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!

Get innovative!

And the winner of the Most-Overstated Beer Festival Name goes to... "Leuven Innovation Beer Festival", for the fourth year running. I spent a long afternoon here but didn't really see what was so innovative about it. The format was perfectly sound: organised by Belgian microbrewer Hof ten Dormaal, hosted in the former Stella Artois brewery, now an exhibition centre, and featuring 17 breweries from across Europe plus a couple of American ones, all mostly pouring a selection of their beers from bottles.

My journey began at the sole German representative, Schwarzwald Gold, from the south-eastern corner of the country. And I will admit that Pomme D'Or, a beer made with apples and fermented with cider and champagne yeast, does carry at least some air of innovation. I've certainly never had anything like it. It's around the 8% ABV mark, and has the funk aroma of a heavy aged cider. The flavour mixes juicy sweet cider with a damp, autumnal funk, finishing on a crisp note of wheat. It's odd, carrying influences from both cider and weissbier. It's tasty too: complex and warming, like it has been pre-mulled. Pleasingly it's still identifiable as a German weizenbock, despite all the... well... innovation.

Next door was Birrificio Sorrento which had a couple of grape ales on the go, and it's my new rule to never pass an Italian grape ale by. I started on Elèa which was 7.5% ABV, a medium amber colour, and exceedingly plain; disappointingly so, in fact. There's a helles-like sweetness and only the fainest hint of grape must. Definitely not what the style demands.

I had higher hopes (it wouldn't be hard) for their other one, Ligia. This is a lighter 6% ABV and spicy like a tripel. Not a bad beer in and of itself, but there was no trace at all of grape, so I was even more let down by this one. I guess if I drink enough of any style I'll eventually find examples I don't like, but to be honest it genuinely never occured to me that it could happen with Italian grape ales. Innovation again.

I was back at Sorrento towards the end of my visit to try one more: Syrentum, a saison with local lemons in the recipe. There's a bubblebath aroma but fortunately no soap in the flavour. Instead there's an intense lemon zing; very real, like homemade lemonade with all the bits in. Once again the style guide is thrown out the window, but this one at least tastes nice, and at 5.5% ABV is well capable of refreshment on a balmy Campanian evening.

South Plains is a brewery that's easily mistaken for an American but is actually Swedish. Its yee-ha Brett IPA is called Hophead Harry, coming in at a modest 5.5% ABV. I wasn't a fan. This one is horribly, cloyingly sweet, opening with a shock of sharp perfume, before proceeding to an artificial floral candy: think Parma Violets or Rhubarb-and-Custards, '80s kids. It's cloying and difficult, the Brett doing nothing to clean (or dirty) up its sugary excesses. A hard pass from me.

Randomly to Poland next, and Browar ReCraft, from near Katowice. Milkołak ICE is, as the name implies, a milk stout. And it's fine. A little strong for one of these at 6% ABV, but with the appropriate sweet condensed-milk aroma, and a flavour which balances that with dark roast and husky cereal grain. Straightforward, boring perhaps, depending how you take to milk stouts, but on-point as far as I was concerned.

The UK was represented by Vibrant Forest, a south coast brewery I'd heard of but never encountered. I went with Dahlia from their selection, a Chardonnay barrel-aged sour beer with added Brettanomyces: you know, like everyone is making these days. It looked like wine, being a pale yellow-green and quite flat. My first impression was of Fino sherry: that slightly sharp, salty, almost vinegar-like edge, then spicy oak and sour green grape. As in many a well-made beer of this genre, the Brett doesn't come on very strongly, adding little more than a sprinkling of funk; a seasoning. Classy stuff, this, if just a little un-beer-like.

Lo Vilot, the Spanish brewery, had a wide selection on offer. I went with Psicocherry, a light, soured, cherry beer, and it's probably the reason I didn't try any of their others. It's plain and watery, candy sweet, with an unsubtle sourness tacked on to the end. I got the impression of a brewery trying to be on trend but not really getting how to do it. This did not compare favourably with the beer that preceded it.

From Moscow, the alarmingly named Red Button brewery. Soledad was my one from them, an IPA with Thai blue tea and lychee. The aroma is floral and enticing, while the soft and sweet lychee really comes to the fore in the flavour. The main contribution of the tea is turning the whole thing a vivid purple colour. Overall it's clean and refreshing, not bursting with hop flavour, but at 5% ABV that's somewhat excusable. This is decent overall, confining its gimmickry to the colour.

On Europe's eastern frontier, in the Ural mountains, you'll find Crazy Brew. I gave their Russian Imperial Stout a spin, of course. There's a gorgeous café crème aroma from this 11%-er but it unravels after that, turning too sweet at first, and then slightly plasticky. I couldn't pinpoint anything specific that had gone wrong with it, it just didn't taste right to me.

Let's stay with imperial stouts from points eastern and check out Tumaine, also 11% ABV and hailing from Estonia's Pühaste brewery. There's coffee in it, though that wasn't apparent to me from the flavour, which starts on gentle chocolate and rosewater then builds gradually, aided by an incredibly dense texture, to liquorice and other medicinal herbs. There's quite a lot of alcohol heat, combining with the thick slickness to make it a kind of liqueur. It's an intense experience, but not necessarily a great one, lacking finesse.

Possibly my favourite name of the festival was Anarkriek by local outfit 't Hofbrouwerijke. It's not a kriek, however, but a porter with cherries, a big-hitter at 8.5% ABV. There's a very interesting contrast in the mix of dry roast and sweet cherry liqueur chocolate. Then it's let down by a savoury autolytic twang and a faint vinegar burn. This may have been left in the fermenter longer than was good for it, but there's potential for greatness here.

I got more cherries from Nacht, a dark ale by Purpose Brewing in Colorado, yet it wasn't brewed with cherries. It appears to have been brewed with damn near everything else, though: coconut, orange peel, vanilla beans, grains of paradise and wood aged. As well as the cherries I found chocolate, hazelnut and raisin in abundance, like a boozy liquid version of a Cadbury's Fruit & Nut bar. Beautiful.

The Purpose beer that garnered most attention on the day was called Smoeltrakker #68. Assuming it has been honed through 67 previous iterations, that's hardly surprising. The base is a sour blonde ale and it has then been aged in bourbon barrels -- how innovative! The end result is beautiful, however: bright and spicy oak, perfumed with incense-like cedar notes, overlaying a mild cleansing tartness. This is no show-off, there's nothing extreme or overdone about it; just perfect balance and harmony. Maybe 9.1% ABV is excessive, but I'll live with it.

The other American brewery was the intriguingly named Pen Druid, out of Sperryville, Virginia. From their offer I picked Telemachus, a 7.5% ABV sour murky brown thingy. There's some herbal aniseed in with the sharp acidity, but also lots of dreggy yeast fuzz. Clean it up and you might have a halfway decent Flemish oud bruin, otherwise I'm not sure what it's supposed to be, only that I don't particularly like it.

It's sour here on out: I guess that's all you need to make to be considered innovative these days. Swiss brewery Trois Dames were at the show and their line-up included Fiancée (Chasselas), a sour saison with grapes. Sounds promising! It's a pale yellow colour and quite assertively tart, with close to a vinegar edge. Fortunately a juicy complexity in the background goes a long way to offset this, though more in a tropical fruit style than wine grapes. Once you get used to it it's quite easy to settle into; pleasant if not spectacular.

The brewery's more spectacular one was the spontaneously fermented Sauvageronne, which had a kick of real lambic about it: from the flat murky orange look to the saltpetre spiced flavour, with a rounded oaky smoothness from the wine barrels it was matured in. The lambicness shouldn't be surprising as the brewery did blend in some Oud Beersel beer years ago, at the beginning of the long-drawn-out solera ageing process. While the painstaking blending and re-blending paid off -- the beer is great -- it's still a little too vinegary to sit side-by-side with Pajottenland's finest.

With night falling and the pubs of Leuven calling, my final beer token went on Weelde, another lambic-a-like, this time from Dutch breweries Oersoep and Nevel, in collaboration. As well as the spicy bricky nitre, there's a lot of tangy fruit, and grapefruit in particular. It's cleansing, invigorating, and like the Smoeltrekker above, quiet and respectful, without being any way boring. The perfect reset beer ahead of the evening's second phase.

Whatever about the innovation aspect, this festival was great for showing me corners of the brewing world I'd never encountered previously. Thanks also go to the guys from Galway Bay, also exhibiting, for the occasional between-ticks tasters. One more wrap-up post to come before we depart.