Gate and switch

An icy gale was whipping the flurries of snow down James's Street and barely a sinner was out in it, except for the trickle of Ireland's beer commentariat filing through the entrance to Open Gate Brewery. The bar was almost eerily quiet this Tuesday night: closed to the regular revellers, and with all the taps blank and the blackboards clean. We had been invited along to taste the latest Guinness beer, without any clue as to what it was. My rumour that a mixed fermentation barrel-aged version of Satzenbrau was in the offing had failed to gain traction.

Out came the tasting trays of the new beer, introduced by brewer John Casey. It's a lager, he told us. While it looked like one, of the clear golden sort anyway, it didn't feel like one. The body was quite heavy, gummy almost, and I suspected that, as with Hop House 13, it was fermented with an ale yeast. There's a somewhat wort-like sweetness up front, but followed and almost fully offset by soft stonefruit hop flavours: mango and peach in particular. Topaz, Galaxy and Mosaic are the hops: the same combination used in HH13, and the main reason for its similarity. The twist is that the new beer, Pure Brew, is alcohol-free, or near-as at 0.5% ABV. Although I spotted the malt-extract sweetness which so often marks these, the hopping was sufficient to completely prevent me making the association. The technicals of it, explained next, are quite interesting. Here comes the science part: concentrate.

I don't know how often this happens with non-alcoholic beer, but it's not brewed to strength and then de-alcoholised. They start with a wort of around 1.030 and pitch a special variety of yeast which brings it down no further than about 1.025 before finishing of its own accord. The quirk of this process that really interested me is that this is one of the very few Guinness beers you'll find out and about that's produced at sale strength rather than brewed and fermented at high gravity and watered down before packaging. Though it bears the name of the Open Gate Brewery like every new release lately, there is a pleasing piece of extra transparency on the back label "Dreamed up at the Open Gate Brewery. Brewed next door in St James's Gate", as are all the Open Gate branded beers that are distributed beyond the taproom itself. A thumbs up for this, and I'll happily overlook the slight topographical inaccuracy.

Pure Brew works well as a non-alcoholic offering. Yes it's a bit sweet and heavy, but that hop profile, if it survives out on the dusty floor-level shelves where pubs keep these products, is enough of a redeeming feature to give it the beatings of its German rivals.

L: Plum Pudding Porter ; R: Olde English Ale

Duty to the new guy done, there was time for some swift catching-up on Open Gate's winter offerings. First out was Plum Pudding Porter. I was imagining a sticky confection, especially given the downright imperialist ABV of 7.2%, but it's pleasingly dry right from the very first sip. The pastry element is present but understated: raisin and prune, lightly spiced with cinnamon. It's a proper winter beer, not gimmicky, and with the fruit and spice additions well integrated into the flavour, not squirted in as an afterthought which seems to be too often the case with this lot.

Olde English Ale is apparently a staff favourite. It's another dark and strong one, 7.5% ABV this time, given 11 months of maturation before serving. It's also quite dry, with a bit of Foreign Extra Stout's bitter bite balanced by toffee in the tail end. While clean and straightforward, I thought it lacked something with regard to complexity: it feels like it should have more interesting mature beer flavours, some coffee or cocoa; even a cheeky savoury edge of autolytic umami, but everything it does arrives in one go and leaves the palate just as promptly.

A total change of tack for the evening's finisher, and a perfect contrast to the heavy stuff. Goodbye Gose is that rare bird: a gose that hasn't been hacked around with in the mistaken belief that the style needs syrupy enhancements. This is absolutely straight up, 5% ABV, offering a refreshing briney salt foretaste countered by tart lemon and all set on a gently effervescent body. You may not think you need cleansing refreshment on a snowy night in January, but this delivers it anyway, and I felt the better for it. It could probably stand to be a little sourer for my taste, but worked absolutely perfectly as-is.

Once again Open Gate excels at a German beer style. Sure you'd wonder why they bother with the dark stuff at all.

 A little over a week later I was back in for something else and two new additions had gone on the bar. Winter Sunshine is another pale ale, 5% ABV, and suffering from the thick syrupyness that seems to beset most Open Gate attempts at doing properly hop-forward beers. It's not unpleasant, having a kind of bittersweet marmalade orange taste, as well as a fun peppery spice. It completely fails to be refreshing, however, coming through heavy and a little cloying. The refreshment quotient is disappointingly low.

The other new one was a complete contrast: Dunkel Hefeweizen, obviously a wheat beer but arriving looking like a stout: black with a beige head. The term "hybrid" gets thrown around to an inappropriate extent in modern beer, but this really did taste and smell like an amalgam of two very distinct styles. There's the rich and sweet brown-banana of a particularly warm-fermented weizen, sitting next to the dry burnt-toast flavour of a particularly roasty stout. A curious mix, and one that shouldn't work, but I quite liked its oddness. The blandness that often besets dunkelweisse is mercifully absent. On the down side it is a bit thin, with a low energy ABV of 4.6%. The fun flavour blend does go a long way to make up for that, however.

That's it from Open Gate for now. I've an appointment there in early March and will be hoping to meet the spring collection then.

The coming-soon and the never-left

The striking similarities between California and Northern Ireland are too many and obvious to bother listing. Any of you with even a passing acquaintance of both will have noticed this time and again over the years, while the sheer number of tourists who mistake Strabane for San Diego should silence any doubters. So when Colin from Dublin's California Wine Imports told me he was about to begin bringing two of Hilden's bottled beers across the border I hardly batted an eyelid. It is, after all, the next logical progression. Both beers are from Hilden's College Green range.

I'd met Belfast Blonde a couple of times in the past, on keg, and I've always loved it. It's a light, easy-going, golden ale designed for the skittish lager-drinker but packing in bags of flavour. From the bottle it's marginally fizzier than the draught edition with just a gently sherbety zing up front, followed by a long and satisfying candycane aftertaste. The icing on the cake is the nose: brimming with zesty succulent fruits like mangoes and melons.

I'd never allowed Belfast Blonde to warm up before -- it's a definite quaffer -- but when this got a few degrees under its belt it developed some marvellous fruit complexity, mostly peaches, as well as the signature chalky flavour I've found in Hilden's other pale ales and which I really rather enjoy. That got me thinking about the next bottle in front of me -- surely a mineral character like that would work great in a stout?

My previous experience with Molly's Chocolate Stout was less positive (unlike my encounter with the eponymous lady of Hilden herself, pictured right, who is a delight). The beer is made with chocolate malt rather than any actual chocolate and I've always found it a bit thin when poured from the cask. It goes into the glass a very pale shade of ruby-brown: among the least stout-like of stouts I've ever seen. Little bits of sediment demonstrate, in case you missed it on the label, that it's bottle-conditioned. The nose is sour and acidic, followed by a foretaste which is extremely dry and quite sharp. The chocolate malt may have given the beer its name, but there's very little trace of it in the flavour profile.

With the cask version, thinness is the flaw; without that cask smoothness you get a jagged and jarring stout. If your tastebuds are up for a challenge, this is the session stout for them.

(Incidentally, readers in Ireland can see me, and Colin, and Laura and Séan and Kieron in the July/August edition of Food & Wine magazine, out now.)

While I'm on the subject of Irish beers, here's a little bit of an enigma. Last year I was compiling a list of every beer currently brewed in Ireland for the Irish Craft Brewer Beer of the Year Awards. The inclusion of Satzenbrau on the list drew remarks from several people who hadn't realised it still existed. This ersatz German pils is brewed by Diageo and was heavily advertised in the 1970s and '80s before the big Irish brewers decided that contract brewing American big-brand lagers was much more cost-effective than running their own. And yet umlautless Satzenbrau survives, mostly in those parts of rural Ireland where the ladies have yet to convert to Coors Light. Behind the bar it comes in a 33cl long-neck, but in the off trade it's almost always presented as a 50cl can. I realised recently I'd no idea how it tastes, and resolved to fix that.

I could, of course, just have read the can:
Sounds great, doesn't it? But ever the empiricist I went as far as to open it and pour it into a glass. First mistake...

Satzenbrau is strikingly thin. The wateriness is such that I could well believe they didn't bother with any malt to get it up to 5% ABV, they just loaded it with white table sugar. The smell is quite distinctive: hoppy, almost to the point of skunky, and really quite accurate for a German-style pils. There's also a carbonic odour from the gassiness. So far so poor, and I won't even tell you what happens if you allow it to get warm.

There's a reason even the likes of Diageo aren't doing much to promote this. I reckon they're hoping it'll eventually go away on its own.

Fit for a prince

Yeah, just pretend you didn't already read Thom's bit on Fürstenberg last week, eh? That way, this'll all be new to you...

The first time I ever heard the word "reinheitsgebot" I would have been about eight or nine. It was in a TV ad for Fürstenberg lager, a beer which Guinness (as they were then) had recently acquired the licence to brew and were promoting heavily. By the time I was old enough to drink, it was still clinging on at the budget end of the Diageo range, next to Harp and Satzenbrau, while Bud and Carlsberg claimed the premium spots (yes, I know). Then, at some point in the late 1990s, it vanished leaving only thousands of give-away steins as evidence it had ever been here. Warsteiner now occupies then took over (see comments) the same odd place in Diageo's five-lager Irish portfolio.

In the meantime, Fürstenberg was acquired by Heineken, and has now re-appeared on the Irish market in bottled form. Perhaps the new distributors are hoping for the nostalgia factor, and that punters will dust off those long-empty steins. Tesco are stocking it at the knock-down price of €2.19, and I decided to give it a go.

There's actually quite a decent aroma from it, a proper hoppiness which is very attractive. The body was the next thing I noticed: there's enough here to lend it that almost-creamy texture that marks out quality German pilsner. But that's where the plaudits end. The actual flavour itself is rather uninteresting. Still, I was drinking this with a vindaloo, where the full body was of much greater benefit, taking on the chilli heat and dampening it. Fürstenberg, then, is a decent but ultimately boring quaffing lager. If that's your bag I'm sure there are better uses for €2.19.

While I was at it, I also picked up a bottle of Hofbräu Original, from another blue-blooded German brewery. The pour is a lovely limpid gold and the gentle carbonation gives it the smoothness characteristic of a Munich helles. Again, we have quite a big body, but here the sugary origins of it are very apparent. It's way too sweet and slides into cloying towards the end of the glass.

I'm a little surprised to find myself preferring the sharper, drier Black Forest lager to the full and malty Munich variety, but there you have it. Not that either of them was any great shakes, but I'm using the tall German bottles for the IPA I just made (à la Russian River), so it's still a win for me.

Time for a ruby?

Beer and food? That's a no-brainer for me and means curry every time. Historically speaking, the beer should be Carlsberg, the first lager to be associated with Indian food back in the 1920s. In general, however, I tend to drink Cobra. Yes I know it's made with maize and is about as Indian as I am, but I don't care.

In the halcyon days of the Dublin Brewing Company, my curry would always be accompanied by Maeve's Crystal Weiss, a spectacular spicy weissbier which sat beautifully with Indian food. It's gone now, though another Irish craft wheat beer is almost as good, namely Curim from the Carlow Brewing Company.

For this post, however, I'm going with a new "slow-brewed" lager called Time. This appears to be another one of the plastic paddies I ranted about over on Hop Talk last month. "Born in Ireland" says the label, and "Brewed in the European Union". The web address given is dead and the company address is an office over a boutique in central Dublin, also the address of several marketing and communications companies. It all adds up to contract brewed abroad and passed off as Irish.

Time, incidentally, was a brand formerly used by Smithwick's before it was taken over by Guinness. If Diageo still owned the trademark, no doubt they would have had it made at one of their Irish lager factories in Kilkenny or Dundalk where they make Harp, Satzenbrau, Bud and Carlsberg. However, I'm told the "Time Brewing Company" acquired the name when the trademark lapsed and they're having this brewed in England.

The beer itself, I'm pleased to report, is quite decent. It has a fairly light carbonation for a pilsner, which is a plus point when it comes to curry, and a bold malty flavour which cuts through the vindaloo sauce beautifully. At the end there's a little bit of a dry hops bite, but nothing too severe. It puts me in mind of Beck's, and if I had to guess a country of origin I would have placed it in Germany. All-in-all, Time passes the curry test with flying colours.

However, what with the vast range of eastern European lagers now available at bargain prices, I find it bizarre that someone would try and push an Irish-themed premium-priced lager onto the market. This sort of money will get you a bottle of Flensburger or Augustiner in any decent off licence. Why would a punter, either here or abroad, be attracted to this?