Year-end pints

This month makes it ten years since Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg suggested categories that beer bloggers might like to use for an annual run-down of the best in beer. I've stuck with it steadfastly since, even if I do change my criteria for the winners each year, and sometimes during the process of writing that year's entry. It's not meant to be taken seriously or considered meaningful, is what I'm saying.

2019 has been a dramatic year in beer, in Ireland and abroad. To mull it all over I've chosen something with a bit of wintery heft: Abbaye de Vauclair Biere Ambrée, a large bottle I picked up for loose change in Lidl. They're not lying about the "ambrée", it's a very ambrée hombre indeed: a beautiful clear polished-copper colour with a generous head which expertly laces the glass. I wasn't prepared for how sweet it is; it is extremely sweet, suggesting treacle, muscovado sugar and similar cake-baking ingredients you're not meant to eat raw. I was a few sips in before I noticed the balancing factor: a dry and slightly bitter tannic twang, which I'm guessing has both a hop and malt component. It doesn't stop the sugary onslaught but it does make it manageable, rendering the beer drinkable as a result. The sum total is a beer that's quite light-bodied for 6.1% ABV and tastes like a cup of very sweet cold tea. I quite liked it, but it's not one you can rush, which suited my needs perfectly. And so...

The Golden Pint Awards 2019

Best Irish Cask Beer: Porterhouse Yippy IPA
The decision to replace heavy, resinous Hop Head with pale dry Yippy was not without controversy. For the record I still miss HH's clean punchiness. To begin with, I treated Yippy like a newborn younger sibling, resenting its usurpation. It was some months later that I first encountered it on cask at Porterhouse Temple Bar and finally got it. I suspect the brewery has sneaked a Yorkshire bitter onto the Irish market dressed as an American. On cask it has that same blend of honeyed pale malt and waxy hop bitterness. It's clean, elegant, moreish and generally a fiver a pint. 5% ABV is a bit too high for a proper guzzlable session beer (bring back TSB!) so you have to pace yourself, but the result is very rewarding.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Land & Labour Coolship (2018)
The sour and the funk may become a bit of a theme in this year's edition as some Irish brewers are getting extremely good at this sort of thing. This one, sampled at this year's Hagstravaganza, was damn near lambic-grade and a very clear indication that local brewers are approaching that standard. There was also a blueberry version showing just how easy it is to mess up something this delicate. Steer your Coolship straight and true, and everything will be OK.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Wide Street Saison Sunday
It's their only bottle, but still the best beer they've released so far. I reviewed it here only a couple of weeks ago, but I hope I can avoid accusations of late-year bias by pointing out that I drank relatively few bottled Irish beers this year now that the can is king. I can see this category becoming the purvue of barrel aged beers. That said...

Best Irish Canned Beer: Wicklow Wolf Pointy Shoes
The canned Golden Pint has to go to a dark beer as we have had a slew of worthy examples from various local breweries in recent months. Larkin's Morrigan, White Hag Festa Nuda, Lineman's Astral Grains and Wicklow Wolf's own Apex and Locavore all deserve a share in this prize. But Pointy Shoes, brewed to mark Wicklow Wolf's fifth anniversary, and as the valedictory beer from the Bray premises, went beyond what any Irish stout barrel-ager has managed to create thus far.

Best Overseas Draught: Ca' del Brado Û baccabianca
Chasing the grape ales has become a travel pastime for me, one which doesn't always land great beer. I hit the jackpot in Billies in Antwerp, however, with this one from Emilia-Romagna. Ca' del Brado is a brewery now firmly on my drink-on-sight list.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: 3 Fonteinen Cuvée Armand & Gaston 2018
Every year should involve ticking a few things off the list, and I was happy to realise an ambition I'd had since the 2017 Toer de Geuze to go to 3 Fonteinen's tap room on an ordinary day and drink some beer there. And I did, and it was this, and it was very impressive. How much of that was down to the occasion? Who cares.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Crooked Stave Sour Rosé
I had to go all the way back to the start of the year to dig this one out. It's another super-complex mixed fermentation job, this time from the US. And it's permanently available in, among other places, the 4-for-€12 fridge at Stephen Street News. You're in a much better position to argue with me about this one than the previous two, but you have to buy it first.

Best Collaboration Brew: Jackie O's/Cycle Anything And Everything And Nothing At All
The runaway standout beer at the Fidelty beer festival during the summer. You think you've tasted everything that's possible to achieve with barrel-aged imperial stouts, and then along comes this. Fascinating and delicious in equal measure.

Best Overall Beer: Û baccabianca
I know. I'd love to have given this to something local, or to something readily available, but I look back on the finalists and think of my reaction to first tasting each of them, and this was the one that induced the cartoon-character-in-love effect. A-wooo-ga!

Best Branding: O Brother
The brewery's Off The Wall series of collaborations with graffiti artists began last year and has now clocked up two dozen beautifully designed cans.

Best Pump Clip: Five Lamps Tilted Drum
I liked the badge Five Lamps came up with for the Convention Centre's house beer, blending the building's distinctive shape with a beer keg.

Best Bottle/Can Label: YellowBelly Bushido
Well of course it was going to be a YellowBelly one. In picking a pastiche style for this black IPA, artist Paul really excelled himself. The beer was pretty damn good too.



Best Irish Brewery: Third Barrel
This was a tougher call than usual, with quite a few breweries doing amazing work. I'll save a special mention for Larkin's who've had some real stunners coming out especially in the latter half of 2019. But Third Barrel has really been putting the graft in. This year was the first time I found beers to impress me released under their Stone Barrel brand: Slammer and Awesome Sauce in particular. Third Circle's Needs More Cowbell and fruited Brett IPA were highlights, and then all the hyperactive hop activity under the Third Barrel label itself, as well as launching The Format, Pleasuredome and other client brewers. I'm exhausted just writing it down. I hope the pace is sustainable.

Best Overseas Brewery: Tilquin
Our dalliance was brief, but I had a lovely couple of sessions at the Tilquin blendery during this year's Toer de Geuze trying all their various experiments. They've never struck me as a particularly playful producer and perhaps it's the market that's pushing them into doing new things. Regardless, they're generally very good at it, that maple syrup lambic notwithstanding.

Best New Brewery Opening 2019: Wide Street
The promise of this all-wild-fermentation brewery in Co. Longford is enormous and the beers, in general, have been great so far.

Pub/Bar of the Year: La Venencia
Since I first visted this Madrid pub in 2009 it's been a firm favourite. I was actually apprehensive on going back last October, for fear it would disappoint. It didn't; it's still amazing. The best feature is that it doesn't serve beer, only sherry, so I get to put my notebook away.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2019: BrewDog Outpost Dublin
I've only been once and I haven't written about it yet, but I respect the sheer commitment of BrewDog in taking on 1,100 square metres of bar and restaurant space in the Dublin docklands and adding an in-house brewery to it. It's a big place and big things are expected.

Beer Festival of the Year: Fidelity
As usual I feared the worst: big queues and braying edgelords. But Ireland's first all-inclusive beer festival, organised by Whiplash and The Big Romance, was quite chilled in the end. There were lots of amazing beers and, if you didn't spend too long chatting, it was quite easy to get one's money's worth.

Supermarket of the Year: Fresh, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7
It's not what it used to be though I have found myself increasingly coming back to the beer section here, often finding things I couldn't source anywhere else. Supermarkets in general seem to have done away with continuously updated beer ranges -- it mustn't have been sustainable for anyone. Fresh is clinging on, though. Turnover isn't as rapid as you'd find in an independent, though I rarely leave empty-handed.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Redmond's of Ranelagh
I always have to make a special effort to go over, but it's always worth it. The exclusive beers created with DOT are what tipped it into the winners' enclosure for me this year. Shouts-out, of course, to my regular haunts DrinkStore and Stephen Street News.

Online Retailer of the Year: The White Hag
They sent me a free case to test their website, which was nice. It arrived very quickly after I ordered it, which was also nice. And the beer was good. Other than that, I had no cause to buy beer online this year, as usual.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Pierre Van Klomp Says No: Life, Death and the Meaning of Beer
Another default award this, being the only beer book I read this year, and that was in ten minutes over breakfast on the morning it arrived. It's still a beautifully put together piece with evocative photos as well as earthy Belgian wisdom. Thanks to Pierre's literary agents Boak & Bailey for sending it to me.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Food For Thought
You may have noticed the occasional snarky morning tweet from me about the drinks industry. And the occasional genuinely interesting industry news story. Many of these are fuelled by the daily email from FFT, so this is just by way of thanks to the team there for all the hard work they do collecting and presenting Ireland's hospitality news.

Simon Johnson Award For Best Beer Twitterer: @BeerFoodTravel
Liam has been a bit quiet on the long-form front recently, but his snippets of Irish brewing history throughout the year have been enlightening. He takes a good beer photo too.

Best Brewery Website/Social Media: Galway Bay Brewery
I don't think I've ever given the pub taplists on the Galway Bay website a nod, and they deserve one, even if they're not always up to date (has somebody lost the keys to the Against the Grain page?). The Black Sheep is generally spot on, I get a Twitter notification when something new is tapped, and I find that very useful.


And that's another year over. Thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.

On the reintroduction of wolves

There were no half measures in the relaunch that Wicklow Wolf just undertook. It centred around the big and shiny new brewery in Newtownmountkennedy, but also included a brand refresh, a format switch from bottles to cans, and a raft of new beers. Sessioners Elevation and Eden survived the update, while Arcadia has been rejigged from warm-fermenting blonde to fully fledged lager. The IPA, porter and red, however, have been completely replaced, and in this post I'm looking at the new starting line-up, plus a few specials.

Wildfire is the brewery's new take on red ale, or possibly amber, given that it's officially "hoppy". It's quite a dark take, showing only faint red tints through the garnet. This is replacing their Sorachi Red and I get a definite bang of pithy coconut Sorachi Ace right in the middle of the flavour. Around it it's a bit thin, the texture watery and the flavour sharp. The malt side of the equation is understated: no toffee or caramel here; not much more substance than you'd find in a cup of strong tea. This feels tokenistic: we have to have a red; let's do Smithwicks with a more interesting hop. It'll float many a boat I'm sure, but not mine.

The centrepiece IPA is named after another extinct creature: Mammoth. Wicklow Wolf's distant roots are in Colorado, hence their launch with their original 6.3% ABV IPA. That's crazy strong for an Irish IPA so here they've brought it down to... 6.2%. It's not that different, really: a big hit of grapefruit and orange pith; a malt weight which exists solely to propel the hops. There's a slight metallic tang, but setting that aside it's very clean, delivering the hard 'n' hoppy flavours any '90s kid will lap up. With modern IPA splintering into a million variants, not all of them worth drinking, it's good that there's still a bitter hoppy core present and visible.

It doesn't really make sense to think of Apex as a replacement for Black Perle Porter, but it is the only black beer in the line-up. It's an oatmeal stout at a big 6.5% ABV and plays up to that from the moment the can opens. The pitch-black beer pours out thickly and slowly, forming lots of nicotine-coloured foam. It smells like a turf fire on a cold night: acrid yet somehow comforting, a mix of bitter herbs and burnt toast. The bitterness is intense from the first sip, giving it an almost grassy kick. When this fades there's strong coffee, a tang of tobacco and a light spritz of rosewater. These are all classic, stouty, stout flavours, not quite balanced but skewed towards a very grown-up bitterness. I really enjoyed the effect, and would quite happily have everything ramped up a level or two higher, but I know that wouldn't be to everyone's taste. Recently I wrote how much I enjoyed the straightforward stylings of Lineman's Astral Grains, well here's another very much in that vein.

The sequence hits the crescendo with Pointy Shoes, a bourbon barrel imperial stout. I only just noticed that the branding is still the old one. Well, if you're going to go out, go out on 12.5% ABV. Despite the strength it's very easy going, light on the alcohol warmth and with elements of coffee, coconut, vanilla and churro sauce. With my imperial stout scorecard out I'd say it lacks bitterness, the sort found in Apex, but as a smoothed out barrel-aged take it's up there with the best.

Berliner weisse next, and I think Vice Vice Baby may be the first I tried from the new brewery, back in early October. It's strangely clear for the style: another pure gold glassful. It's not any way sour either. I get a dry wholegrain crispness but that's as close to the style as it comes. There's a briny, sweaty musk and a bizarre sugarpill sweetness. I imagine this is what you'd end up with if you forgot to add the souring culture to a straight-up Berliner weisse, though I'm sure that's not what happened. The end result is a clean and thin beer, screaming out for a tartness which it just hasn't been given.

I was privileged to have visited the Wicklow Wolf hop farm back in the summer. They've been turning out the Locavore series from there this last few years: an annual all-Irish beer (or two) in a spread of styles. Saisons, blondes and pale ales have all lent themselves to the muted tones of Irish-grown hops, but this year they've gone dark: Locavore 2019 is badged as a dry Irish stout. Well, it is and it isn't. For one thing the ABV is up at 5.5%. For another, the flavour is beautifully complex, bringing rosewater, cocoa, tar and pipe tobacco. It's a lot more complex than the norm. I find it hard to believe that the hop character here was grown in Leinster but it really forms a centrepiece to this. We're far from everyone else's idea of Irish stout: this is closer to the top end of London porter. Maybe it's time we reclaimed it.

Last of the string is Dawn of the Red, an imperial red ale aged in bourbon barrels. It comes out at 9.4% ABV and smelling all of that: big on the oak, coconut and red liquorice ropes. The texture is heavy and that's fully part of what it does; the oak vanillins spread quickly to the back of the mouth from the first sip onwards. Though the wood is sharp, verging on harsh, there's a smooth and balanced aspect, brought by the malt. A lot of work has gone in to making this beer taste like this. I like the end result: all the malt and all those bourbon barrels. If super-strong barrel aged red is your schtick, here's 440ml of it.

Do one thing and do it well is very much not the Wicklow Wolf motto, if these early offerings are anything to go by. In particular, the brewery seems to have found a new knack for stout. Long may that continue.