The Big Three

Today's post harks back to the early days of Irish microbrewing, when the producers felt that the path to success was to copy what the mainstream was doing. As a result, every beer that came out was either a pale lager, a red ale or a stout. Things are very different nowadays, but those three styles are still around, even if they're not produced at the same rate as the myriad variations on pale ale. I've picked a handful to see how things are at the old school.

We'll start at Dublin City Brewing. Well, sort of. Even though their cans have been claiming the beer is brewed at the new facility in Parnell Street, company representatives are regularly in the media explaining they brew under contract and their own brewery will be commissioned any day now. One or the other, lads. Anyway, Pioneer Pilsner is their first limited edition, designed to be a hoppy cut above their core Liberator lager. Its rich golden colour suggests to me that they're going for something Czech style, and the malt-driven flavour confirms it for me. This is no crisp and grassy number but a smooth and biscuity experience. There is a smattering of fruit esters on top of this, but it's not too disturbing and adds to the enjoyable chewy character of the beer. While it's not exactly how I like my pils, it's a hard one to fault, other than on that questionable provenance.

The OGs of Dublin microbrewing also have a new pilsner on the scene. Porterhouse Hammer is hard to come by: you'll find it on the brewery's web shop, and I got my can at their off licence in town, but otherwise it doesn't seem to be out there. "Just like a pilsner should be" is the bold promise on the can, and at 5% ABV they're not skimping on the alcohol. It's quite a dark shade of gold, heading almost for amber, with a generous topping of fine white foam. The aroma is biscuit malt, with a tangy and almost vinegary counterpoint. The carbonation is low, showing only the faintest tingle. That vinegar thing -- white, sharp -- is present in the foretaste. Might this be why the beer isn't more widely available? It doesn't totally ruin it -- to the rescue comes a grass and wax bitterness and a grain-husk dryness. It's inescapably tangy, though, in a way that pilsner should not be. Lager has never been a Porterhouse strong point, and this one may be in need of a do-over.

Hope has gone the Czech route more explicitly with Limited Edition 24: Bohemian Pilsener. There is a little haze to the gold here, and the hops get more of a look-in than in the above. The grassiness is intense, shading over into lemon rind and hard wax. It lingers long on the palate, almost oily in intensity. There's just enough malt weight to balance this -- it's a sufficient 5% ABV. And despite the strong contrasting flavours there's a clean finish so you're done with the experience pleasingly quickly. It's not as well integrated as the real Czech thing, going for bold and brash instead of smooth. This is very much a craft take on the style, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Can art of the year so far is this beauty from Western Herd on their Loop Head pilsner. The beer inside, 4.5% ABV and hopped with Perle and Saaz, is lightly hazed again and smells very herbal, beyond Saaz's damp grass and into sage or eucalyptus territory. Crispness is promised on the label and fully delivered: it's beautifully clean and nicely dry despite a slight spongecake vibe from the malt and a soft texture. The hops aren't overdone and the elements are very well integrated. Inspecting it closely I get hints of spiced red cabbage, fresh spinach and pine nuts. Really, though, it's a beer for quaffing -- perfect session material. "2021" beams the lighthouse on the can. This deserves to continue shining longer than that.

With Irish breweries clearly capable of great lagers, it's a shame it tends to be an occasional novelty rather than something they all have in the core ranges. I blame the drinking public, of course.

On to the reds then. There aren't anywhere near as many of these around as there used to be, and breweries don't seem to feel under any obligation to brew them. A ticker seeking exclusively Irish reds in Ireland would have a hard time of it.

We'll stay with Western Herd for the first one. Their original range included one called Fox Catcher, at 5.3% ABV. Its place has now been taken by Atlantic at a more normal Irish red strength of 4%. It's quite a dark example, verging on brown. The aroma has that beery quality particular to red ales and darker bitters: lots of tannin with metallic old-world hops and a faint sticky caramel sweetness. It's all quite subtle, so the flavour was a surprise: it's intensely bitter, and almost acrid. The zinc and tin hop character sparks on the tongue and continues to smolder late into the experience. There's a softer toffee side too, but I was half way through before my palate had adjusted enough to let me taste it. There are no technical flaws here; I'm certain it's as the brewer intended it, but it's far too much of a workout for me. Maybe I'm not a big enough fan of red ale to go dictating how it should taste, but for me it should be mellow and easy-going. This is the opposite of that.

Solas Red is brewed by Rye River for Tesco and comes with a €2 price tag on the half-litre bottle. You get a handsome glassful for that: a limpid garnet colour topped by a lasting off-white foam. The aroma is bitter and roasty, and very grown-up: definitely your granddad's sort of beer. It may as well be wearing slippers and smoking a pipe. I was all ready for a charming retro experience, but... the bitterness. It's gastricly sharp, tasting almost vomit-like to begin. On the fade-out that turns to harsh tangy metal, which is less unpleasant, perhaps, but still far from enjoyable. And then in the middle there's the intense sweetness of ersatz milk chocolate with some instant coffee and strawberry jam stirred in. It's like they assembled all the elements of good red ale, but used the cheapest and nastiest version of each. I was thoroughly sick of it by the half way point, but at least the lacing on the glass was pretty. This beer is much more fun to look at than to drink.

Neither of the reds did it for me. I have no reason to miss the style then, I guess.

Now stout I would miss. And stout is still plentiful among local breweries. What I'm looking at today is your classical Irish variety, built for session drinking with no fancy ingredients. Few brewers are turning new ones of these out.

The first is from The Porterhouse, and it's very specifically one with no fancy ingredients. Porterhouse Irish Stout is the Oyster Stout they've been brewing since 1996 only minus the molluscs. I've long loved the velvety chocolate effect of Oyster so was fascinated to see how that would hold up in the changed recipe. At 4.6% ABV it occupies the middle spot between their Plain and XXXX. The aroma is certainly chocolate, with some toffee sweetness added in. It's a long time since I last had bottled Oyster, but one would miss the smoothness of the draught nitro version. This carbonated one has a pointy quality that doesn't sit well with the flavours. The milk chocolate is definitely there, though, with a minty herbal tang and a layer of hard toffee. Given a moment to warm up and flatten out it's even creamy, like the original. While there's nothing fancy going on, it's a well-made session stout and all the better for the presentation in a 500ml bottle. If the thought of oysters had been putting you off before, I strongly recommend getting hold of this.

It's back to dodgy provenance again for the last one. I am unconvinced that Sullivan's brews Black Marble on its pilot kit in Kilkenny, rather than above at Dundalk Bay where most of their production happens, though I'm happy to be corrected on that. At 5.1% ABV it's substantial, so I was expecting to enjoy it. It's a pleasingly dense black with a firm head the colour of old ivory. Bitterness, both roasted and herbal, forms the aroma, and on tasting too, it's bitter. You can add coffee to the mix, and a little of a lactic sour tang of the sort found in Guinness. It's very old-fashioned tasting, eschewing chocolate and latte and everything else sweet and cuddly, going instead for boiled veg, old tweed, liquorice and ready-rubbed. The finish is long and pinches the tongue cheekily with its acidity. Creamy this ain't, but it works. Though perhaps not as bitter as the likes of Porterhouse's XXXX, it's on that continuum. By the looks of things this is mostly intended as a draught beer and I hope I can find a tap once normality resumes. A large bottle from the cooler was great, but a pint would be sublime.

There was no nostalgia for me at the end of this set. Good pilsner and solid stout will always have their place, but nothing beats variety. I'm very glad I have the opportunity to leave and come back to drinking beers like this. Now, what IPAs do you have?

The curtain descends

Old Father Time is oiling down his scythe, ready to take a swing at 2014 and bring the year to close. I'm left with a scattering of beer tasting notes gathered over the year that I've yet to commit to this blog and most of which will have to wait until 2015. For this post I'm pulling together an assortment of Irish ones, mostly to give posterity flavour of what was happening at this point in the big bang of modern Irish microbrewing.

Red is something of a theme, and rumours of the death of Irish red ale have been greatly exaggerated. The slightly hoppier amber ale twist is also highly fashionable and Mayo newcomer Reel Deel have launched with an amber ale as their first. Irish Blond is a sort-of in-joke, because it's not blonde, it's red. Ahahahaha. Um. What we have here is a pretty decent fist of an American style amber pouring a lovely shade of chestnut red. The aroma is lightly fruity, combining old school white lemonade and sherbet lemons. There's a lot of quality English bitter about the flavour, a crisp and thirst-quenching tannic element, some spices, but also the rounder exotic fruit of new world hops. It's maybe a bit too dry for first-rate American-style amber ale *cough*Amber-Ella*cough* but it's a very well made beer and one I would happily quaff lots more of.

Dublin's Stone Barrel brewing are coming to the end of their contract brewing phase and are hoping to have their own production brewery in the New Year. Red Mist is their second UK-brewed bottled beer and is an amber ale of a modest and sessionable 4.2% ABV. It packs a lot of complexity in there, being another sherbet-smelling one but showing bags of toffee in the flavour, in keeping with the dark copper body. The sweetness is balanced deftly by pockets of green bitterness, for that hop-studded candy effect I always enjoy in amber ale.

There's less of that sort of thing in Clanconnel McGrath's No. 6 which I chanced upon in The Waterloo in Dublin. Their Saturday night €4 bottle offer is great for some sociable exploring. This is another dark red amber ale but the malt is winning the aroma, showing in a rather musty burlap smell. There's crunchy grain in the flavour as well, though the hops are more assertive here. Rather than American citrus you get a genteel lavender and talcum which adds up to a sweet and slightly twee beer. Think granny's oatmeal cookies. That she eats in the bath.

I'm guessing West Mayo brewery were going for more of a traditional red style with Clew Bay Sunset which I found on tap in The Norseman back in October but this is a weird mutant variant. It's thin enough and fizzy enough, but is over-the-top sweet, with the fake fruit flavour of red lemonade. The aroma is pure butterscotch and the finish saccharine-sweet to the point of tasting metallic. It's the awful candy concoction of an especially vindictive Willy Wonka. Avoid.

More recently (yesterday) in The Norseman they were pouring Yule, a Christmas beer for White Hag's first Christmas. It's 7.2% ABV, mostly headless, and a murky red-amber colour. I'd say it's quite highly attenuated as the texture is thin even though the alcoholic weight is very apparent. There's a powerful red fruit flavour with all the sugar of ripe rasberries and strawberries plus the acidic sharpness of both. I'm definitely not of the opinion that a Christmas beer should taste Christmassy but this one has me wondering why a beer called Yule conjures up strawberries and cream in front of the tennis.

Meanwhile, at the supermarket, Solas is one of the brands Rye River brews for Tesco, the more traditional of the two. Solas Red is a classic dark Irish red: copper shading towards brown. The head is generous to begin with but collapses quickly, while the nose is a charming mix of warmth and red fruit, like fresh cherry pie, including the slight sourness. It's rather plainer to drink: lots of simple dry roast and a highly attenuated thinness. There's no hop character and not much malt either, not even the caramel that any reasonable human might expect from Irish red. It's 4.3% ABV but drinks like a cheapy supermarket own-brand half that strength.

So, apprehension going into Solas Stout. It certainly looks the part, pouring thickly and nearly opaque with a loose-bubbled ivory head. There's a rich and sweet aroma, though it's slightly phenolic, but not in a bad way -- sort of smoky. The flavour is at once classic Irish stout, but also quite unusual: there's lots of dry roast, more than a hint of caramel, burnt edges and a sour tang. It exists somewhere in the middle of a circle marked by bottled Guinness, Knockmealdown and O'Hara's Leann Folláin and is beautifully complex for something that's just 4.5% ABV. I really like it, and it's great to see this sort of interesting full-flavoured Irish stout hitting the mainstream via Tesco.

New lagers are a bit thin on the ground. Who wants to drink lager, after all? Cumberland Breweries from northern England do, and have set up a satellite brewery called Station Works just outside Newry where they're making Finn Irish Craft Lager. It's 4.5% ABV and comes in 33cl bottles decorated in hexagons, because giants and that. It's perfectly clear and very pale, with a suspicious but not unattractive burst of green apples in the aroma. It's very clean to taste, however: lightly carbonated for moussey texture and with light notes of grapefruit and lime balanced against a sweet biscuit graininess. There's a near-sour bite on the end which may be down to a technical flaw but which I rather enjoyed. It's maybe not a session lager, but works well as a refresher or aperitif.

A similar bite is at work in Carden's Wild Ale by White Gypsy, discovered by chance on the beer engine at Alfie Byrne's the other week. The aroma of this red-gold ale is a kind of lemon sourness rather than the full-on acetic of deliberately soured beer. The body is quite thin and the flavour offers a mild combination of pale biscuits, brown sugar and light lemon-and-lime. I'm left a little confused as to what it's supposed to be, and at 5% ABV I expected a lot more of everything.

I only managed to catch one of White Gypsy's pair of draught winter specials, namely A Winter's Ale, a title seemingly abandoned by Eight Degrees now after a couple of years of disuse. This "German Pale Ale" promises an intriguing mix of Belgian yeast and ultra-hip German hop varieties Polaris and Mandarina Bavaria. Conveniently for me, The 108 in Rathgar had it on tap so I nipped over one quiet Sunday afternoon to give it a go. It's another odd beast, pouring a perfect clear garnet colour with an aroma very typical of Belgian dubbel, despite a mere 5.7% ABV. There's a double impact on tasting: the heavy brown-banana esters of the yeast and then a sharp, medicinal, mentholyptus effect from the Polaris. I'd been hoping for some rounded fruit tones from the Mandarina but I'm guessing the yeast esters have buried all that. A long menthol burn finishes it off gradually. It's a strange beer: invigorating and like nothing I've ever tasted before. But it's just a little too hot and sharp to be friendly.

Just one token IPA for this post. It's hard to believe people are still drinking this quaint and outmoded style. Bran & Sceolan is one of the White Hag range that I missed at the RDS back in September but seems to be part of the small core range the brewery is selling in Ireland. There's something classically American about the amber colour, the 7.2% ABV and the big hit of mango and peach in the flavour. There's a certain amount of residual crystal malt sweetness, but not so much that the hops suffer; if anything the tropical fruit notes are emphasised by the extra sugar. It's nicely balanced, clean flavoured and very drinkable showing very little sign of how strong it is. The hop acidity lasts well into the finish, coating the tongue, so I suspect it may be a bit of a palate killer, but what a way to go! Another bravo performance from the Sligo lads.

And a handful of dark beers to finish on: St. Mel's first seasonal is Raisin & Oatmeal Stout which showed up in bottles at 57 The Headline. Sharp, dry, crisp roast rules supreme in this 4.5%-er. The label employs the words "vinous" and "port" but you need either a finely-tuned palate or an active imagination to spot them. There isn't even the smoothness that I understand is part of the package with oatmeal, whether that's down to the low ABV or the bottle-conditioned high fizz. Towards the end I got a tiny hint of dark fruit, but not enough to really mark this out as anything other than a decently put-together dry Irish session stout.

Trouble made a much better fist of fruited Christmas stout. Dash Away was on cask for one thing: no upsetting fizz, just luscious smoothness, helped no doubt by 5.7% ABV. Chocolate and cherries are the added ingredients, the former making a huge contribution to the flavour, the latter just a small smattering of the glacé variety. Amongst the warming sweetness there's a mildly spicy edge as well, generated by the roasted grains and yeast, I'd guess. The finish is quick, making it nicely glugable, setting up the next pint. The keg version is simpler and less rich but does preserve a lot of the black forest gateaux complexity.

I found a very similar flavour profile in Carrig Winter Ale, part of an excellent seasonal line-up in The Bull & Castle at the moment. It's dark and dense, and slightly stronger at 6.5% ABV. Chocolate features in a big way, sweet and creamy, while behind it there's a confection of mild winter spices: could be cinnamon, could be nutmeg, but nothing particularly assertive or distinctive. This mince pie effect is even more noticeable in the aroma. As a filling winter warming it's absolutely spot on though the weight and sweetness do mean a pint is a little like consuming an entire selection box in one go. Not a session beer, then.

Time for a palate cleanser. Fortunately JW Sweetman had tapped a cask (possibly the first) of Barrelhead Dry Stout. I suspect that this is a very simply made version of the style: it has the same sort of crisp roast and creaminess of any Irish dry stout. But the natural conditioning adds dimensions to the flavour, with notes of sandalwood and cranberry sneaking in. It's a little watery at heart, reflecting perhaps the sub-4% ABV, but overall a damn decent beer and a great example of how cask conditioning can benefit a stout. Cheers to Steve for the heads-up on this one.

Lastly the second beer from the Blackstairs brand: Dark Fiery Porter. It's 5% ABV and brewed with oatmeal, ginger and jalapeños. What's not to like in that? There's a density to the appearance, jet black with a tan coloured head. For all that, it's a lightly textured beer, low on fizz and smooth without being thick. The spicing is gentle and mannerly with the ginger present more in a candied way, as a sweetness. There's very little sign of the peppers, maybe just a slight fruity pop in the aroma. The end result is a nicely complex warming winter beer, proof that you can get great results with wacky ingredients without the beer itself turning out wacky.

Phew. Bit of a scattergun, that. But it reflects how trying to keep up with Irish beer feels these days. I've deliberately left out several groups of beers and I'll get to those before the clock strikes midnight on the 31st.