New tack

It's Porterhouse Independent Irish Beer and Whiskey Festival time once again. And, also once again, they've re-jigged the way they're doing it. Instead of splitting the line-up across several bars, they've asked each one of Ireland's micros to supply just one beer and all of the 14 submissions are available across the estate including (apparently) London and New York. I called in to the Temple Bar branch on Wednesday last for the results of their annual, blind-tasted, competition of the festival exhibits. Just one overall gong this year, plus two runners up. And all worthy recipients too: first prize to Mel Camire for the fabulous Messrs Maguire Brown Ale, second to Franciscan Well's excellent Purgatory, and bronze medal for the newest arrival Metalman -- one hell of an achievement given the seasoned competitors they were up against. Metalman Pale Ale is now officially superior to O'Hara's Stout, Galway Hooker and Wrasslers XXXX. Tremble in your wellies, established brewers.

The Porterhouse's ever-generous hospitality gave us Beoir members the chance to do some comparisons of our own from among the festival listings. There was just the one new beer to me: White Island Wheaten Ale from yet another newcomer to Irish brewing: Fermanagh's Inishmacsaint. I already tried their lager (here) and was impressed, though perhaps more by the technical prowess than the taste of the beer. I reckoned the wheat beer would be more interesting. And it is, no doubt, just perhaps not in the way I'd anticipated.

As it happened I was surrounded by brewers when I brought the bottle back from the bar and offered it round. Every one of them recoiled in horror at the smell and screwed up their faces at the taste. I'm pretty sure this is wheat beer as no-one but the Good Lord intended it. It pours clear and starts with some fairly serious vinegar on the nose. The texture is highly attenuated, thinned out and barely discernible as a wheat beer at all while the taste is both sharp and sour with a major lactic sour-milk tang on the finish. I'm no Quincy, but I would guess that something in the lactobacillus line got in here and had its wicked way with the fermentables.

And yet, perhaps because I'm not a proper brewer, I thought it still had something going for it. Other non-brewers in the company thought so too. The thinness and sharpness is at least clean, with an interesting bite. Could it be that what we have here is a new lambic appellation? No, probably not. I would guess that if Gordon gets the right sort of feedback he'll have this cleaned up and tasting properly Bavarian in no time.

More's the pity, perhaps. It wasn't that long ago that brown or hoppy ales wouldn't have stood a chance in an Irish beer competition. Why not give the sour side a fair crack of the whip?

The Porterhouse Independent Irish Beer and Whiskey Festival runs until Sunday 3rd April.

Ahoy casketeers!

Saturday was all about Real Ale in the Real Capital, with an afternoon at the first (hopefully) annual Winter & Cask Ale Festival at the Franciscan Well. It represents a big step forward for Irish beer festivals in that it's the first in the Republic to work on the CAMRA model whereby the festival organisers buy all the beer up front and are responsible for selling it on rather than the individual brewers renting a pitch and running their own bars. It's an arrangement which I think gives a better deal for the producers and I hope to see more in this style in future.

Most of the micros were represented at the taps, with beer from Carlow, Dungarvan, Franciscan Well, Hilden, Messrs Maguire, The Porterhouse, White Gypsy, Whitewater plus a new one from Dingle's Beoir Chorca Duibhne. Sort-of new, anyway: I suspect that Carraig Dubh is the same recipe they were selling at last year's Easterfest as an unnamed special. It's very dark in colour but light and easy to drink, the roasted flavours buoyed up on fresh green German hops. Simple and tasty fare.

I missed Dungarvan's strictly limited edition Coffee & Oatmeal Stout which all sold out on Friday night, but reports from the few who tried it were very positive. Highlights that I did actually get to sample included a mellowed 15-month-old version of Franciscan Well's 3 Kings smoked ale and a fresh and fruity cask edition of their Purgatory pale ale. As promised I got a chance to try the cask version of Messrs Maguire's new brown ale and I have to say it works better on keg: once again the cask smooths out all its distinct flavours including the hallmark raw graininess.

White Gypsy had a new blend of their Raven vintage stout, this time the wood-aged imperial stout was mixed down to a very approachable 6.5% ABV, using a fresh session-strength stout. It's a masterpiece of balance, with the wood flavours present but not dominant.

My beer of the festival was not one I was expecting to be impressed by at all. Rebel Red is perhaps the most popular beer in the Franciscan Well line-up. Heineken's decision to stop brewing Beamish Red created a new market for Rebel Red and it has cropped up in pubs all over Cork. I've never been much of a fan, but there it was on the handpump on Saturday, and dry-hopped too. Sure why not? It tasted almost nothing like Rebel Red. It tasted amazing: a deep amber colour and packed with mild citrus and gentle tannins creating a sort of lemon tea effect for supreme thirst-quenching power. More than anything, I was reminded of Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter. This is the sort of high-quality session beer that, like the keg version, should be a commonplace local specialty in Cork's pubs rather than a one-off festival novelty.

In the meantime it's great that the Franciscan Well have created this opportunity to showcase these sorts of beers. Let's think of it as a first step in getting them out of the festival yard and onto the bar in pubs.

To the barricades!

Oliver Hughes was in campaign mode on Monday night, telling war stories of his time as a start-up brewer in Blessington in the 1980s and how difficult -- impossible, in fact, as it turned out -- it was to break into a beer market dominated by massive foreign-owned, brand-driven macrobreweries.

He noted that things have changed a bit since then, with Ireland now home to a number of small independent breweries, including his own Porterhouse. Yet even from his established position of owning the largest independent brewery in the country, with a tied estate of five pubs in two countries, Oliver sees that there is still a battle against blandness to be fought. And with the recession making itself felt in every sector of the economy it has never been more important to ensure that our beer money ends up in the hands of Irish brewers rather than the shareholders of British and Dutch multinational corporations.

To these ends, today marks the beginning of the Porterhouse's Independent Irish Beer & Whiskey Festival (a slight misnomer on the whiskey side since there is only one Irish-owned distillery in operation, and the Irish brands owned by Diageo and Pernod Ricard are also represented here -- booo!). Almost all of Ireland's craft brewers, from both sides of the border, will have a range of their beers available at Porterhouse outlets in some form or other over the next eleven days. Among them is the new one from Galway Hooker.

Galway Hooker Dark Wheat Beer is in something approaching the German dunkelweiss mould, though with a very Irish plain flattop, rather than a big fluffy Bavarian foam dome. Underneath it's an opaque dark brown and the aromas are definitely banana-esque, but not overwhelmingly so. Weizen fruitiness is not top of the flavour agenda. Instead there's a crisp spiciness -- more the kind of thing you might find in an altbier -- mellowed by a smooth caramel toffee sweetness. I had been sorely disappointed by the absence of this character in the last dunkelweiss I had, Paulaner's Hefe-Weissbier Dunkel, so I really welcomed it here.

There's a lot to like here, and much for the Erdinger/Paulaner drinker to enjoy. If it became a permanent part of their line-up and gets a fair crack at the market (never a guarantee) it should do very well. Another daring-yet-accessible beer from Aidan and Ronan at Hooker.

The Independent Irish Beer & Whiskey Festival continues at all Porterhouse branches until 5th April. Other highlights include Clotworthy Dobbin -- a kegged dark ale with an amazing hoppy nose followed by the usual fruit-and-nut chocolate flavours. There are also new editions of Franciscan Well's Purgatory (very orangey and English this year) and Porterhouse Chocolate Truffle Stout (darker, bitterer, stoutier than last year), plus yet another new cask for Ireland, albeit temporary, in the form of the decent, solid, Hilden Ale.

You'd want a really good excuse for continuing to drink Heineken and Diageo's vapid offerings.

Hop it

After their recent poor show with a raspberry beer, I was very glad to find Meantime's Pale Ale a return to form. I like this brewery and knew I wouldn't stay angry with them for long. At 4.7% this is a medium-strength ale, though is supplied in a 33cl bottle to save customers from the temptation of overindulgence. How thoughtful. It pours fizzily, a surprisingly non-pale dark rich amber, with just a light dusting of suspended sediment. Not much on the nose, but the flavour is far from understated. We get those marvellous mandarin-and-sherbet notes that are the hallmark of great hoppy pale ales, and which won Franciscan Well's Purgatory ICB Beer of the Year. They say there's East Kent Goldings in here, but they've definitely put Cascade in the driving seat. My only criticism is the texture: there's just too much fizz and it interrupts the palate's enjoyment of the complex malt-hops interplay. With a little less conditioning this could be a champion. Still, highly enjoyable and recommended.

It made me even more eager to get at Meantime's India Pale Ale: bigger bottle, higher strength and allegedly hopped nine ways from Sunday. The cork eases out with more of a puff than a pop. No overwhelming hops funk comes from the neck of the bottle. The pour is a lurid orange, topped with a big fizzy head that dissipates quickly. Even in my wide-bottomed glass I'm finding it hard to drum up an aroma. A vague fruitiness, but not much else. The main thing I can taste is the alcohol: heavy and sticky-sweet. But there's more underneath it. The Fuggles and East Kent Goldings impart a dry back-of-the-throat sort of bitterness that works better in lighter, more sessionable beers, but gets squashed by the booziness in this 7.5%er. There's a slight orangey-citric fruit tone to it as well, but nothing like the moreish big citrus of American IPAs, a flavour which may have spoiled me for most British and British-style IPAs: I end up thinking fond thoughts of Goose Island half-way through. All-in-all, I'm finding this beer tough going.

More of the green stuff is on the horizon for tomorrow evening when I'll be at the launch of the Porterhouse's new summer ale: Hop Head. Pilgrim, Nugget, Cascade and Hallertau in this one, and just a pinch of black malt. Doesn't sound like much could go wrong in that, does it?

Munster mash bash

The Irish beer calendar is a short one and mostly concentrated in the latter half of year, with Hilden in August, the GIBF in October and CAMRA NI's Belfast festival in November. The main event, however, is the first of the year and happens on Easter Saturday and Sunday at the Franciscan Well brewpub in Cork. This is where the nation's craft brewers gather to sell their wares side-by-side and meet the drinking public. This year there were stalls from Hilden, Hooker, Carlow, White Gypsy, the University College Cork Pilot Brewery and the 'Well itself. Whitewater had just sent some bottles along, and The Porterhouse phoned in a keg of their Oyster Stout but left it to the hosts to serve it. Unfortunately there was a supply problem with the new Dingle brewing company (Beoir Chorca Dhuibhne) so I didn't get to try their beers.

For the second year, the Irish Craft Brewer contingent among the festival-goers used the opportunity to award prizes to the best beers available, and this year the top gong went to a cask version of the Franciscan Well's Purgatory pale ale. I had it in its kegged incarnation last year, and quite liked it. On cask, however, I was blown away. It was superbly balanced with big mandarin fruit flavours sitting comfortably next to a sherbety hoppy bite, all attached to a full smooth body. A deserving winner and hopefully we'll get to see more of this.

A runner-up award went to Messrs Maguire Imperial, which I have already raved about at length. The MM brewer is about to launch his own range of bottled beers under his new White Gypsy brand. He says that, the market for Irish craft beer being what it is, most of this will go straight to export. It's a shame, but I'm depending on the usual suspects in the retail drinks trade to get hold of at least a few cases of these for the locals. This stand was also selling MM Best, a beer which does the festival circuit in the UK and beyond, but is rarely seen in Ireland. The pub where it's made used to have a regular cask ale (called Pale, if I recall correctly) but it, and its beer engine, disappeared some years ago. Best is a light-bodied golden session ale with a slightly astringent bitterness. All of the cask beers were being served through sparklers and I used this one to decide my opinion in The Great Sparkler Debate. Having tasted it with and without the plastic tap attachment (picture, right), I confess to not being able to ascertain much difference.

Third place went to last year's champion Galway Hooker. As the only winning beer produced on a year-round basis, Hooker clings to its premier position in the pantheon of Irish craft beers. Still daring and still fresh even after a couple of years on the market. As I mentioned on Friday, their Irish Coffee Porter was made for this event and it was available in both keg and cask varieties. I didn't try the kegged one to see how it worked with the right gas mix, but the cask one was definitely a different beer to the one I was drinking in the Bull & Castle. The foamy head carried all the coffee essence that I thought was missing from the keg version last week. Fuller, smoother, and altogether more flavoursome. It could be that there's some truth to this notion of cask beer being somehow better than keg...

Another cask beer walked off with the prestigious Beer of the Festival award, decided by popular acclaim rather than any formal voting procedure. This was Carlow's Druid's Brew, made especially for the Easter festival each year and modelled here by the lovely Cormac. It's a powerfully bitter stout with a real back-of-tongue dry tanginess in addition to bags of full-on stout roastiness. Its texture is fascinating, being very similar to the sort of creamy smoothness you get with nitrogenation. This, I guess, is the effect the Guinness scientists were going for when they developed nitro beer back in the '50s.

UCC's Pilot Brewery had two beers on (though not when this picture was taken). Frithjofs is a lager which looks for all the world like a Belgian witbier: cloudy and pale yellow-green. It has you thinking of lemons before even taking a sip. In reality it's not really lemony, but it does have a tangy fruitiness to it, to my mind more like a light German weiss than anything else. It's also quite dry and crisp and probably works well as a summer refresher. The other tap (eventually) dispensed UCCinator, a dark bock, though a bit light-bodied to count as a doppelbock, despite the name. It has quite an overpowering sweet-and-sour character, reminding me more than anything of boiled sweets. At 7.4% ABV it's probably just as well I couldn't drink much of it.

As well as their own beers and the festival visitors, the 'Well also had a small range of Belgian beers on tap in the upstairs bar. I tried the Barbar Winter Bok, a deeply dark brown lager brimming with sweet sweet fruity flavours and concentrated essence of banana. Another one not to be taken lightly, but good in its own sweet way.

The Festival continues today but I'm back in Dublin, my cup having truly runnéd over with Irish craft goodness. The buzz among the brewers mentioned the possibility of a Dublin beer festival along similar lines. Going to a beer festival then home to sleep in my own bed would certainly be a pleasant novelty.

No penance

Last night was the first of Oktoberfest at the Bull & Castle Beerhall (continuing today and tomorrow -- tell your friends). Among the special additions to the stock are two from the Franciscan Well pub-brewery in Cork: Rebel Red and their regular seasonal, Purgatory.

I love trying a beer with no idea what style it is. For no reason at all I was expecting Purgatory to be fruity and spicy, like a maibock perhaps. However, it's a super-hoppy, slightly cloudy, light orange American-style pale ale ("Anglo-American" it says on the web site, but the texture is all wrong for England). After the first bitter smack of hops, the flavour settles down to a lasting crisp dryness.

Like many of the Franciscan Well beers, Purgatory is a bit rough round the edges. For me, this shows it's made by humans not machines and I have no complaint.

Much as I love the notion of brewpubs keeping their seasonals exclusive to themselves, I'm a lazy, lazy man, and having a direct line from the 'Well to Dublin is something I could get used to.