Garden party

It has taken them a while. Almost eight years have passed since the Smithwick family opened the Sullivan's Taproom in Kilkenny, a brand home for their contract-brewed beer which would one day be a full-sized production facility. It's getting there now and the block-built infrastructure is in place at the rear of the building. Also back there is a good-sized and well-laid-out beer garden where, for the last two years, Sullivan's has been inviting guest breweries to set up their bars for a weekend. I went along to the most recent iteration.

Of course, it was also a chance to catch up with some new beers from Sullivan's itself, since I don't see them very often. Earlier this year they introduced a pilsner called Na Boii, named after the Celtic tribe after whom, in turn, Bohemia is named. It's the appropriate clear golden colour with a soft texture and plenty of sparkle, and the 4.7% ABV is appropriate too. The appropriateness ends there, however. The fermentation isn't up to snuff and the beer is full of esters, tasting primarily of green banana with a different sort of marzipan or cake sweetness alongside. I expect grassy Saaz hops, and would even forgive a smear of buttery diacetyl, but neither features here. There's nothing distasteful going on, and it's OK to drink, but if I were marking it to style it would fare poorly.

Sullivan's Pale Ale is rather better. It exists in bottled form, so I'm guessing it's produced by the main contracting brewer, Dundalk Bay, rather than on the on-site pilot kit in Kilkenny. That might explain why everything is dialled in better. It's a dark-ish amber colour in the glass and smells delightfully zesty. The hops soften on tasting, into the apple and grape of a fruit salad with a sparkle of lemon sherbet. That's balanced by a cornbread malt sweetness, making for some nicely satisfying drinking at only 4.7% ABV. Rather like its Sullivan's sibling, Maltings Red Ale, this is a well-made take on the style, accessible enough for the mainstream but with plenty of interesting character too.

The host had also tried their hand at imperial stout, and barrel-ageing it too, to create Tri-Capital. Information about it is near non-existent so I can't tell you why it's called that, nor what it was aged in. The tap badge does say it was barrel aged for nine months, with another handwritten note on the bar telling us it's 8.5% ABV. Dundalk Bay has a bit of experience in this space, creating the fantastic 8% ABV Romanov in 2019 and a 9% ABV imperial stout in 2021. Happily, this has more in common with the first of these, taking very dark chocolate and caramelised sugar and adding in a heap of boiled green vegetables for a very grown-up bitter stout flavour, just how I like it. The barrel aspect is understated, adding quite a subtle layer of vanilla to proceedings, and a little cheeky spirit heat. Fans of the kind of strong and dark beauties produced by Brehon Brewhouse on the regular would like this one too. It deserves a wider distribution than the Taproom.

And so to the guest brewers. I began at Hopfully, with their new Floatinghome Belgian-style pale ale. This is a tricky style to get right, and American breweries have tended to be better at it than European ones, in my experience. Hopfully has made an excellent go of it, however, holding back a little on the fruity hops, showing only some apricot and star anise, but going big with the Belgianesque herbs and spices: bitter marjoram and dill plus a kick of incense and exotic peppercorns. It's heavily textured for 5.1% ABV but retains a cleansing sparkle as well. Like the imperial stout above, it's great to find this too-rare flavour profile in an Irish beer.

The second Irish hopfenweisse of 2024 came courtesy of Lineman, called Organised Fun. I said in the context of the Eight Degrees one that the style is rarely to my taste, but this one very much was, and I think the hop choice was crucial to that. It's BRU-1 and Hallertau Blanc, the latter of which brewer Mark described as "poor man's Nelson". I can see why too: this beer has very Nelsony notes of flinty minerals and juicy Chardonnay grape. What's even better is what it doesn't taste of: clashing banana esters. There is a softness and sweetness that tells me it's not simply a thinly-disguised IPA, though I fully accept that I may simply prefer hopfenweisse when it's not brewed entirely to style, or when it's brewed by Schneider of Kelheim, who are still making the original.

That leaves just Dead Centre, who had two beers new to me. There was a New England-style pale ale called Tweet Into The Void, 5.5% ABV and hopped with Citra and Strata. That offered a very straightforward kind of decency, from the sunny opaque yellow colour to the zesty yet tropical aroma of lime and pineapple, to the juicy mandarin flavour. If I'm picking nits, there's maybe a little too much of the oniony, savoury side of the hops in the immediate foretaste, and right on the very end, but far from enough to spoil things. It doesn't do anything you haven't tasted a hazy pale ale do before, but I think I'd be perfectly happy with a pint of this in its native environment, down by the Shannon.

Another barrel aged imperial stout to take us out: Solar Eclipse, at 10.7% ABV. There's a slightly odd, but not unpleasant, charcoal aroma, then a flavour centred on chocolate and caramel but with sidenotes of oaky cork and a little umami-laden autolysis as well: soy sauce or shiitake mushrooms. The charcoal flavour becomes a tang of burnt grain in the finish. That sounds a bit off, but again it's a very good beer for the most part, the highlight being a hugely rich and creamy texture, making it for sipping only. It's ambitious, and certainly characterful. While the like of Lough Gill and The White Hag have really mastered this kind of beer, you have to start somewhere and I hope Dead Centre will be trying its hand at more.

With all the ticking done, pints followed, including excellent cask versions of Ballykilcavan's Cobbler's Castle and Wide Street's Plush pale ales. And after that there was tasty barbecue food down at Paris Texas before the train home. It was a fun and easy-going festival in a beautiful venue. Thoroughly recommended for next year, when there might even be a shiny new brewery to see.

Funny place to bring a dog

Drinking in the RDS on St Patrick's Day is a proud Dublin tradition. Or at least it was until the early 1960s when the spoilsports in government made it legal for pubs to open, removing the necessity to feign interest in the Irish Kennel Club's annual dog show in order to take advantage of its refreshing licensing loophole.

This year the custom returned, in a manner of speaking. After four years in the docklands, the upstart little brother of Ireland's biggest beer festival has moved in next door to its sibling. To a bigger house, too. The 2015 Irish Beer & Whiskey Festival was held in Hall 1 at the RDS, a grand space with plenty of seats and room for the amateur drinkers to stagger safely.

It wasn't quite the extravaganza of limited-run beers that the September festival tends to be, but there was plenty to keep me occupied. Eight Degrees, for instance, was showing off Enigma, a 6% ABV pale ale made with the eponymous hops, a real Australian rarity. It reminded me most of Nelson Sauvin, in its milder, gooseberry manifestation. There's a melon rind quality too, and some red apple: all the dry, tart fruit, in short. It's decent drinking but could stand to be more complex.

The other new one from the Mitchelstown machine was Polar Vortex, a 5.8% ABV pale ale brewed with Cascade, Simcoe and Citra. I got a lot of resinousness from this and it's even a little acidic. Only the big malt body saves it from harshness. Rather than the hop explosions we've become used to from Eight Degrees, this is altogether more rounded and nuanced, something I certainly appreciated about it.

White Hag was present at the festival in a big way, bringing a nice comfy couch for the crew to lounge on behind the bar. It was a long five days of festival, after all. New beers included The White Sow, a 5.2% ABV milk chocolate oatmeal stout. It sounds more interesting that it turned out to be. The milk chocolate is right there, smooth and sweet at the centre of the flavour, but that's about the extent of what happens. My attention wandered, even when sipping a sample. They also had a version infused with fresh coffee at the bar and that simply replaced one single-dimension flavour with another.

I was much more intrigued by Searbh Rua, described as an "imperial sour red". Wut? Well, it's 7.9% ABV, and very definitely red. But the first sip reveals it to be massively sweet. It certainly makes up for the stout's shortcomings in its complexity: I got raspberries, cherries and even chocolate in the first few seconds. The sourness arrives late, providing just a little kick of tartness right on the end. The alcohol heat is very present throughout and I'd be placing this on the shelf with the barley wines. It's not a clean and invigorating sour beer; more a warming fireside sipper.

The "OMG When Do You People Sleep?" award for overactive brewing activity went to Trouble who had three brand new beers, plus the regular range and minus one new one they didn't reckon was ready yet. My beer of choice, and beer of the festival, was Centennial SMASH, 4.8% ABV and served on keg and cask, though I only drank the latter. Knock a percentage point off this and we'd have Ireland's Jarl. It's has that dry and ever so slightly soapy floral character of the Scot, but a beautiful smoothness and plenty of bright, zippy citric notes. Insanely drinkable material.

I was less impressed by Wandering Star, a blonde ale with nothing much going on other than some dry grain husk and an unpleasant tang of marker pens. Fallen Idol cheered me right up after that: a murky brown ale smelling edgily of gunpowder and weed and with a powerfully juicy flavour, mostly consisting of abundant, decadent peaches. At 6.3% ABV it demands a bit of respect but is great fun at the same time.

My other festival highlight alongside Fallen Idol was O Brother's Bonita, another dark hop-forward beer. Instead of fruit flavours, however, this is big on piquancy: liquorice and perfumery spices are to the fore, backed by dark chocolate and a lip-smacking dry roast.

Other breweries I just tried one new beer from were Independent, which had a new IPA, a 7% ABV job utilising Citra, Cascade and Summer hops, smelling spicy and tasting very grassy but without being too bitter, balanced by a tasty sweet orange candy character; and Kinnegar, whose Cup & Saucer coffee stout really lays on the thick brown-sugar-laced coffee but there's plenty of roast so while it's certainly heavy, as befits 6.2% ABV, it's not sickly or difficult drinking.

White Gypsy had an Australian Pale Ale, 4.8% ABV, amber coloured, toffee aroma'd and tasting of perfume and caramel with a rather sticky texture. Much better was White Gypsy Helles, a tiny bit of diacetyl but also lots of crisp green celery and a little white pepper too, alongside a golden syrup sweetness. Its best feature is the texture: authentic Bavarian levels of soft smoothness making it very quaffable indeed.

Finally to Station Works. I mentioned in relation to their brown ale the other week that they've been doing local recreations of Cumberland Breweries beers. Two more to report on from this festival: Station Works Irish Stout is nicely dry with a sharp black malt edge but smooth too, making for a plain but easy-drinking pint. Only a slight rubbery waft in the aroma spoils it, and only a little. I liked Station Works Irish Blonde too: no aroma, but cool and crisp like a good lager, and every bit as refreshing. If Station Works has truly set itself a mission to breathe new life into cask beer in Ireland then this is sort of beer that could do it. This and Trouble Centennial SMASH, obviously.

What else you got?

Several established Irish breweries brought beers I'd never had before to the 2015 Alltech festival at the Convention Centre. Galway Hooker, for instance, has just launched a new bottled IPA called 60 Knots. It's a serious dark gold colour and is all about the classic grapefruit aromas. As my first beer on the second day of proceedings it seemed sharply acidic to begin, and a little brassy. But there are mellower elements in the flavour too: a touch of that signature Hooker biscuit and a more fun gunpowder spicing. You know you're getting a full-on 6.5% ABV and 60 IBUs here. This is one for the Hooker Pale Ale fans who've spent the last nine years craving something bigger.

Hilden is also at the ABV-raising game. Their new one is a double IPA called Buck's Head and is dark gold once again. While the hops definitely make their presence felt -- bitter and waxy -- the malt is a major contributor to the overall flavour. You get a warming cake-and-caramel weightiness with this one. It's perhaps a little old-fashioned compared to the zingier sort of US-style DIPA, but it works perfectly well as a beer in its own right.

If it was zing you were after, Kinnegar was the bar to go to. The Donegal brewery has jumped on the white IPA (ish) bandwagon with one called White Rabbit, hopped entirely with Vic Secret and while allegedly brewed with the customary wheat, there's very little sign of it or any other malt in here. Bask instead in the glory of grapefruit and the roar of the resins. The rabbit beer from the rabbit (ish) brewery is unapologetically hoppy.

IPA fail of the weekend was a non-exhibit, but a bottle of Farmageddon Wet Hop IPA smuggled into the press room by Nigel. I can only assume a saboteur filled two thirds of this with TCP as it reeked and tasted of raw disinfectant and absolutely nothing else.

From ale to lager, briefly, and Remix India Pale Lager from the increasingly hyperactivie Trouble Brewing. It's 5% IPA and very dank, tasting akin to the air just outside the front door of Amsterdam Centraal. There's a fun peppery piquancy and a quick, clean exit from the palate like a proper lager ought to have. Big and complex while also being simple and quaffable. A taster really didn't do this justice.

Two more new Irish saisons made an appearace. Carlow's latest seasonal Spring Saison is the plainer of the two, No fruit, no esters, just very dry -- stale, even -- dusty burlap and grain sweepings. Wicklow Wolf, meanwhile, had the shortest-pitched seasonal I've ever encountered: Solar Eclipse was topical for about five minutes last Friday morning. It's a lovely dark copper colour and rather strong at 6.5% ABV. While it leans towards the fruit-forward type of saison -- green banana and lychee coming through in a big way for me -- it's all very deftly balanced with peppercorn and similar dry spices. There's great refreshment power here despite the strength.

I have to fit a couple of token stouts into these Irish posts, and Jack Cody's fits the bill first with their Paddy's Day seasonal Hail Glorious Saint Patrick. It's 5.4% ABV and absolutely bang-on for a slightly-bigger-than-usual Irish stout: chocolate looms large in the aroma and the flavour profile floats nicely between sweet dark malts and drier roasted elements. They've cheekily badged it as an imperial stout and I can kind-of see the basis for the claim -- it's pretty full-flavoured after all -- but it lacks the warmth to really pull off the illusion.

I finally got to catch up with the two 12th Abbey beers I hadn't tried, and to hear about the highly ambitious brewery development plans under way. In the meantime, Raven Stout is a very simple and straightforward Irish dry stout, throwing a bit of caramel into the mix as it warms, though also featuring a strange aspirin acidity. 12th Abbey Pale Ale also has this. Jaffa orange is the sum total of the hop fruit flavour, but it's more sharp than anything else. Like the Amber ale, all of these recipes could do with tweaking to smooth out their rougher edges.

Our last port of call before we head abroad is Station Works, up there by Newry railway station. They had a new pale ale on the go called The Foxes Rock. It doesn't really work, being all buttery diacetyl and nasty chalky mineral dryness. One of those beers that leaves you boggling at what the brewer could possibly have intended. Station Works also has grand plans to revitalise cask beer in Ireland and has been busily cloning the beers from its sister operation Cumberland Breweries. Station Works No. 1 was the first fruits of this, a 4.7% ABV cask brown ale. While there's more butter here, it works far better in this sort of beer. The overall effect is of milky coffee or chocolate ice cream. I'd love to say it hits the mild style spots but it's just too heavy and not refreshing enough for that. Still a decent beer: a regular sweet brown ale on cask could well be a winner.

That's the UK and Ireland covered. Where to next?