Very new, very normal

The latest pandemic-related comeback is The Session, the monthly beer blogging jamboree that ran from 2007 until it sputtered out in 2018. Session enthusiast (in all senses) Al has resurrected it and asked how we're all getting on in the age of Covid-19 and how it has affected our beer-drinking lives.

To be honest mine hasn't changed hugely, other than missing the handful of times a week I would be in the pub, and spending much less time hunting down beers in the off licences of Dublin. It's a bit weird not to be planning a trip somewhere too, but the less said about that the better.

No longer doing the daily commute has changed one thing, though. I found myself still needing the border between work and home life that my twenty minute cycle provided without my realising it. I have filled the gap with beer, making a habit of drinking just one serving of something undemanding immediately after closing the laptop for the day. In the beginning this was Manislav, Tesco's very decent and very cheap Czech-style lager. On a subsequent supply run to Aldi I substituted Rheinbacher, though they only had bottles. I found I just didn't enjoy them as much as the canned Rheinbacher I remember. The working hypothesis is that twist-off cap: I suspect it's not as good as it needs to be to keep oxygen out. When the first six-pack ran low I staged a blind test against Manislav and was quite surprised to find bottled Rheinbacher my favourite of the pair. And so it was back to Aldi, where I was ecstatic to discover the cans were back. So that's me committed to a daily Rheinbacher for as long as this whole thing lasts.

I'm still getting ticks in, of course. It's very strange to be trying a new Porterhouse beer at home rather than in in one of their pubs, but here's two of them.

Session Pale Ale has inherited the branding palette of the late Hop Head IPA. There's a certain resemblance in the liquid too: a clear amber colour, not quite as dark as Hop Head but darker than its replacement, Yippy. A sharp grapefruit bitterness is the centre of the flavour, with a slightly soapy lemon twang after it. Belma has been used, alongside Amarillo and Centennial, but I couldn't detect its signature strawberry flavour. It's light but not thin, and after that initial jolt of bitterness there's very little follow-through. This is simple and straightforward, and perhaps a little old-fashioned with its west-coast sensibilities. The name isn't an affectation: it is very much built for the session; easy-drinking without being bland, and only €3 for the half-litre bottle. There's absolutely nothing to stop you from opening another bottle if you are so minded.

But I had another Porterhouse beer to tackle, their pandemic theme beer Stay Home, badged as an "isolation IPA". Juice is promised here, via El Dorado, Enigma and Ekuanot. It's only slightly hazy and again a dark orange colour. The aroma isn't juicy but it is sweet, with a fair whack of vanilla in there. The flavour is better: tangerine and satsuma in the foretaste, buoyed up by the big texture. It gets a little sickly in the finish -- the revenge of that vanilla effect -- but it's only 4.6% ABV so once again the finish is quick and it doesn't get cloying. It's an interesting counterpoint to the previous one: a similar strength but lacking the pointy C-hop edges. I don't know that it's better, though. I found myself craving a bitterness kick that was never part of the deal.

Yeah, pale ale is fun and all, but neither of these are candidates for my every day beer. I fully intend to surf out the crisis on a wave of Rheinbacher.

Everywhere and nowhere

Huh. Looks like it's January again. Time to pick over the remnants of the holiday period and check the back of the sofa for beer money. Me, I've been to Aldi. They added a new eurolager knock-off to their line-up and, after being impressed by Rossini last year, I figured it was worth a punt. That gave me an excuse to compare it with their more established brand-leader substitutes.

But to the new one first, and Carullo Especial is a few centuries late to claim any real Spanish heritage: the label states it was brewed in the Netherlands, I'm guessing by Swinkels. From the scarlet livery I'd say Estrella Damm is the target of its appropriation. It's quite a weighty lager, feeling stronger than its 4.8% ABV. There's a dense breadiness in the flavour and not a whole lot else. I get a vaguely green grassy tang from the aroma but no hop flavour I can detect. I can't find anything to be critical of here other than its crashing dullness. If clean and bland is what you value in lager, this one fits the bill, and doubtless that's the intention.

Stacked high and sold cheap in Aldi since time immemorial is Galahad Export. The very English stylings suggest Carling is the niche they're aiming for with this, a beer with nowhere near the status here as it has in the UK. Still, if my observations in the check-out queue are anything to go by, Galahad is undeniably popular. No provenance is given, nor list of ingredients, and it's a meek 4% ABV: another nod towards Britain where that's deemed an acceptable strength for mainstream lager. The appearance is undeniably handsome: a strawberry blonde with a head of purest white. A grainy aroma becomes a corny foretaste so I suspect the use of maize in this. After the initial burst of sweetness it turns dry and a little musty. The vaguest tinny tang of hops appear on the reflux. All, therefore, is in keeping with your bottom-of-the-barrel international adjunct lager. I drank it as a literal lawnmower beer and the first few gulps were deliciously refreshing but it turned harsh, dry and unpleasant very quickly.

We class it up next with some reassuringly expensive Sainte Etienne. It does state it's brewed in France this time, and at just 4.8% ABV your wife can rest easy. It also looks the part: a bright gold with lots of fizz. The texture is decently heavy but oooh the flavour is not right at all. There's a similar stale mustiness as I found in the Galahad but it's combined with a bizarre herbal flavour: mint and aniseed, with a concentrated poppy or caraway afterburn. Thankfully that fades quickly but there's a long residual syrup effect which is actively unpleasant. Charitably you could call this a heavy hearty beer for manly men; realistically it's just difficult to drink and a bit nasty. They've called it Sainte Etienne but the real martyr here is your correspondent.

Switching tack for completeness sake, a new addition to Aldi's Irish range, or at least one that had hitherto passed me by. The Brown Bears already include an IPA, IPL and DIPA, but now there's a Brown Bear Session IPA too. As with the rest it's brewed by Alltech in Dundalk, and a couple of bottles were sent to me by Aldi as part of their 12 Bears of Christmas box set. The colour is a bright gold with a little haze. 4% ABV shouldn't necessarily mean it's watery, but it is a bit. The carbonation is low, which contributes to the thinness but also, I guess, the sessionability. The aroma is a fun mix of apricot, lemon and nutmeg but the flavour is plainer: straight citrus with just a hard wax bitterness in the finish. It's fine, and I could imagine settling into a few of them, but I think I prefer this style to be more fruity and rounded than palate-strippingly bitter.

It's great that the German discounters give us such an extensive beer choice, and that the market supports that. However, nothing here has the beatings of their Aldi shelfmates, Spaten and Rheinbacher. If you want to see out January with good quality, attractively-priced beer, they're still the ones to pick up.

Beer of the moment

I'm going back a few months to when there seemed to be a disturbance in the force on beer Twitter over the absence of Rheinbacher Pilsner from the shelves in Aldi. I had always assumed it would always be there, and even having never tasted it I made a point of picking up a four-pack when it came back.

It looks... proper: a clear gold. There's a delicious weighty sweetness, starting me thinking of helles, but quickly after the early candyfloss and golden syrup there's a harder spinach and dry tin. It's not quite a balancing act; more a seesaw: the two very different characteristics taking turns to run the flavour. Overall, though, it's a jolly decent pilsner with plenty to offer the fan of malt-forward German lager while also bringing just enough noble hops to keep the other tribe happy. And all for just over a euro can. Can't say fairer than.

While I picked up that plastic-wrapped four-pack I also, on a whim, bought a sixer of Brasserie Lager Shandy. This is fun because no ABV is displayed on the can though the number of standard drinks and the ratio of beer to lemonade is there. I reckon it comes out at about 1% ABV.

Expecting yellow I was immediately surprised by how brown it was, a clear garnet-copper. It does present like a soft drink, being bubbly but headless. And yes it tastes of lemonade: a sugary fruit concentrate with just a sprinkle of spiced ginger. There's a sizeable layer of lemon tea in the taste: dry and quenching. The problem is all the sugar stays in charge while there's no sign of the beer: nothing of the hop or the malt about it at all. I can see why the pre-mix shandies of my youth used an ale. It offers a much better base to work from.

This doesn't have the bright zing of a good radler yet lacks the depth of a old-school English shandy. There are much better options out there, even if you have to pay a little extra for them.