brewery: Born To Die, an 8.5% ABV double IPA. Colourwise, it's not that different from the lager, the clear bright yellow a refreshing change in a world where double IPAs tend to be heavy, soupy, orange beasts. The aroma is very, er, BrewDog: a punky blitz of ripe mango, pine resin and dank, with maybe just a whisper of heat, hinting at the high ABV. That strength gets hidden in the fruit-forward flavour. It sings an innocent carefree rhyme of apricots and mandarins with only a slight bitter pinch on the end followed by a dry savoury finish. No heat, no chewiness, just a pure clean surface for the hop fun. I sipped slowly to savour it, not because it was hard going.

I think I can see why the brewery is making a big fuss of this beer's fragility: when the hops die off there isn't going to be any character to replace them; it will not, like some double IPAs, grow up into a decent barley wine. Though that said I'm not about to spend another €11 to test that theory.

Top stuff all round from BrewDog. These plucky kids will do well.

Summer in the mountains

From the official brewery of the American outdoors comes Mama's Little Yella Pils, a 5.3% ABV pilsner lager. Yella is right: a brilliant glaring gold, shot through with just a slight haze and topped by a stiff white foam.

I'm sure a brewery of integrity like Oskar Blues brews this from an all-malt recipe, but there's a certain corny quality to the taste; a sweetness I normally associate with the cheaper 'n' nastier sort of lagers. The aroma is dry, grainy and not entirely pleasant. So where's all the Saaz at? There's a tiny bitter bite -- no more than  a nibble -- in the finish, but none of the lovely grass notes you get in good pilsner. At this point I looked at the bottom of the can and noticed that this was packaged nearly seven months before I opened it. Perhaps that explains some of the problem, though I'm positive that the likes of Pilsner Urquell is more robust than this, distance travelled notwithstanding.

A bit of a disappointment then. It's even a little too fizzy to be properly refreshing. If I were hiking up the Rockies (don't laugh; it could happen) I'd be packing Dale's Pale Ale instead of this.

And staying in Colorado but flipping to the other end of the calendar, I recently acquired this unseasonal can of Euphoria, the winter pale ale from Ska Brewing. It pours the brown-amber of a twiggy English bitter, and it's fairly malt-forward, a warming 6.2% ABV with smooth chocolate flavours infused with oily mandarin and a classy touch of rosewater. While it's far from fresh at this time of year, there's still a lovely sharp citrus aroma, though that's where the big hop action starts and ends. Still, good in any weather, and very much preferable to the elderly pils above.

Tall tales

Steve is hosting The Session this month and has picked Beery Yarns as the topic. I'm by no means averse to a long and rambling anecdote and could easily qualify for the national Pub Bores team, but it's not just back-packing, pint-swilling transcontinental scoopers like me who get a kick out of being the centre of attention, whether anyone's paying attention or not: there are more than a few beer makers who like spinning yarns as well, sometimes with a distinct whiff of brett aroma about them too.

As Exhibit A, I present a new range of beers recently arrived in Ireland: McGargle's. Behind the ubertweeness is the more prosaic Rye River Brewing Company of Kilcock, Co. Kildare, who appear to have eschewed all the troublesome mashtun and fermenter business for now in favour of a licence to distribute San Miguel, an energy drink, and these three beers -- commissioned from the Thomas Hardy contract brewery in the UK, pending the alleged construction of a real live brewery in Ireland.

The McGargle's website is long on story and short on content. Each of the three beers is associated with a cartoon character, though we're not told trivia like where they're made or from what. There's barely even any tasting notes. Whatever they teach at beer marketing college these days, I guess it's not about customers like me. Geoff at 57 The Headline was kind enough to provide me with a tasting tray of all three a couple of weeks ago and this is what I found in it:

I started with the lager, called Gravy Maevey's Pilsner, and pilsner it is not. The brewer definitely had the book open at the right page when picking and adding the hops -- there's a solidly big grassy bitterness in the middle of it -- but they must have been looking somewhere else later in the process: it smells buttery, the texture is thick and slick, and the finish is 100% Kerrygold. On the plus side it puts paid to any suggestion that this is a big industrial brewery's lager re-badged, since most of them would have process controls to prevent lager coming out packed with diacetyl. Drinkers who choose lager because it's bland may be pleasantly surprised by this, but it's not likely to win over any Urquell fans any time soon.

Moving right, to Granny Mary's Red: a dark chestnut red with just a thin skim of foam. It arrived very cold from the tap so it first tasted of nothing, but as it warmed it began tasting of... something very very slightly more than nothing. It's another heavy one, but while it feels like it should be abundant with caramel flavours, there's only the merest hint of caramel and a very slight suggestion of coffee too, but no more than that. Even by Irish red standards, this is all-out full-spectrum high-calibre boring.

And so to the inevitable pale ale, which Rye River have called Knock Knock Ned's India Pale Ale, though I doubt anyone else ever will. The theme of under-attenuation continues -- heavy, sticky -- in a pleasant-looking clear red-gold package. It tastes bizarre, with a kind of accidentally-tasted-aftershave chemical intensity. The big sweetness grinds up against a big artificial-tasting bitterness in a way that's probably supposed to be balanced but is all wrong. One of those beers that makes you want to sit the brewer down and ask what they were trying to achieve, out of sheer morbid curiosity.

I genuinely would love to know more about these beers, what the specification was and what's going on in them. Conversely, I am not on the edge of my seat waiting to meet the newest kerrr-azy member of the McGargle family.

Please, brewers: concentrate on the product quality and leave the beery yarns to the drinkers.

Show us your dimples

Murray's is what you might call a boutique superpub. It's right at the, ehm, unfashionable end of O'Connell Street and has had a succession of names over the years. The current incarnation is perhaps a little bit more pleasant than some earlier versions, and on my visit the food seemed decent and some of the punters actually looked like they were gainfully employed.

What had me in there in the first place was news that they had a house beer now on tap. Not expecting much, I have to say I was extremely impressed by Murray's Lager. First thing that struck me was the serving temperature: see the frost on the glass in that picture? Exactly. I'd say it comes out somewhere closer to a cask ale: refreshingly cool, yet warm enough so you can actually taste it. And what a taste: Saaz, Saaz and more Saaz. The spicy bitter Czech hop is balanced by a candyfloss malt character, and the whole thing is tasty, extremely drinkable, and at a mere €3.30 is one of the best value pints in central Dublin. The cute dimpled pint mug, something I've never been served beer in before, was the icing on the cake.

All other things being equal, I'd assume this was a Czech import. It tastes a lot like Pilsner Urquell. The barmaid in Murray's even told me it was a Czech import. Except, the postering and font badge are promoting it as "Home Grown Beer" with merely "Imported Czech Hops". So, like Pifko Premium, Solas Lite and the TramCo range we have another mystery beer. It's great the way the beer choice keeps expanding, but why does the provenance have to be such a big secret?

Late late edit: apparently it's a rebadge of one from the Chotěboř brewery in the Czech Republic. Thanks Cliodhna!

Odd place for a pint

The Guinnesses had a charming habit of salting the earth and calling it civic-mindedness. When they bought Sweetman's brewery on Francis Street, Lord Iveagh had the site turned into a market (named after himself, of course) and presented it to the City. The extensive Anchor Brewery premises was also given over, to be turned into council flats, when it fell under the Guinness axe. Sweeping down from the old Dublin Liberties towards Usher's Quay on the south bank of the Liffey, Oliver Bond Flats (The 'Bond, in local parlance) have gained no small amount of noteriety over the years. There aren't a whole lot of businesses running in the immediate curtilege of the complex, but it's not surprising that one of the few is an off licence: a garishly-coloured outlet in the Booze-2-Go chain, operating throughout inner city Dublin in those places where the market demands cider and lager on a budget and served through a perspex hatch.

But this particular branch has a secret that it's trying hard not to keep hidden. Next door to the actual off licence, there's a pub. While the outside branding is still that of a downmarket intoxicant peddlar, a bit of money appears to have been spent on the inside, turning it into a central-European-style hostelry under the name Pifko. There's an extensive Slovakian winelist and a menu of Czech and Slovak specialties. Unsurprisingly, of course, the mainstream beers of the Czech Republic are represented on tap -- Staropramen, Pilsner Urquell, Budvar, Kozel Dark -- plus Gambrinus and the pale Kozel by the bottle. In general it's quite similar to the Czech Inn just a few hundred yards down river in Temple Bar. But it wasn't the selection of mainstream imports that drew me in.

Pifko has a house beer, called Pifko Premium. Before you ask, I don't know who makes it or where. The pub claims it's brewed exclusively for them, and at least one source has it that it's made in Ireland. But until I get some corroboration (let me know if you have any) I won't make any statements of provenance [edit: brewed at White Gypsy].

It's an amber beer, of the granát style, I guess, served very very cold. Bitterness is the driving force here. I thought initially that the sharpness was a yeast thing, as it reminded me most of the more severe sort of Belgian wit. But on the end, and especially on burping, it's clear that lots of bittering hops have played a role here too. There's no character I'd describe as malty per se, no caramel or graininess. Instead there's an intense sugary sweetness which is just about detectable and which, when combined with the hops, creates an amusing sort of perfume flavour, one which comes through in the aroma as well as the taste. It's an interesting beer, without doubt, and there's a lot to be said for having a bitter quaffer available for warm-day drinking. I wish Pifko every success.

I've been writing a lot about Dublin pubs recently, which is most unlike me. And I still haven't got around to Tramco, the intriguing new pseudo-brewery which recently opened in Rathmines. The Irish beer revolution trundles on...

In the meantime, I'm fleeing the country tomorrow to hit the Great British Beer Festival. I'll be in my navy IrishCraftBrewer.com t-shirt, most likely loitering at the BSF bar. Say hello if you see me.

Czech, mate

I am agog at the news coming out of the Czech republic from the beer blogosphere's correspondents there -- Evan, Velky Al and Pivní Filosof. It seems that the overweeningly lagered Czech market is starting to expand in fascinating new directions, and the results from the micros are impressive. My only first hand experience of this deliciously velvety revolution is the Kocour rauchbier I sampled in Copenhagen, and I liked what I had. A lot.

I can only pray, then, that Dublin's ex-pat hang-out, the Czech Inn, gets in on some of the new ale action. Though granted that's as likely as an Oirish pub in Barcelona or Bangkok stocking O'Hara's Stout.

Still, I'm encouraged to see that the pub appears to be taking steps to court more local business, with the rebadging (sort of) of two of the house beers. I don't remember which jaunty moniker they've given to Pepinova Destika, mentioned back here, but its stablemate Francinova Dvanáctka now goes by "Frankies". I'd been surprised recently by the sweetness of Pilsner Urquell and I found this one to be only very marginally less malty -- another full-bodied tasty pale lager selling for next-to-nothing.

A further indication of the local attraction of the Czech Inn came while I was ordering. An Irish chap came to the bar, perused the taps (an activity almost unknown in this country), and then asked where the dark beers were. "Upstairs", he was told, so that's where I got the next round in. "Dark" is a serious misnomer, as the darkest they were doing was Staropramen Master, an amber lager. It's not earth-shattering stuff, bittersweet with some good liquorice notes, but in a pub with such an array of pale malty lagers something vaguely different is always welcome.

While I was upstairs getting the Masters in for Thom and Mrs Beer Nut, I spotted Zlatý Bažant on the bar. I knew full well it was a mediocre Slovakian lager, but I figured it would be worth a tick. That's about all I can say for it: lighter of body and milder of taste than any of the Czech beers. There's not a thing wrong with it, it's just nondescript and very easy drinking, which I'm guessing is all that most of the clientele, both local and foreign, are after.

So this is about the best I can do for Czech beer in these parts. However, it seems there's never been a better time to visit the homeland.

Curry source

For my evening curry I thought I pick up another couple of bottles of cheap Asahi from the supermarket. There was none left when I got there, however (demonstrating the efficacy of our new restrictive off licence laws), so I plumped for a lager I'd not had in ages and never reviewed here: the legend that is Pilsner Urquell.

The original beer from Plzeň, an SABMiller brand these days, pours as golden and as fizzy as one might expect. Those very Czech hops stand up well against the hot and sour vindaloo sauce -- the sharp bitterness cutting through the spice with each mouthful. After eating it's even better, refreshing and cleansing the palate. Sitting over it a bit longer, a funny thing happens: as it warms, the malt comes out in the flavour profile. Of course, this sort of beer is meant to be served cold, but at temperatures approaching cellar, and beyond, it offers a wonderfully balanced experience, with the sweet porridgey grains enhanced with the Saaz sharpness.

Pilsner Urquell is a beer worth savouring and I'm glad there was no Asahi.