R you serious?

Tradition dictates that oysters may only be consumed when there's an R in the month. Tradition is silent on when you're allowed to bung them into a stout, however. Galway Bay Brewery's summer stout, Flaggy Shore, bears the name of an oyster farmer of the same name and location, and carries a shellfish allergy warning, so I guess like the Porterhouse's own Oyster Stout it does actually include them in the recipe.

Otherwise it's a straightforward Irish stout: 4.5% ABV and served on nitro. It's nicely full-bodied and leaning to sweet with lots of milk chocolate in the centre, though finishing properly dry, adding a mildly metallic pinch of old world hops in the aftertaste. There's no novelty factor going on, however. I might be picking up a little salt, but no more than you'd get from actual milk chocolate. It seems the poor oysters died for nothing.

Regardless, it's a very decent stout, and consumed on a warm afternoon in Dublin was exceedingly refreshing. I'd happily drink this any time of the year, with molluscs or without.

Drink the past

Bill asks us to make a connection to beers-gone-by for this round of The Session. With beer being a high-volume, rapid-turnover product its history is plentiful and varied. The contexts in which people have brewed and drunk beer, the types they made and the ingredients they used are manifold. In Dublin, porter looms over all. What Flann O'Brien aptly called "The Workman's Friend" was the first style to be made in industrial quantities to meet the needs of large urban population centres. And in maritime cities like London and Dublin, the plain people's drink went with the plain people's food: shellfish. Oysters, mussels, whelks and whatever else could be harvested from the shore in quantity and turned into food with minimal preparation. The Porterhouse has long commemorated this tradition in its Oyster Stout but more recently the Mourne Seafood restaurant chain commissioned one from the Whitewater Brewery in Co. Down. The company has just opened an outlet in the Dublin docklands, making Mourne Oyster Stout available south of the border for the first time.

It's a wonderfully velvety stout, smooth even by the standards of nitrogenated beer. Rich milk chocolate dominates the flavour but there's also a gentle green vegetal hop flavour in the background. A simple and pleasant beer overall, lacking the depth and complexity of the Porterhouse one, perhaps, but not likely to interfere with the taste of your seafood either. On the downside, a pint of this will set you back a whopping €6 so to get your money's worth you'd better enjoy the picturesque setting while you sup.

Porter spent almost two centuries as Dublin's beer of choice before its place was eventually taken by lager and, according to the most recent figures I've seen, two out of every three pints consumed in Ireland these days is lager. While Diageo and Heineken have most of that market sewn up between them, they weren't the first to produce golden cool-fermented beer for the Irish palate. That honour is normally accorded to the Dartry Brewery, in what's now a leafy residential suburb of south Dublin.

Reporting on this Teutonic curiosity while it was still under construction at the beginning of 1891, The Irish Times does note¹ that the founder, Herr Stoer, is seeking to meet an already-existing local demand for lager. Much like the porter brewers over a century previously, in fact. The Dartry Brewery was in a converted mill by the River Dodder and utilised the millwheel to run its machinery. "One of the special features claimed for the new beer," says our Victorian churnalist, "will be its freedom from injurious clarifying ingredients which are so much used in many other beers". The reader is advised that it may be February by the time this slow-to-produce foreign style is available for drinking, and indeed it's May before an ad in the 'Times² lists the nine Dublin pubs where it's available, including Neary's of Chatham Street, the only one still trading today under the same name. Also in the spring of 1891 The Whiskey Trade Review sent its reporter to Dartry³, who gushed "We have been Lager beer drinkers in many places and many climes, but never tasted a finer quality than the glass with which we toasted 'Success to the Dartry Lager Brewery' of Messrs. Stoer and Sons, Upper Rathmines, Dublin."

The fine tradition of riverside brewing in Dublin continues today at JW Sweetman on the Liffey quays, though they have yet to harness the free fluvial power that runs past the conditioning tanks in the basement every day. As it happens, they have a new lager on the taps: Maracanã, brewed for thirsty football fans in the pub for the World Cup. It passes the colour test for an accessible lager: perfectly clear and medium gold. I wish everything else about it were as clean. The hopping has been done generously so there's lots of wax and grass. But there's also a very high sweetness: spun sugar, caramel and a hint of butterscotch too. The effect isn't helped by a sweet-sour green apple aroma. It's back to lager school for Mr Sweetman, I'm afraid. A rare misstep, and it's just as well the whole brewery isn't dependent on this one brew for its success.

A little over two years after the Dartry Brewery began selling lager to the Dublin public, a terse notice appeared on the back page of the paper⁴:

FOR SALE: The Dublin Lager Beer Brewery, situated at Dartry, Rathmines, in full working order. An enterprising party with capital would find it a very good investment. 

And with that questionable claim, Ireland's first lager brewery vanished into history.

Notes:
1. The Irish Times, 8th January 1891, p.7
2. 26th May, p.7
3. Reproduced in The Weekly Irish Times, 28th March 1891, p.6
4.  The Irish Times, 12th August 1893, p.8

Unshellfish

Another cringingly titled beer from Flying Dog: Pearl Necklace is a 5.5% ABV stout made with real oysters. More oysters than hops, in fact, if the ingredients listing is in order of quantity.

A thin ivory foam settles over a dark ruby body and gives off a wonderful heady molasses aroma laced with herbs and spices. The texture is soft and round with nary a prickle from the fizz while the flavour provides a run through of what stout does best: dark chocolate, coffee, treacle, and a tangy vegetal finish. No oysters, though. The Porterhouse's Oyster Stout is similarly smooth and chocolatey, but also has a slightly salty character from the oysters. There's none of that here.

Not much to complain about with this, but if you're looking for something out of the ordinary this isn't the one.

Festival season

It's been a busy few days, beerwise, involving some thorough investigations into the new wave of Irish beers on the scene right now. It began with the kick-off of The Porterhouse Independent Irish Beer & Whiskey Festival on Thursday. This year, joyously, the range is too big to squeeze onto one bar so it took trips to both Central and Temple Bar branches to get a taste of all the newcomers.

Pale ales are something of a theme at the moment, and alongside Carlow's heavy O'Hara's IPA, Whitewater have produced Copperhead: a 3.7% ABV sessioner. It's the dark gold shade of Budvar and gives off a peachy fresh-hop aroma. After an initial strong and waxy bitter hit, it provides punchy citric notes, all on a smooth and very easy-to-drink body. I love this beer, and especially the way it crams so much flavour into a low level of alcohol, guaranteeing the first pint is followed by a second, no matter how many new and interesting beers are on the bar next to it.

At the opposite end of the scale there's Golden Otter, a new one from Franciscan Well. A distinctive, vaguely familar, aroma leapt out of the cloudy brown liquid and continued to dominate the flavour on tasting. It took me a few minutes to figure out what it was, but I eventually pinned it down as Marmite: that sharp, almost beefy, yeast flavour that tends to indicate beer which has been left fermenting too long. I couldn't help but think that this is more a beer for spreading on your toast than drinking. Additionally there's a barnyardy funk to the flavour as well, adding up to an ale perhaps most kindly described as "rustic". Not one I'll be ordering again.

White Gypsy have three newbies out and about at the moment. One, Bruinette, is described as an Irish red and as a Scottish export, depending where you read. It's definitely darker than the typical Irish red with next to no carbonation, leaving it feeling a bit thin. Yet the lack of fizz allows lots of malty flavours come through uninterrupted. I got chocolate, raisins, cherries and some dry roastiness too. Bruinette appears simple but actually packs in a lot if you take your time over it.

On the lighter end of the colour spectrum there's White Gypsy Emerald, a cask IPA. The Porterhouse had this on gravity at Temple Bar where it poured really quite lifeless and dull -- perhaps not yet ready for consumption. Across in Galway, however, The Salt House are serving it from their handpump with a super-tight sparkler ensuring the beer comes to life and performs for the drinker as the brewer intended. Its density means a long wait for it to settle, but when it does you're left with a beautifully clear pale amber ale topped by a firm and lasting blanket of foam. The hoppiness is quite subtle: it's bitter but not intensely so; fruity without being zingy per se. In short, Emerald is a solid, enjoyable sup of the sort that wouldn't elicit any special remarks in Northern England but is fantastic to encounter in an Irish pub.

Last of the Templemore three is Amber, a simple deep gold lager with the smooth body, bubblegum fruitiness and no-nonsense drinkability of a quality blonde ale. This won the Best Lager category in The Porterhouse's competition, and rightly so. I'm not generally a fan of Ireland's microbrewed pale lagers, but this is one I would keep coming back to. For the record, the bottled version of Porterhouse Oyster won best beer overall: not necessarily my choice, but a very fine beer indeed.

There was just one new black beer in the line-up: O'Hara's Easter Stout. It's not a radical departure from the flavours in O'Hara's usual stout, or their cask Druid's Brew: only the emphasis is different. Easter Stout, perhaps appropriately, is all about the chocolate. It's rich, dense and smooth: like concentrating two pints of regular O'Hara's into a single glass. Yum.

I mentioned above encountering Emerald in The Salt House. This was on Saturday in the run-up to the Irish Blog Awards. The Award Fairy passed me by on the night, but landed in the seat to my right when Nine Bean Row deservedly took the gong for best newcomer. Congratulations to 'Neen, and to the dedicated team of staff writers, photographers, researchers and editors whose tireless work makes her blog the success it is.

Meanwhile, back at the pub, James has dealt more blows to industrial swill since my first visit to The Salt House, ditching the last few bottles of Heineken from the fridge and removing the Carlsberg tap, leaving Guinness as the only remaining factory-produced Irish beer in his bar. For now. In addition to the hand-picked import lagers on draught, there's now Galway Hooker Pils. As it happened, Aidan the brewer was in The Salt House late on Saturday evening, and he said it's not an especially inspiring recipe -- more a workmanlike made-to-order job. I have to say I quite liked it. Its best feature is a lack of fizz which makes it smooth and very easy-going. Nothing in the flavour really jumps out, but one interesting feature is a lemony fruitiness before it fades to a dry grainess, just turning slightly unpleasantly to must at the end. Still, no harsh bitterness and no funk: as a pale lager it does actually work better than most brewed around these parts.

And that's the end of the Irish beer for the moment. Festival season reaches a crescendo next weekend with The Franciscan Well's annual shindig in Cork. This year it's not only debuting new Irish beers, but also two brand spanking new breweries helmed by regular commenters on this blog: Cormac and Co's Dungarvan Brewing, and Thom, Paul and Stephen's Trouble Brewing. I'm so excited I'll hardly be able to demand my free samples.

Tribal imbibements

Friday saw me in Galway where one of the ICB lads had arranged a visit to Ireland's newest brewpub, Oslo in Salthill. Straight off the train my first stop was Sheridan's on the Docks -- a cosy watering hole where the beer list is conscientiously chosen and the macro taps are overshadowed by huge fonts for Budvar, Staropramen and Galway Hooker. It was a pint of the hoppy local that quenched my thirst before I moved on.

Destination two was a new pub for me. The Salt House is part of the chain which includes Oslo, and I was lured in by the promise of cask White Gypsy ale. Sadly, while the engine was in place, the tap was dry and I made do with a pint of Porterhouse Oyster. The pub is a narrow and compact boozer offering free wi-fi and a fantastic range of beers. The guest tap was pouring a deliciously spicy Messrs Maguire Weiss and I had that to accompany the burger I brought in from Mustard, a nearby restaurant under the same ownership. The Salt House is open from 3pm and is managed by James: a kiwi beer fanatic with a robust approach to customers seeking the bland usuals he doesn't stock. It's a definite must for drinking in Galway.

On then to Oslo, in the centre of Galway's seaside suburb of Salthill. This is on a much grander scale, stretching back from the front door along a long bar to a large saloon at the back. Windows here offer a peek at the stainless steel vessels of the Bay Brewery where John the brewmaster plies his trade. They don't have a kegging setup as yet so the beer is pumped directly from the bright tanks to the bar. Two beers are on offer at the moment: Bay Lager and Bay Ale. The former is probably going to come as a surprise to the unsuspecting yellow fizz drinker: it's orange and cloudy for one thing and tastes very dry and crisp. There's a touch of oxidised cardboard in it and I got a mild appley vibe as it warmed. Bay Lager is a work in progress, I'd say. The red Bay Ale is a far more rounded product. It's very much malt-driven and is full of sweet biscuity notes, though the hopping is generous too, adding a lovely fruity dimension to the finish -- definitely one of the better examples of the Irish red out there.

From the wide bottled selection I got a chance to try the 16-year Ola Dubh. It's not very different to the one aged in 12-year-old whisky barrels, but the phenols are more pronounced. It's tasty, but I think I prefer the milder incarnation. I wonder does the marker-pen taste get bigger and bigger with the ascending age of the barrels? If so, I dread to think what the forthcoming 40-year edition will be like.

The group adjourned to The Salt House afterwards for a few Hooker nightcaps and Galway was still partying when we turned in.

It was great fun and I'd like to thank Tom who arranged things and all the crew at Oslo and The Salt House for their generous hospitality. Oslo will be hosting the first Brewers on the Bay festival of Irish craft beer this May Bank Holiday weekend. It promises to be a fantastic couple of days.

All it's casked up to be?

I love cask beer, but there's an awful lot of horseshit preached about it, particularly from certain sectors of that lot over to the east of here. One of the observations that often gets trotted out is "I've never had a well-kept cask beer that's not been better than the brewery-conditioned version". Fair enough: you can't argue with anecdotes, but I have a theory that this cask-is-always-best principle only holds up for beers which were designed for cask in the first place. It is, by and large, a British thing, and people who believe it need to get out more.

So, mostly for my own reference, I thought I'd take advantage of this month's Session to examine the handful of beers I know in various dispense formats and see just how often natural condition is the best method of serving.

The two examples I trot out most frequently are Clotworthy Dobbin and Galway Hooker -- two of the best ales in regular production on this island. Bottled Hooker does not yet exist, but I've encountered it on cask on several occasions and it's always lacking. It's very much a hop-driven beer, and the Cascade and Saaz get deliciously propelled by the pressurised CO2, creating a clean, refreshing zingy session beer. When that force is taken away it ends up flat, watery and quite green-tasting, like it's not finished. What it probably needs for cask purposes is a dose of dry hops, but as-is it just doesn't work. Clotworthy also loses its hop character on cask. I'm most familiar with the force-carbonated bottle where late Cascade adds a mouth-watering fruitiness to the dark chocolatey ruby porter. The one time I had it on keg this interplay of malt and hops was even more pronounced, and if it wasn't for a bit of a metallic bum-note on the end, it would have been sublime -- I definitely look forward to seeing the keg version again. But on cask this all gets blended into a homogeneous brown lump, indistinguishable from a zillion other brown beers. A case for dry-hopping again, I reckon. Consider this next to the extremely unhoppy Curim Gold wheat beer from Carlow Brewing. I don't think I've met anyone who likes the dishwater bottled version; the keg edition has more of a fanbase but was still a little soapy for me; but on cask it's stunning -- jam-packed with witbier spice and refreshing lemony zing.

And yet, big hop flavours don't always die in the cask. Porterhouse Hop Head is a beer not at all dissimilar to Galway Hooker -- a bit bigger, a bit bitterer -- and it works equally well from cask, keg and naturally-conditioned bottle. If anything the bitterness is even more extreme in the cask edition, which is why I'd generally opt for it kegged, if given a choice.

Where I've found cask really works best, however, is with black beers. O'Hara's Stout, Porterhouse Plain and Porterhouse Oyster all far outshine their force carbonated incarnations. At least part of this is the unmitigated evil of nitrogenation. I can completely understand why Guinness came up with it: I'd say the early test batches of keg Guinness Extra Stout didn't get very far since the feel of CO2-pressurised draught stout was all wrong. It would have been so good if they'd just said "Well, there you go: you can't keg stout" and went back to casking. Instead, they managed to recreate the texture of the cask beer, but via a method which destroys its taste and aroma. I've met very few beers which are bold enough to stand up to nitro, Wrassler's XXXX being about the only one I can think of, and the Porterhouse have achieved this by brewing a monstrously aggressive stout that's probably undrinkable any other way (bottle-conditioned edition out soon, I hear: beware!). It's a massive shame that even across the water, in the spiritual home of cask beer, the style of beer which works best on cask is overwhelmingly represented by smoothflow keg rubbish. Where are the mainstream cask stouts from Britain's large regional breweries? Why aren't they as ubiquitous as the brown bitter and nitrokeg stout?

I should add that even stout-is-best-on-cask isn't a universal rule. Hilden's Molly's Chocolate Stout manages to dodge most of the rich sumptuous roasty flavours and comes out rather boring and thin. The bottled version at least adds a certain carbonic dryness that makes it a little more interesting. Which brings me on to the beer I'm wedging in for review in this post. It's not one I've had from the cask, but it is bottle-conditioned and wears its "CAMRA says..." badge up front with pride on its neck.

On pouring, Hook Norton Double Stout does a very good impression of a cask stout, coming out smooth and foamy though just a teensy bit overzealous with the carbonation. From the off-white head you get an enticing nosefull of dry and crunchy roasted barley or black malt. The foretaste contrasts this with a silky, creamy, chocolate sensation, followed by a brief tang of hops. Finally, there's a dry finish to clear the palate for the next mouthful. All this complexity on a mere 4.8% ABV makes it nearly perfect as a session stout. I'd love to try it on cask and would be willing to bet that the dryness tones down and even more of that chocolate creaminess comes to the front and hangs around. Yum.

While I remain incredulous in the face of the CO2 fundamentalists, it's only when we turn to stout that I have to bite my lip.

Ancient history

There are a few places and beers that will always remind me of the early days of my beer education. The Celtic Whiskey Shop is one such, and when it opened on Dublin's Dawson Street just after the millennium (the main one, not Dublin's local one twelve years previous) I worked nearby and was a regular customer. Alongside a massive range of hand-picked whiskies, whiskeys and other spirits, they had a modest but far more interesting selection of Irish and Scottish beers. It was here that I first encountered the "Heather Ale Company", these days going by their much more prosaic "Williams Bros." moniker.

Over several weeks I worked through their portfolio of ales made from traditional, yet exotic, ingredients. An early one was Kelpie, the dark seaweed ale. I recall being horrified by it and after one bottle vowing never to touch it again. Most of the rest of them I simply didn't care for; Fraoch I adored (and still do); but thoughts of Kelpie gave me the shivers for years after. Then recently I spotted a bottle in DrinkStore and started to wonder if it was as awful as I remembered. Wasn't it possible that my taste in beer had moved on to a point where seaweed flavours can now be welcomed? I bought a bottle.

It pours a red-brown Coca-Cola shade with a busy sparkle but not overly fizzy. The aroma is mild and chocolatey, like a mild or porter. I took a sip and waited for the other shoe to drop. But it didn't! Kelpie is actually quite nice. At only 4.4% ABV, it's rather light and possibly a touch watery, but the sweet roasted flavours are beautiful and there's a salty tang from the seaweed, adding character and finishing it off well. The whole reminds me of a lighter, simpler edition of Porterhouse Oyster Stout. It just goes to show that it's worth re-checking your opinion on every beer at least once a decade.

Tragically, Celtic Whiskey's days as a purveyor of fine beer didn't last. Probably sick of me as the only proper beer customer, the range was cut back until it was little more than cans of Guinness for the tourists -- I've not been in in a while so I really should go and check if the winds of change blowing through Irish beer at the moment have breezed down Dawson Street at all. The loss I felt most keenly, even more than the Fraoch, was Alba: the Williamses' strong scots pine beer. When I saw a bottle on the shelf of The Cracked Kettle last year I snapped it up. I have such fond memories of this beer, and it nearly pained me to open it: could it possibly taste as good as the nostalgia? One sniff and I knew the answer was yes.

Alba has always smelled and tasted of strawberries to me: not the fresh and firm kind, but big old sloppy, mushy, dark, half-fermented strawberries: it's a gorgeous heady sensation. Behind this there's a dry peppery spice and a little bit of yeasty ester, and possibly a funky hint of mushroom too. Barry got cloves in a big way, and I can see where he's coming from, but it's more subtle than that. It's quite a bit lighter than I remember, but then I've had plenty stronger than its mere 7.5% ABV in the six or seven years since my last bottle.

I definitely need Alba back in my life. A whole range of new and exciting Williams Bros. beers are now in stock in DrinkStore, and I hope to work through them during the year. But I'll always be yearning for an Alba.

Wot no cream? Wot no oysters?

Having thoroughly enjoyed their Old-Style Porter recently, I expected big things of St. Peter's Cream Stout when I eventually tracked it down. I confess to being a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong: it's really really good stout, but I was anticipating something, well, creamy. This one is a very heavy dense stout, deep black in colour and with barely any gas. It is very sweet, with a caramel aroma and an overriding burnt toffee flavour. Yet, right at the end, there's that back-of-the-throat dryness of the sort you only get from quality stout. Next time I'm in the market for a half-litre of black beer which requires a mortgage, however, I think I'll stick with the Old-Style.

On the subject of English stout, I also recently acquired a bottle of Marston's Oyster Stout. The Oyster made by the Porterhouse in Dublin (from oysters) is one of my favourite stouts, so I felt it necessary to check out the competition. First of all, there is no indication on the bottle whether it is actually made with oysters or not. There is no list of ingredients, just warnings about the barley and malt. I had to go to the web site to find that it is, in fact, mollusc-free.

And that's not the only thing missing. Some of this could be down to an unfair comparison with the super-premium St. Peter's, but I found the Marston's almost devoid of any flavour. It's slightly dry; it's slightly bitter; but it's really not much of anything. "Marston's Don't Compromise", apparently. Compromising on this already watery number would indeed be a tough proposition.