Clock this

I'm used to Irish breweries having a long gestation, from the first announcement by some ballsy entrepreneur to actually being able to drink a pint they brewed can be a long stretch, and often the second part never actually happens. So I was agog at how fast things moved with Changing Times. The news that a consortium of prominent Dublin publicans had bought the old Kepak warehouse in Glasnevin and were planning to set up a brewery in it only landed last July. Since then we've seen Franciscan Well co-founder Shane Long and former Trouble and Hope brewer Mark Nixon become associated with the project, and now only four months later, there's actual beer pouring.

The consortium of owners includes The Palace pub in Temple Bar, and that's where I went on the day after the high-profile launch to try out the first two. Any excuse to visit such a fine establishment.

Daydreamer is the lager, described on the badge as "snappy". It's a very pubbable 4.2% ABV and arrived extremely cold, with a €7.60 tab -- priced on a par with other independent beers. There wasn't much to say about it at first: lots of fizz and a tiny amount of haze on the pale yellow body. Given a moment, there's a pleasant cracker crispness (snappiness? sure, why not), and a moment later brings some Germanic hopping. That adds a different sort of crispness: crunchy green vegetables. With the pint half empty and warmed a little, there's a threat of butteriness in the aroma but the flavour stays clean and dry. This has the basics of decent lager, and certainly isn't a clone of the cut-corner big brands. At the same time, however, it's no connoisseur's lager and only hints at the fun you can have with good pilsner, Helles or the like. If the mainstream lager drinkers aren't completely tied to the familiar labels, this offers an alternative of acceptable quality. I'm guessing that's what it's meant to do.

Launching alongside is the pale ale, After Hours. They've put "hazy" on the badge, but it's not really much cloudier than the lager. Sorry, hazebros: nothing for you here. It's 4.2% ABV again, which puts in a competitive space with Little Fawn, but it's nowhere near that quality. The aroma is broadly about American hops, with a certain amount of pine resin, though nothing overboard. The texture is thin, and fizz is again central, something much less acceptable in a pale ale than a lager. In the flavour, the hops make a valiant effort to be heard, but can't quite manage it sufficiently. There are token quantities of juice and dank with minimal bitterness, so it fits the hazy profile in the most basic way but, to me, comes across like an Ambush that's been run under the cold tap. It's not offensive, bad, or poorly made, but it tastes cheap and dumbed-down. This sort of beer was radical in Ireland a decade and more ago. These days, I think even mainstream pale ale drinkers will find it lacks character. I wouldn't be fully confident that it's a trade-up from fresh Hop House 13.

So... I don't really know who these beers are for. I can't see any drinkers of the big brands making the switch, when they've already turned down the pre-existing alternatives. And this goes even more for the third in the range, Clockwork stout, arriving soon. Equally, there's not much to attract the seasoned drinker of microbrewed beers. I see After Hours working as a distress purchase, but I think most of us would prefer a Little Fawn, Ambush, Scraggy Bay or Galway Hooker. It's disturbing to hear already of independent breweries' taplines being removed from pubs which are part of the brewery consortium.

A brand new brewery means lots of new potential, but I'm not seeing that realised to any great extent in the first two beers.

Go fish

Lough Gill features regularly on these pages. It's a brewery which turns out a lot of product, and one which appears to have an eye on the US as its target market. As such, it tends to go big: high-strength IPAs, barrel-aged imperial stouts and smoothie-like "pastry sours" feature prominently. Today, however, it's a change of tack, with two rather more sessionable beers, both appearing on draught at UnderDog recently.

The first is Horizon, a pale ale at 4.7% ABV. It looks like the straightforward proposition it is: a mostly-clear pale amber with only the slightest cast of haze. They describe it as a "California IPA" without elaborating on what they mean by that. One might be expecting piney hops in the west coast style but it goes for gentler peach and melon instead, suggesting to me that Mosaic or its ilk have been employed. The texture is as light as the sessionable ABV suggests but comes with a heavy dose of fizz which I found slowed my drinking down. This is simple and decent stuff, and will hopefully find its way to being a permanent offering in places that don't already have the likes of Little Fawn, Ambush or Scraggy Bay on tap.

I neglected to take a photo of the other beer, which is a shame because it looked well in the Lough Gill Willibecher pint glass. Black Wave is a stout, nitrogenated and 4.2% ABV so very much made for pub drinking, and as far as I know that's the only way it's available. It performs the task well, without doing anything too unusual, for good or ill. For the most part the flavour is dry with a medium level of roast, enough to satisfy a regular drinker of such stouts without causing problems for those that are wary of it. There's a countermelody of milk chocolate which gives it a character of its own, and then a herbal echo, suggesting spearmint freshness to me. That sounds odd but it fits the rest of the profile seamlessly and is barely noticeable unless you look for it. I would say that getting a beer like this into pubs is a very hard sell and I wish the brewery luck with it.

This new turn towards more accessible beers is a welcome one, so long as it doesn't interfere with the regular production of fancy cans. Either or both of the above would be a welcome addition to the line-up in a pub seeking to give mainstream drinkers quality options from a small independent Irish brewery.

Start-ups and upstarts

Once more, early September brought the biggest showcase of Irish craft beer and cider to Dublin, with the third annual festival at the RDS. For 2013 the gig expanded to four days and incorporated a number of new arrivals and returnees to the main floor.

One brewery was making its official début: Brú, from Trim in Co. Meath. So new are they that their lager recipe is still in development so instead of an officially badged version, they had two "experiments". Experiment X is the result of a cooling failure on a conditioning vessel. The end result isn't the clean crisp lager they wanted but, in true homebrew style, they reckoned there might be a market for it so slapped a badge on the tap and brought it along, with its superhero like origin story. They were right to do so by the sounds of things as it was quite popular among those who care little for brewing technicalities. Massive butterscotch flavours, of course, but the hop bite isn't completely lost and peeps out pleasantly from behind. Not the sort of 4% ABV lager you'd scull pints of, but far from undrinkable by the half pint.  Experiment Y, also 4% ABV is much more on the money: a big grassy aroma balanced by some properly Teutonic bready flavours and a decently full texture. It's unchallenging but balanced and quite drinkable.

From the more conventionally warm-fermented side of the house there was Brú Stout (later renamed "Dubh"), a sweet and creamy 4.2% ABV sessioner that's bigger on the chocolate than most Irish stouts, but the star of the show was Brú Rua: an evolved Irish red. It looks like a normal enough Irish red, and the nitro serve does little to dispel this, but while the backbone is conventional caramel and red berry it's overlaid with some much more progressive new world hop flavours: juicy peach and tangerine. In fact, if this was being passed off as an American-style amber ale I wouldn't have blinked. That this is being passed off as Irish red delights me. Please let it me the next phase of development for this tired style. Might be an idea to drop the nitro though, eh?

The second-youngest brand at the festival was Black's, still with just the Kinsale Pale Ale I mentioned the other week. To keep things interesting, the brewery had set up a randall and was getting through several different hop varieties each day. I stopped by when it was Galaxy's turn and found it added a lovely fruit softness to the aroma, though leaving the flavour largely as-was. Randalls look set to be the Next Big Thing in Irish beer, having been acquired by a number of specialist beer pubs. I can't help but feel that running already-hoppy beers through them is missing the point. Kinsale Pale Ale is not the sort of beer that needs punching-up. Attach it to the Smithwick's tap and we might be on to something.

Eight Degrees stablemate (for now) Mountain Man was using the festival to launch its second beer: a 4.5% ABV IPA called Hairy Goat. I liked it a lot, but that's largely because I found it incredibly similar to their first beer, Green Bullet. It has the same dry spiciness and the same light and sessionable lawnmower beer texture. To be honest I'm not sure whether this counts as a criticism or not.

Also launching its second permanent beer was Offaly's Bo Bristle brewery. Bo Bristle Amber Ale is 4.5% ABV and served bottled. It pours a lurid Lucozade orange and presents candy sugar up front followed by some strange spicy-sweetness complexities, like old fashioned confectionery: humbugs, clove rock and popping candy. I was quite taken with it and will be on the lookout to try this again. Bo Bristle's third beer was a festival special, dubbed an American Brown Ale by the pretty improvised signage. This is 6.2% ABV and starts with a brown-porter-like coffee effect. So far so brown, but then there's a sudden grapefruit pithyness showing off its American style credentials. I don't think it offers full value for the high strength but enjoyable nonetheless.

One of my festival highlights was catching up with Rick from Kinnegar Brewing. I had been following with great interest his brewery's expansion and am looking forward to seeing a lot more of it out on the market. The move from essentially commercial homebrewing to a near national brand in the space of a few years is nothing short of inspirational. I was long overdue a taste of his 4.7% ABV pale ale Lime Burner. Despite the style designation there are some serious German credentials here, the beer having been brewed with Hallertauer Mittelfrüh hops and fermented by a Kölsch yeast strain. It came from the tap a cloudy shade of blonde with a slight sourness on the nose and a touch of smoky phenols. The hops give it a mildly vegetal celery note. Above all, though, it's light simple and refreshing. It's bigger brother is Scraggy Bay IPA: 5.3% ABV and with much more front. Orange candy and sherbet start it off sweet but there's a significant bitter kick on the end, that greenness showing itself again, only more so.

Those were the brand new brewers. Next we'll take a look at some of the special beers produced for the festival.