Hazy recollection

It's the season for pointless time-consuming traditions and dull end-of-year lists: yes, The Golden Pints are upon us once more. 2018's deliberation beer is one I acquired at the Mikkeller takeaway bar in Copenhagen airport with my final fistful of kroner. Hazy is a New England IPA of 6.6% ABV, an opaque orange-yellow, topped by a thick white head. In the minus column there's a pinch of dreggy yeast and a rising garlic note as it warms; the principal plus, however, is a massive juiciness -- mostly sweet orange but there's a balancing citric bitterness too, from the Simcoe, I'm guessing. Three months on from canning and this was still a perfect example of this style done well. It does need to be consumed cold, though: I was only half way through deliberations when it warmed up to the point of losing juice. A lesson for me to make my decisions quickly. Anyway, without further review, here are...

The Golden Pint Awards 2018

Best Irish Cask Beer: O Brother: The Whippersnapper
This cask-conditioned Berliner weisse ran a close race against another oddity, Third Barrel's Raspberry Stout, but just pipped it.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Urban Brewing: Barrel Aged Sour
Barrel-aged pale farmhousey beers rocked my world this year. Extremely honorable mentions go also to Rascals for the Chardonnay Sparkling Ale and DOT's Dainty Wood. This one, while perhaps not the most complex, had the best mix of classic wild-fermented and wood-aged flavours, very like an authentic Belgian gueze. I hope they can recreate it, and that there are customers in the local market who appreciate this sort of thing.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Larkin's: Baltic Porter
This award is based not solely on the quality of the beer -- though that is consistently excellent. It's almost as much the availability: this one has been there for me at regular intervals throughout the year; occasions when I just want something unfussy but great to drink. It looks to have been renamed now, as "Dark Matter", but it still tastes perfect.

Best Irish Canned Beer: Hope: Hop Hash DIPA
My standout from The Big Grill Festival this year translated perfectly into canned form. Citric hoppy deliciousness.

Best Overseas Draught: Purpose: Smoeltrekker #68
Another one of those barrelled sour blondes, hailing from Colorado but showing up on tap at the Leuven Innovation Beer Festival back in the spring. All the oaky spices.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Sierra Nevada: Tequila Barrel Otra Vez
I've been a bit grumbly about Sierra Nevada's harmless gose-alike but I was genuinely wowed when I happened across a bottle of the tequila-barrel-aged version.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Collective Arts: Ransack the Universe
In Ireland, "Overseas canned beer" is mostly going to mean "some murk from England with an abstract design on it" -- there are a hell of a lot of those on the market at any given moment and I don't bother trying to keep up with them. So instead I'm picking some murk from Canada with a sort-of abstract design on it, and very nice it was too.

Best Collaboration Brew: Jester Zinne
This one from De La Senne and Jester King -- barrels, funk, sour: you get the picture -- could equally have been awarded Best Overseas Bottle but I'm slotting it into the collaboration bracket where there's less competition instead.

Best Overall Beer: Urban Brewing: Barrel Aged Sour
Scouring the above for the most memorable, pupil-dilating, beer experience of the year, and I think this is the one.

Best Branding: Kinnegar
The Donegal brewer switched its minimalist monochrome designs to the new busy cartoon bunnies and their associates. I haven't seen it on a label yet, but I loved the design for Rustbucket, featuring the late eponymous doggo.

Best Pump Clip: Beerbliotek: Shakes Fist Angrily
Still amused by the sheer daftness of this.

Best Bottle/Can Label: YellowBelly: Covert Operation
The Molloy's guys and YellowBelly are up to something. With a fox.

Not a skull to be seen.

Best Irish Brewery: Rye River
2016's winner returns to the top spot, though for different reasons this time. It still does excellent contract-brewing work, and the Brown Ale and Saison for Lidl were two very strong new strings to its bow, but the five limited edition seasonal launches really marked out the progression of 2018, and we got hints too of a pilot series a few weeks ago. The Rye River brand has come of age, and attached itself to some very fine beers.

Best Overseas Brewery: The Exchange
In a busy and diverse drinking year, no single overseas brewery stood out for me. This award is going on visitor experience, then, and the smart, bijou taproom of this place in Niagara-on-the-Lake, visited in September. It brews good stuff too.

Best New Brewery Opening 2018: Four Provinces
OK technically this was a 2017 launch, but it was 2018 before the new range started getting out and about. Láidir in particular was the best new regular-production Irish beer of the year, but there's no Golden Pint for that.

Pub/Bar of the Year: UnderDog
In the grand tradition of the previous year's Best Newcomer winning Best Pub this time round, UnderDog takes the prize. Anyone who's spent any amount of time there will know why. It's always entertaining and only a small part of that is because of what's on tap. Shout-out to Paddy, Barry and Chris who make it what it is.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2018: GIST
I think I'm right with the timing here: I don't see any reference to its existence prior to last January. Anyway, Brussels has a new star in its pub firmament; a lovely blend of traditional cosy brown-café vibes with a bang-up-to-date modern beer list. A most honorable mention goes to the Metalman bar in Waterford which opened just over a year ago, pouring great beers and hosting fun events on the city's quayside.

Beer Festival of the Year: Hagstravaganza
The only Irish beer festival that people talk about; the centre of the calendar for the last two years; performing stellar geek-service while also being just a fun day out. After a few hiccups in year one, the 2018 outing nailed it.

Supermarket of the Year: Lidl
Time was this was a back-and-forth between the supermarket near work (Fresh in Smithfield) and the supermarket near home (SuperValu Sundrive) but both have lost crucial staff resulting in the loss of elite status. I'm going with Lidl instead this year, largely because of the Rye River commissions above, as well as the exotic oddities from the summer. More tickworthy exotic oddities please!

Independent Retailer of the Year: Stephen Street News
Unlike the supermarkets, Martin's and DrinkStore have done nothing at all wrong, but here comes the disruptor, jumping on the aluminium bandwagon and making exemplary use of price-points and social media to corner the poorly-served ubergeek end of the Dublin beer market. Long may it continue.

Online Retailer of the Year: YellowBelly Brewery
I don't usually award this because I don't buy beer on the internet, except this year I did: I joined the first outing of the YellowBelly Beer Club which meant four six-packs in the post. As I mentioned in relation to the last one, they weren't all brilliant beers, but there's still a bit of fun in parcel-post beer delivery, especially when it's a local outfit rather than a, say, Scottish or pseudo-Danish one.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: The Good Beer Guide To Belgium, 8th ed.
The mostly-annual award for The One Beer Book I Read This Year goes to Joe and Tim for this one. It is genuinely good. You don't get Golden Pints, or any pints, for putting out dreck.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Every Pub In Dublin
I've mentioned in previous years how I'm a sucker for a grand project. Dublin has two which came to my attention this year, attempting to visit all the pubs in Dublin (for a given value of "Dublin"), so shout-out to Dublin By Pub, but for sheer indefatigable doggedness, and regular laugh-out-loud pen portraits, this one goes to Cian.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: @Bill_Linane
It was well worth keeping a blackboard record of how many times each Twitter account amused me during 2018. The final tally shows Bill to be out in front. Well done Bill.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: Eight Degrees
The most frequent winner of this category takes it again and godammit it shouldn't be this easy for them. It's not rocket science for breweries to put information about their new releases out on the internet so customers can see what they're buying when they're buying it, yet Eight Degrees is the only one that has the information to hand when I want it. A spirited, and much appreciated, attempt was made on Instagram by Whiplash but they still didn't manage to document all their own releases (Love is Lost? Hello?). Meanwhile, every other Irish brewery: pleeease do this better.

And there we are. Can you believe that that's ten whole years of Golden Pints? Madness. Big thanks to Mark and Andy, of course, who originated the categories, ones which are looking a bit clunky for the current beer scene, but my unhallowed hands shall not disturb them, or the beer world's done for. See you in 2019!

All the way up

There's always a good showing from the nordics at Borefts, confirming that region as an instigator and driving force of interesting beer in Europe. As one would expect, the 2018 iteration of the festival featured some old hands and a few newcomers.

Närke, for instance, haven't missed a Borefts yet, as far as I've seen. A lot of their offer gets repeated but there's often something new. This year that was Husings Skogs-Porter, literally a "forest porter". It's foresty all right: the label mentions spruce, birch, alder, juniper and honey. Despite this it's still a porter all the way through, built on a solid base of milk chocolate, the 7.9% ABV giving it a good foundation. All the fancy ingredients amount to little more than a sticky raisin and blackberry combination. This is offset by a berry tartness but it still tastes like a cake. I'd have liked some more exotic and unusual flavours, yet there's nothing wrong with a porter that tastes a bit like Black Forest gateau. Add more cherries next time.

Iceland made its Borefts début with beers from Borg brewery. Snorri No. 10 caught my eye in particular, described as a herb ale and 5.3% ABV. Arctic thyme is apparently the key ingredient. It's a hazy gold colour with an aroma which calls to mind homemade lemonade and herbed summer cocktails. The flavour is appropriately fresh and zingy: a sweet sugary base but with overtones of citrus zest, white pepper and assorted garden herbs. This is fun and refreshing while also being intellectually interesting in the way the flavours combine and contrast.

From the selection of Borg stouts I picked Garún as the one I hadn't had before. There's no mistaking the 11.5% ABV here: it's very heavily textured, the flavour being a bitter and sticky mix of toffee, liquorice and very strong ristretto coffee. While this is an absolute pounder, it has subtleties too. The flavours are strong, but they're comforting, making it an ideal winter sipper.

The Norwegian beers came courtesy of Klostergården, German and all that it sounds. Their Mint Saison intrigued me: it's not a combination I'd seen before. This turned out to be rather plain fare. Not even a hint of mint comes through to the taste, just vague herbs and an unpleasant rubber note.

Its companion goes by the cheery name of Herbie, a beer brewed for the festival with the nine ingredients specified by De Molen plus one extra of the brewery's choosing. Don't ask me to list them. What they came up with was an unhopped job, fermented with kveik yeast. It's a wan orange colour with a powerful farmyard aroma and then a flavour that is at once candy-sweet and heavily phenolic, strongly implying that peated malt has been employed. There's no smoothness or nuance or blended elements here and the whole thing is just a bit nasty. A failed experiment, I reckon.

Moving from Norway to Sweden, I stopped in my tracks when passing the Beerbliotek stand and seeing their orange-peel-infused black IPA Shakes Fist Angrily: the perfect beer for a certain sort of online beer commentator. It's a stonking 9.5% ABV and looks like a lovely creamy stout in the glass: purest obsidian with a tan-tinted head. Fresh and crunchy red cabbage comes out in the aroma while the flavour is sweet with lots of milk chocolate, laced with candied orange peel. A mild hop acridity finishes it off. There's a classy linear progression through the flavours with each mouthful, none of them building to dominate and with no alcohol harshness. This is smooth, balanced, easy-drinking, and probably very dangerous in larger measures. Hence the name, I guess.

I assume there's some sort of protocol to the 2004 accession treaty that says beer from Estonia's Põhjala Brewery must be present at a certain proportion of international beer festivals in Europe, because they really do get about. The only one of their Borefts range I tried was Leevike, described in the programme as a "spiced winter sour" with honey, cinnamon, hibiscus, and clove. It's a murky ochre colour, and the honey and cinnamon form the aroma: so far, so wintery. Warming cinnamon is most of the flavour but it's not laid on too thick. The texture is light and sparkly despite 6.5% ABV. The baseline sweetness is probably the honey again, and while it's not as complex as the ingredients list implies, it is pleasant and jolly.

My Estonian beer horizons were expanded by the presence of Sori, from whom I tried two beers. Vinum Secale is, as the name explicitly states, a rye wine: 10.1% ABV and a dark chestnut red. It tastes... oily: herbal like retsina with the same juicy red grape and then overtones of eucalyptus and coconut oil. Smooth and a little boozy, it's very sippable and ponderable. This is an unusual beer and one not to be rushed.

I returned to Sori much later for an even stronger beer: Conca d'Oro, This is a wine-barrel-aged imperial stout of 11% ABV. The base beer here is very plain and it lacks the basic profile of a stout. The barrel goes some way to make up for that, throwing out unadulterated grape juice, sweet raisin and plum and a fortified port booziness. Bitter herbs add to the complexity, giving it a pipe tobacco aroma and a finish like Fernet Stock. It's all rather delightful overall and a great finisher for the evening and this post. Sori is a brewer to look out for, it seems.

More from elsewhere tomorrow.