The whips of winter

As usual, the breweries of Ireland collectively slowed the pace of new release beers for the month of January. Luckily, beer squirrel that I am, I had built up a collection of Whiplash's late-2025 offerings to tide me over until the kettles were fired up once more.

A number of local breweries have taken turns in making a Christmas special for the Molloy's off licence chain, and it was Whiplash's go last year. As usual, it's a simple and accessible pale ale, this one 5.2% ABV and given the grand title Winter Hymnal. In defiance of fashion, it's very pale and very clear, with a classic aroma of gently lemony American hops. The gravity is high enough to give it a decent malt substance and quite a sweet character. The hops manifest as lemon curd or candy, soft rather than sharp, despite the "west coast" claim on the label. Don't expect much else: this is an uncomplicated beer, to say the least. It's far from bland, however, and beautifully clean. As usual with these Molloy's beers, they're sort of thing you can lay in for a party and keep all the beer drinkers happy. Or most of them, at least.

Belgian pale ale isn't a style we see much of from local breweries, but Lace Ritual is one such: a collaboration with Belgian-themed Atlanta brewery Bold Monk. It poured clearer than I would have expected for both the style and the producer, turning out a happy sunset gold with plenty of fine white foam on top. The ripe, almost foetid, fruit of the aroma tells us we're in Belgian territory from the get-go. The low carbonation level was the next surprise: the gas must have all gone into the head. That does lower the Belgian quotient a little. The flavour is bitter at first, a pithy bite striking early. This softens after a moment, adding sweet orange segments and a floral complexity, like jasmine and/or honeysuckle (it's been a while since I had a good sniff of a flower garden). The bitter side returns in the end: a little herbal and a little minerally. A nicely full body helps carry all this, though more active condition would have helped too. I've complained recently about Whiplash beers lacking boldness of flavour, and while this could be accused of that, I think the subtlety is in its favour, and it's far from bland. Refreshingly different and very decent, is my assessment. Thanks, presumably, are due to the collaborating partner for taking this out-of-the-ordinary approach to pale ale.

The inevitable hazy IPA in the set is Dream State, a collaboration with English brewery Floc. It's the beige sort of hazy, with a handsome head of loose bubbles on top. Tropical juice features in the aroma, a sweet mix of mango, passionfruit and pineapple derived from Galaxy, Citra, Motueka and Nelson Sauvin. The flavour is clean, but a little plain. I get coconut rather than tropical fruit as its centrepiece, which is dessert of a different sort. Apricot and red apple sits behind this, and little of Nelson's flinty spice. Although it's heavy, and shows all of its 6.5% ABV, it's clean with it, and quite easy to drink. As usual for recent hazy Whiplash efforts, I would have liked bigger and louder regarding the hops, and there's nothing very special here: nothing distinctive or justifying the presence of the visiting brewers. Not all beers of this sort are bang average -- some are actively terrible, others sublime -- but this one is the epitome of fine. I'm of the opinion that there are so many hazy IPAs knocking around that they really need to do something distinctively excellent to be worthwhile. This one doesn't, alas. 

Yet another hazy double IPA follows. Down to the Well is the typical Whiplash 8.2% ABV, though not the typical Whiplash colour, being a dun shade of beige, rather than luminous yellow. The aroma is spiky and bitter, suggesting hop dregs or even raw cones. Azacca and Amarillo have been used, and I thought they would have given it a sweetly fruitsome flavour. Instead, it's bitterness first, thanks presumably to the third hop, Chinook. That's coupled with a heavy texture and lots of heat, two more things that are out of character for the brewery. More subtle mango and cantaloupe arrives late in proceedings, but has to share space with a waxen bite and a teeth-squeaking pithiness. The whole is a bit too hot and soupy for my liking. Drink it cold to make it manageable.

I wasn't sorry to be leaving the hoppy section behind. Whiplash isn't playing a good haze game these days. We move on to the much more enjoyable genre of stout. Shepherd's Warning is an oatmeal and coffee job, with regular coffee-dealing collaborator, 3FE. The roast is off the charts in the aroma, beyond coffee and into full-on carvery: beefy, with deliciously charred edge pieces. The flavour is still centred on coffee, but lighter and more, well, coffee-like. Coupled with a creamy texture, the main taste is that of coffee cake icing, or a coffee-cream filled chocolate: much more sweet and oily than dry and roasty. There's little room left for the beer in that, but I don't mind. Roast is roast, and too many coffee stouts allow the beans to fade into the stout background. That very much doesn't happen here, and it runs a contrary risk of being too coffeeish instead. I liked that about it. It's bold, unapologetic, and makes superb use of both the added ingredient and its blousey 7.5% ABV. One could level a fair accusation that it's nothing but a novelty beer, but few coffee novelties are this colourful, or enjoyable. The coffee isn't a seasoning here, it demands your full attention, and deserves to be given it.

The strength goes up to 8% ABV for Dying Again, though it's in the somewhat plainer style of export stout. It looks great, though: pouring thickly with a very dark tan-coloured head. The aroma is coffee, but much less pronounced than in the previous one, obviously. There's a little buttery toffee too, suggesting it's going to be sweet. But while it is dense with unfermented malt sugars, they've given it a serious dose of hops -- old world, I assume -- for that wonderful balancing kick of vegetal bitterness. I always think of beers like this as a window into stout before the big multinationals eroded it into the anodyne, mass-market beverage it became in the 20th century. This is stout from when it was, well, stout. Atin' and drinkin' in it, to redeploy the horribly over-used Irish beer cliché. After the initial rush of molasses and zinc, there's a gentler summer fruit and meadow flower perfume. It doesn't need complexity, but they've given it some anyway. All told, it's a damn solid, straight up and down, thoroughly proper export stout. Why isn't this the fashion, instead of hazy IPA?

I eagerly await the 2026 releases from Whiplash, especially if there are more big stouts.

Lidl goes shopping

Lidl unleashed a plethora of independent Irish beer in an autumn windfall of generosity last month. I picked up the ones I hadn't tried before, of course, including relative newcomer 59 South Pale Ale. It's brewed in Dublin at Select Batch but claims a pretend brewery at the foot of Mount Leinster in Co. Carlow on the label. It's a middling copper colour and a middling 4.8% ABV. A solid west coast bitterness opens the flavour: sharp pine and grapefruit; not exactly fresh and zingy but with plenty of punch. The aroma combines this with balancing toffee, but that dark malt doesn't get a look-in in the flavour, which is (pleasingly) all hop. The initial pine fades to wax then tails off, leaving a dank residue. Maybe it's the Carlow connection, but I'm reminded a lot of O'Hara's IPA here: it has the same sort of combination of heavy body and uncompromising acidity. I liked this solid pale ale much more than I thought I would and am all ears for the next 59 South release.

12 Acres had two new ones in the line-up. I began with Shepherd's Warning, a red-labelled (oh I get it now) IPA of 5% ABV. And there's a distinctly reddish tint to the beer too. The aroma is a wholesome mix of lemon and tannin like, well, lemon tea. I have a lot of time for a beer that smells refreshing. The flavour is blander, and sliding much more into red ale territory than IPA. I got a jammy kick of strawberry and some harsher green cabbage notes. After this it finishes quickly, abruptly so for a beer of its strength, leaving an odd wisp of caramel smoke in its wake. While perfectly drinkable it lacks character and is certainly putting on airs by calling itself an IPA. More hops please.

The other was Lazy Meadow, a lager I opened a few days later. It's a dark gold colour with a fun lemon spritz aroma. Lemon tea is again a feature, this time in the flavour, leaving it nicely thirst-quenching if a little flat. Though a mere 4% ABV, it has quite a big and chewy texture, and could easily pass as a pale ale more than a lager, which is a bit of a shame. It is clean and lacking in flaws, however, which can't be said of every budget Irish supermarket lager. I didn't take too long over it, and I don't think it's designed to be savoured anyway, but I enjoyed the time I spent with it.

It was great to see a nordie brewery represented at Lidl too. There were three releases from Hillstown, and my first to try was Douglas Top, another lager. Though only 4.1% ABV it's a rich dark golden hue and the aroma gets full marks: a classic pilsner mix of crisp green veg and soft sweet biscuit. Both of these elements get turned to an extreme in the flavour, in a way that wasn't to my taste. The hops are tinny and tangy; the malt musty and stale-tasting. I've certainly had real German lager that has tasted like this so I think the fault is entirely mine here, though the beer is a little flatter than it should be, technically speaking. Otherwise it's a cautious thumbs up, unless you have the same weird aversion to intensely German lagers that I do.

Long Mountain was an altogether smoother affair, being a wheat beer in a broadly weissbier style, though with a dab of witbier lemon in it too. The low carbonation works better here, giving it a full and silky texture for ease of drinking. In place of banana there's a gentler lychee fruit sweetness, and a piquancy that may be the yeast, or is possibly down to the surprise inclusion of rye, according to the label. The more subtle fruit and spice does fight a little with a level of alcoholic warmth which suggests more than the 5.3% ABV, so this isn't one of your light and refreshing weissbiers. It's not one for hammering through anyway.

The trilogy is completed by Mid Hill, an IPA, though a modest one at 4.5% ABV. It looked unattractive while pouring, as flat and pale as a half-litre of white wine. It is a little bit darker in the glass, with a skim of white foam which doesn't last long. The aroma offers fun mandarin and candy, followed by a harder metallic edge. Oddly, my first flavour impression is of chocolate, coupled with oily oranges, like a Terry's confection, or the orange creme sweets that tend to be the last ones left in the tin. And then there's that bitterness: a harsh buzz of green cabbage and zinc, rising late and forming a long and insistent finish. Coupled with further thinness and flatness, the flavour did not endear me to this beer. It's nearly a decent, vaguely American-style, pale ale, but it misses the mark on texture and fresh hop taste.

No stand-out bargains here, but a couple of decent and unfussy efforts. It seems kind of strange that Lidl's core beer range is of generally better quality than this handful of specials, though that's not a complaint.