End of

Oof. I'm glad I'm not in the business of making predictions, because the things I merely hoped for in this post last year did not work out. No, don't go and check; let's leave 2024 in the rear view mirror, with 2025 now ready to join it.

It's time to run through the highlights of the year just gone in the time-honoured (17 years!) fashion. My trusty assistant for the work at hand is Brewers At Play 48 from Kinnegar. It's a 10% ABV barley wine so should be up to the task. It's as viscous as one might expect, pouring slowly and forming a thick puck of cream-coloured foam over a murky mahogany-red body. The aroma combines bready malt warmth with some summery fruit: cherry and red grape in particular, a reminder that the style was named for its mimicry of wine. It opens with a bitter, herbal bite, something like a brightly-coloured Italian aperitif, with a hint of oak vanilla too, even though it hasn't seen the inside of any barrels. That settles but never quite goes away, while the fruit from the aroma makes a return, forming the centre of the flavour. The brewery says plum, and I get that, but I think it's more intense, suggesting damson, blackcurrant and raisin. Towards the end there's some pepper and nutmeg spicing, meaning there's a very decent degree of complexity on offer here. Coupled with the heavy texture, it's a sipper for sure. That's copperfastened by a growing warmth as it progresses. You don't need me to tell you this is a beer to take time over, and there's lots to explore and ponder. But I have a different sort of pondering to do. 

And so, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats and pray silence for...

The Golden Pint Awards 2025

Best Irish Cask Beer: Otterbank: The Magic Road 
It hasn't been a bad year for Irish cask, with Lough Gill and Brehon Brewhouse joining Hopkins & Hopkins in the rotational cask selection at Dublin's Porterhouse branches. The winner comes from a festival, however: Belfast, last month. Otterbank presented The Magic Road as a strawberry sour beer but there was much more happening than that short description conveys.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Wide Street: Cuvée Spontanée
This could also have been a cask contender, though was a little green when first presented, at the Mullingar Wild Beer Festival in April. By Hagstravaganza four months later, it shone on keg, delivering by-the-numbers classic oude geuze flavours.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Rye River: Grafters Night Shift
Dunnes Stores takes a gamble on the American-style brown ale that Rye River previously supplied to Lidl. I hope it stays here longer, because the combination of brightly floral hop fun with indulgent chocolate is rather special, while the teeny price tag is almost unique for a beer of this quality. Please do your bit to keep it on order at Dunnes. A very honourable mention goes to WhiteField for their joyously no-nonsense Irish Stout.

Best Irish Canned Beer: Lough Gill: North Star
Unsurprisingly, there were lots of contenders for this one. Lineman cornered the market for hop-forward styles, Third Barrel aced the lagers, but Lough Gill continues to reign supreme in imperial stouts, and gave us a dizzying array to choose from. Sherry-aged Solera was a strong contender, but the one with the Christmas spices -- crucially, not overdone -- was my top preference.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: 't Pomphuizeke: Peper Lambiek
Preference is an important factor in these awards. I'm not saying that the spiced lambic from a Belgian brewery I'd never heard of was the best overseas draught beer by any objective measure, but it's very much the sort thing I like, and enjoy finding when it's done well. This one, from this year's Borefts Beer Festival, goes full-on novelty while still retaining its core lambic character. Superb.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Tommie Sjef: Flint
More sour beer from the same festival. No gimmicks here, just spontaneously fermented and barrel-aged flavours, exactly the way I like them. A reminder that lambic, and lambic-a-likes, don't necessarily need spices to taste spicy.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Dois Corvos: Magnetic Poles
The Portuguese brewery puts a dent in my theory that classic lager styles are best not given wacky, craft-era, recipe twists, with this tonka'd up Baltic Porter. What if tonka, but just the right amount? This is the first beer I've ever encountered that's done that.

Best Collaboration Brew: DankHouse and De Molen: Dank & Dutchies
Is it just my imagination or did black IPA have a wee bit of a resurgence this year? Not much, but it seemed noticeable. Not all of them were great, but this collaboration for Borefts was everything the style ought to be, which is a near guarantee of an award from me. 

Best Overall Beer: Cuvée Spontanée
One does not simply walk into the brewhouse and begin making beer like this. Wide Street's abundant enthusiasm for the style and years of honing its processes has paid off handsomely, and I think that deserves recognition. In place of proper recognition, however, I can offer only this meaningless plaudit. Bottled Cuvée Spontanée is out and about at the moment, and deserves to be snapped up.

Best Branding: Wicklow Wolf
I've long been a fan of the way Wicklow Wolf presents itself, and there have been some lovely variants on its consistent house style this year. The contrasting colours on the tap badges for Pacific Heights and Cliff Walk looked striking side-by-side at Tapped back in April, while the glow-in-the-dark Halloween label and the Troy Parrott football celebration lager showed a wonderful sense of fun.

Best Pump Clip: Galway Bay: Forbidden Cats
More fun from Galway Bay too. Rock on, racoon!

Best Bottle/Can Label: Hopfully: Snowboard
For the second year on the trot, the best label goes to a beer I haven't published a review of yet. This was the work of Laurynas Butkus, a student at the National College of Art & Design. I loved the geometry and economy of the picture. I hope we'll be seeing more of his work on future Hopfully beers. And indeed, more named artists on beer label smallprint generally.

Best Irish Brewery: Lough Gill
I've never gone back to count the number of Golden Pints that Francesco Sottomano is responsible for throughout his years at various Irish microbreweries, but I bet it's a few. This year he has been absolutely killing it at Lough Gill across a range of styles and formats. I hope the team up in Sligo enjoys making the beers as much as I enjoy drinking them; they have a lot to be proud of. 

Best Overseas Brewery: Hill Farmstead
This award is on the strength of only three beers (one of them, yes, at Borefts) but they confirmed my conviction that Hill Farmstead is not a brewery whose beers one passes by when they're available. Their output is quite different to how European breweries do the whole wild beer thing, but if there are more operators like this in the US, please send those our way too.

Best New Brewery Opening 2025: Priory
It's a re-opening rather than an opening -- the kit in Tallaght hasn't moved an inch since it was installed in 2017, but this year it exited an extended Covid-era suspension and began brewing again for its new onsite taproom and tank bar at the Priory Market food court. The beers have largely been excellent too, with particular shouts-out for the Helles and stout.

Pub/Bar of the Year: La Fleur en Papier Doré
Another welcome back to a long-closed establishment. I was delighted to be able to enjoy a beer at this Brussels icon back in the spring, making it my favourite pub experience of the year.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2025: Daphni
A tough category, with openings of good beer outlets very much in negative growth around here -- RIP UnderDog. The new bar from Animal Collective, at Bolands Mills, wins by default, though I was genuinely impressed, by both its beer offer, and the setting: it's the sort of high quality renovation of an old industrial site that we don't see enough of in Dublin.  

Beer Festival of the Year: Borefts
It supplied three of the award winners above, so it shouldn't be a surprise that De Molen's festival gets this prize again. Third year running, but last year ever, following the brewery's closure in September. The field is open for 2026.

Supermarket of the Year: SuperValu Sundrive
The era of specialty beer being one of the front lines in the endless War of the Supermarkets is long over, but nobody seems to have told my local SuperValu. It continues to stock a first-rate range of core beers from Irish breweries, as well as solid classics from Belgium, the UK and further afield.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Martin's of Fairview
I only trekked up to the far distant northside on a couple of occasions this year, but I came away both times with beers I hadn't expected to find, or didn't know existed. Add in their fondness for commissioning special beers from local breweries, and you have everything you want from a neighbourhood offy. If only it were in my neighbourhood.

Online Retailer of the Year: Craft Central
Four years running. I'm not even going to pretend there's anyone else in contention. I click the beers, I pick them up, and the rest of this blog flows from there, by and large.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Filthy Queens
It's the battle of the books this year, with two works of beer history, taking very different approaches. Kudos must go to Martyn Cornell's monumental Porter & Stout: A Complete History. It was a slog to read, but even before I finished it, I was using it as a reference resource. It will stand for the ages, and double-fastens the author's legacy. Christina wins on narrative grounds, however. Her book is one of people and their stories, rather than cold numbers and diagrams. It's an account of the real lives lived by the people -- mostly women, it must be said -- who brewed and sold Ireland's beer down through the ages. There has not been a beer book like it.

Best Beer Blog or Website: The Drunken Destrier
I had this flagged for greatness since the spring, but the flurry of entertaining beer reviews petered out in late May. In the hope of some revived activity -- I mean, how hard is it to drink a beer and write down what it tastes like? -- I'm slinging a Golden Pint in Kill's direction.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: barmas.bsky.social
Yeah, it's mostly for the dog pictures, but you knew that.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: Rye River
This was the year that I made a firm and final break with Twitter, in favour of doing much the same sort of timewasting on Bluesky instead. Like the media outlets I used to follow, not many breweries have made the switch, but Rye River have, and regularly post their beer news and other fun stuff from around the brewery. I'm hoping to see more of my favourite producers posting to The Nice Place in 2026.


And with that, the awards table is empty for another year. Thanks for reading in 2025, and here's to more award-worthy beer in the year to come.

Packed to the Gills

This post has been a long time coming, and it's all the fault of the brewery's prolific output and nothing to do with my sluggishness in turning notes and drafts into consumable content. So I am, to say the least, several months behind in my coverage of Lough Gill.

It all started back in August, with a couple of sunny summer cans. I hadn't seen the word "crushable" in a beer description for quite some time. The word seemed to have a moment back in the craft heyday and appeared on these pages exclusively between 2014 and 2020. Lough Gill deployed it anew for their latest lager, called Rake. I guess the name implies that one can drink it in quantity, though the 5.5% ABV puts it above the level of your standard Irish pint. It's also "west coast" according to the can, single-hopped with Chinook. It looks well, being a dark, almost reddish, golden colour with good head retention. The Chinook is quite shy in the aroma, and instead there's a Czech-like bready malt effect, with maybe a hint of lemon. The Czech impression continues in the mouthfeel, which is very full and almost sticky, something which I would say has an adverse effect on its crushability. It doesn't taste very American; the hop side is all bitterness with very little citric or pine flavour. I tend to think of Chinook as a bittering hop in the main, and that's borne out here. There's a resinous payload which gums up the palate without delivering any accompanying dank enjoyment. Coupled with the big body, that makes this a somewhat cloying affair, far from the session-drinker that the brewery seems to have envisioned it as. Your mileage may vary, but this satisfied neither my need for clean lager, nor for American-style hop fun.

We should have some proper hop fun next, with Sunbrella, brewed with wunderkind hop Krush alongside fruity fellow-Kiwi Nectaron. We're back in Lough Gill's comfort zone with a 6% ABV hazy IPA. "Tropical" it says in all caps on the front, but this is another serious beer, tasting like it has nothing in common with the fruity soft drinks that I imagine the word is intended to convey. The weedy quality is set on another very full body, with an alcohol heat that tastes of all its 6% ABV and more. Here it meets a strongly sweet custard vanilla, but the hops hold their own, creating a proper balance in a type of beer not really known for that. The flavour has similar length and depth as the previous beer but is far more enjoyable, sparking with a mineral spice and citrus pith in addition to the main theme. It's not crushable, and I'm sure it's not meant to be, and neither does it show the bitterly herbal hallmarks typical of New Zealand's more established hop varieties. It is a banger, though: fresh and bright tasting, while warm and soft feeling. Taking my time over it, I did find a certain degree of garlic building up as it warmed, though not to an offensive degree. I don't always enjoy it when Lough Gill does the haze, but they've nailed it here. You don't even need sunny weather to enjoy it.

That's hop-forward beers for you: some you win and some you don't. An all-Chinook lager was a courageous flex but I don't think it worked out. The new-wave New Zealand hops continue to impress, however.

A few days after drinking these, I paid a visit to the brewery where they were nearing the end of their winter preparations, with the usual selection of strong dark beers going out again this year. The imperial stouts are joined by a couple of different small cans, though following the usual Gaelic theme which the receiving importers presumably lap up.

I haven't seen Emerald for sale at all in Ireland and it may have all gone to the Netherlands, which isn't at all unusual for an Irish beer these days. It says "Irish Export Stout" on the label, and I guess they mean that literally. I tend to expect bitterness from this style: substantial hopping and lots of roast, with any sweet side being burnt caramel or molasses, where there's a darker, more grown-up aspect to the sugar. This one is all-out sweet, however, which was disconcerting. Sticky chocolate sauce builds, even in a small sample, to the point of becoming like pink marshmallows. Lough Gill was an early adopter of kerr-azy pastry stout recipes, but this one shows you don't actually need the daft adjuncts to get the same effect. It's not my sort of thing, regardless. 

I was able to buy the next pair locally, beginning with Celtic, an "oak whiskey red ale". Unlike most Irish reds, it's 6.5% ABV, though the clear dark garnet colour checks out. The whiskey side is very strong in the aroma, in a lovely, warming, hot-toddy sort of way. A side order of caramel comes with that, and the caramel takes the lead in the flavour. Though sweet again, it somehow avoids being sticky, showing remarkable restraint. That allows the whiskey side to return in the finish, bringing notes of honeycomb and raisins. Though they've put the word "oak" up front in the description, there's no honking sap or vanilla here; the oak's contribution has been fully integrated into everything else happening, and I would be very hard pressed to pick it out. I assume oak chips rather than barrel ageing is the reason behind the wording. That process does tend to have a much less impactful effect on beer, and I'm impressed that so much of the whiskey side has come through. This is a very pleasant wintertime sipping beer and I can report that a nip of Power's on the side helps enhance its Irish whiskey features even further.

It's a shame that an "Irish breakfast stout" has been named Shamrock rather than "Rasher", but that's the export market for you: no sense of humour. We're up to 7.5% ABV and, as the description implies, oatmeal and coffee have been engaged. I was expecting sweet but the first sip gave me significant bitterness which, after a moment, turned out to be a combination of black toasted grain and dark roast coffee. That would have been severe were it not for the soft malt base behind it, bringing gentler chocolate and golden syrup, with a wisp of rauchbier smoke. Rasher: I'm just saying. There's a bum note too, and to me it tastes autolytic, of Marmite or soy sauce. It might be an effect of the coffee rather than a fermentation flaw, but it didn't sit right with me. In a beer of this sort, I like the coffee to be creamy and oily, contributing more to its sweet side rather than the roast. That doesn't happen here, and it's to the beer's detriment. Shamrock files with the more serious and slightly acrid school of Irish export stouts. Normally I'd be all in, but the savoury tang, whether from coffee or dead yeast, spoiled it for me. It's just as well I still had some Power's left to take the edge off.

And it wouldn't be winter without Lough Gill's plethora of little black cans. At the brewery, I got a bit of insight into the process behind these, too. They're all made from the same base, and this year for the first time, they've released it as a standalone: the plainly-titled Imperial Oatmeal Stout. For something developed as a means to a different end, it's an excellent beer in its own right. The checklist for a 10% ABV imperial stout is all there, with lots of chocolate, a dark fruit complexity -- raisin and prune -- and then a decadent liqueur warmth. This is aided by the oatmeal doing exactly what it's supposed to, making the texture silky and cream-like, lengthening the flavour and enhancing the drinking experience. While this is surpassed in different ways by its barrel-aged progeny, it's still worth drinking, especially if you're a fan of the barrel-aged ones. It would be nice to have it available year-round, rather than trying to compete with the elaborate seasonal specials.

Speaking of which: Warrior is among the returning versions for 2025. It's new to me, however, because previous vintages were packaged in spendy 75cl bottles. Moving it to a 33cl can has brought it into my price bracket for the first time. Warrior Warning 1 is that it keeps going up in strength, having started at 12.8% ABV in 2023, it's now a very full 15%. Warrior Warning 2 is that it's peated, pointed out in all-caps on the label. And not just peated: the wood involved previously held the Turf Queen herself, Laphroaig. This is immediately apparent on cracking the can, wafting up vapours of salty seaweed and TCP. The beautifully smooth and rich stout (see above) helps offset the effect in the flavour, but I wouldn't exactly call it balanced. Instead, there are two parallel streams: the unctuous velvety stout, with soft dark malt notes, comforting winter warmth and a distinctive and distinguished smokiness, and then an absolute foghorn of chlorophenols on top of this, like it's been given a jet of disinfectant. The latter arrives late but hangs around on the palate for... well, at time of writing, possibly permanently. You really really need to enjoy peated product to get value out of this one. I do, and even I found it a bit much, especially in the first few sips. I guess there are enough fans of the big smoke to keep it on the market for three winters and counting.

On to new business, and with Solera we depart from the Celtic theme, because it wants to tell you about the sherry brandy barrel, latterly used for whiskey, it was aged in. I assume this is "brandy" in the sense of the not-for-drinking fortification spirit used in making sherry. It's a light one, at a mere 11.9% ABV, though is the usual dense black, of course. The aroma tells us that some barrelling has been going on but is vague on the details. It's more wine fruit than spirit heat. That continues in the flavour, with notes of raisin and fig, while the base beer is still very much in evidence, with its smooth chocolate dessert and affogato coffee and vanilla. I enjoyed the subtlety of it. Even though there's lots going on, every flavour gets a turn, and the brandy complements the stout beautifully. You can take the sumptuous velvety texture as read; likewise the lack of excessive heat or rough oak. This is a future classic and I hope we'll be seeing it again in the years to come. 

There's more wine to be found in Wine Geese, using ex-Bordeaux barrels and referencing the French winemakers of Irish extraction. This one is 12% ABV, though seemed a little thinner on pouring, its café crème head quickly crackling away to nothing. Dried dark fruit features again in the aroma: plump and juicy raisins with sweeter prune, and the flavour allies these with the same blend of chocolate and coffee as the above. So they're similar beers, but different. This one has even less spirit heat despite the extra strength, and although it's quite sweet in the middle, it finishes on a balancing dry roasted note, cleaning it respectfully off the palate. I caught a little splintery oak too, as well as some oily coconut and a mildly meaty twang, suggesting a touch of autolysis. You'd need to be a very fussy drinker to pick those out, or even designate them as off-flavours. It's very hard to find fault here otherwise.

A highlight of the brewery visit was a final new addition to the sequence, one which hadn't got as far as canning yet and was tasted from the tank. With Celt, the imperial oatmeal stout has been given the Cognac barrel treatment, finishing at 12.6% ABV. There's no mistaking the spirit: this opens with a strong kick of distilled alcohol, before softening into that luxurious vinousness that is uniquely Cognac. The stout still manages to hold its own, ensuring that the significant warmth doesn't become a burn, and contributing that beautiful oatmeal texture to combine smooth beer with mature brandy. The finish is surprisingly clean, considering everything going on, and there's a pleasant aftertaste of Christmas jollity. This is an excellent candidate to drink on The Big Day, if I'm allowed mention it this early in November.

It strikes me that a palate reset would be a good idea after all that. At a Sligo off licence on the way to the Dublin train, I picked up some 1928, a Helles that Lough Gill brews in support of Sligo Rovers football team. This is light for the style at 4.2% ABV yet still manages to display all the necessary Helles qualities. It may even over-compensate, its principal malt character going beyond light spongecake and into the full melanoidin effect of treacle cookies and steamed pudding. There's just enough grain-husk crispness to prevent that turning unpleasantly sweet. For a beer that is, presumably, not aimed at the especially particular lager drinker, it has a great deal of character and class.

I think that's enough to be getting on with, and a nice broad sweep of what Lough Gill put out, at least in the winter when we're safe from all the fruity gloopy jobs they're a bit too fond of. A big thanks to James at the brewery for showing us around on the day. A taproom is in development which will make Sligo Town even more of a beer destination than great pubs like The Swagman and Thomas Connolly's already make it.