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?

British Summer Time

I'm weekending up north at the moment and staged a minor beer raid on a local supermarket. Not Sainsbury's, so I wasn't actually expecting to find much of interest, here where a certain tonic wine from Devonshire is the tipple of choice for many. But there behind the stacks of alcopops and a veritable Aladdin's cave of tramps' brews ("I say, Jeremy, shall we go for the Tennents Super or the Carlsberg Special this morning?" "Why not something delightfully continental, Tristran, from the extensive Polish selection?") there was a well-chosen core collection of English ales: the best of Fuller's, plus Black Sheep, Young's Double Chocolate and the like. Hardly ground-breaking, but there was nothing like this when I lived in these parts. However, nobody wants to read more "Northern Ireland is making progress" headlines, so I'll stop.

There was an old favourite of mine, Bateman's XXXB, but I passed on it to try another from the same brewery: Combined Harvest. It would usually take a lot for me to pick an English golden ale out of a line-up, but a beer made from barley, wheat, rye and oats presented just enough of a gimmick to pique my curiosity. Unwisely, it's presented in a clear glass bottle, but there was only the very faintest whiff of skunking on opening. It pours to a limpid orangey-gold, with a big head that dispells quickly leaving just a light skim of foam. Marmalade is the governing feature here, both in the aroma and the foretaste. Big, tart, zingy orange notes turning to just a hint of citrus hoppy bitterness at the end. The fizz, while far from overpowering, is just right to add to the refreshment power of this beer, and I'm delighted to discover another member for that tiny pantheon of good, interesting, English golden ales. An instant beer-garden classic.

On Friday, before I left Dublin, I nipped in to the Bull & Castle to give another recently-arrived English summer beer the once-over. Raspberry Grand Cru is from Meantime, a London brewery I have a lot of time for, and whose darker beers I've particularly enjoyed. This one wrong-footed me from the outset with its pale orange hue. I was expecting something, well, pink, like a Belgian raspberry lambic. But they haven't gone for fruit here, preferring instead to aim for the sourer flavour I associate with mature fruit lambics, and Cantillon's Rosé de Gambrinus in particular. But really there's not enough of either characteristic for my liking. The sourness finishes up as dry, without any real lip-smacking tang, and the fruit flavour is on a par with that found in an ice lolly. These miniflavours are buried under a massive 6.5% ABV for which there is no excuse, not with this rather thin and gassy body. More Meantime beers have just arrived in Ireland, and I'm really hoping they've made a better fist of them than this one. Expect reviews soon.

Still, where UK summer beers are concerned, one out of two definitely ain't bad.