Exit by the Abbey

Finishing up this week of posts from east Flanders with a bit of history. I, with my fellow Brussels Beer Challenge judges, found myself at Merksplas-Kolonie on a dreary Monday afternoon. Founded in the early 19th century, this was a sort-of workhouse, residential and employment facility for the destitute. Under Belgian law at this time, and indeed up until the early 1990s when the EU put a stop to it, it was possible for vagrants, the homeless, and anyone without a "proper" place in society to be committed to rural colonies like this and put to work. Following its decommissioning (although there is still a working detention facility on-site) this one has been turned into a visitors' centre, restaurant and event venue, with a hotel in development in the stables.

And of course there's a house beer brand: Vagebond. The core beer is a tripel called Vageblond but we didn't get to try the base one, starting instead on Vageblond Jenever, a version that's been aged in a barrel previously used for the local gin. Maybe it's for the best that we didn't taste the ordinary tripel, as it seems from this that it's very plain, lacking the spice and honey topnotes of good examples. With the barrel, however, you do get a solid dose of boozy herbs, though it's clean tasting as well, and not at all gimmicky.

A somewhat less ambitious twist comes with Vageblond Tripel Primeur. Like the original, this is 8% ABV, the alcohol unaffected by the addition of extra Target hops. I wouldn't have put that down as an especially fruity variety, but there's a huge amount of fruit on display here, all peaches and lychee, set on a smooth and creamy body. It's very dessertish -- perhaps a little too sweet to drink easily, but very pleasant to sip with cheese, I imagine.

And there's a quadrupel as well, the beast that is Vagebruin, at 10.5% ABV. It's a lovely mahogany colour, the flavour starting on a dry cereal grain with more than a hint of roast. I didn't get much by way of fruity Belgian esters, so no plum or raisin, only a mild dark-chocolate bitterness. Though the strength is very apparent from its density and a certain amount of boozy heat, the flavour otherwise doesn't show much complexity. Fine but plain is the verdict. One would expect more from a quadrupel.

Earlier that day, the lunchtime beer had been Affligem's Postel Dubbel. It's a very retro-looking label, but not one I recall seeing before. It's 7% ABV and here we have the features which were sorely missed in the quadrupel. There's chocolate and toasted grains as well, but also lots of delicious dark fruit: black cherry, prune and raisin, finishing on an exotic tang of tamarind. It's not wildly different from other Belgian breweries' quality dubbels, but does show that it's still possible to impress with one of these.

The other grand institution we visited was Corsendonk Abbey. Corsendonk is now a large hospitality company with several hotels in the area, including this one. Despite it also being a ubiquitous beer brand, there's no history of brewing on the site, and the beer all comes from faraway Wallonia.

Corsendonk Blond is a perfectly palatable Belgian blonde ale, almost as easy to drink as a lager, especially when cold on draught. But there's a lovely lacing of honey to add body and give the flavour at least some modicum of character. While far from exciting, it's clean and accessible, while also unmistakably Belgian.

The brewery had featured at the opening reception, where they were pouring another blonde ale, called Tempelier. At 7.5% ABV, it's stronger than most of these are, heading for the weight of a tripel. And you can really taste the difference here, with a heat you don't get from 6% ABV blondes, or even squeaky-clean Duvel. The flavour is largely bready -- wholesome, but a bit boring -- with some added sweet relish or marmalade shred. It's unexciting but perfectly acceptable for the specs.

There's also Corsendonk Blanche, their witbier. The trick with reviewing these is to find the point of difference with the style's archetypes, and then decide if they're an improvement or not. This is a definite not as the recipe's peculiarity appears to be ramping up the coriander to beyond acceptable levels. The result is intensely herbal, like a medicine cabinet, with a background soapy unpleasantness. It's the sort of thing one's palate probably gets used to when drinking more than a sample, but I didn't deem it worth the effort.

Back at Corsendonk Abbey, they were serving lunch. With that came a 75cl bottle of what appears to be a new limited series. Grand Hops: Mistral d'Alsace was the name, and presumably Mistral is the single hop. It's an IPA and is 6.9% ABV. For all that, it's light-bodied and a little unBelgian. The flavour is remarkably complex for a single-hopper, loading in summer flowers to begin, then a punchy lemon zest before finishing on raspberry and cherry. It's lots of fun and very interesting to explore. It's always good to see a venerable old brewery trying something like this, and even better when it results in something delicious.

Today's top Belgian travel tip is that if you have a few hours before you need to be at the airport, try Mechelen. It's a typically picturesque Flemish city and only a short hop to the airport by train. I had an hour spare which was just enough to get to the main square, drink a beer and come back for the train.

I drank it in a poky pub hard by the cathedral called De Floeren Aap: Deep Terra double IPA, a surprise appearance from New York's Drowned Lands brewery, in a venue with an otherwise unremarkable beer offer. It's completely opaque, 8.2% ABV, and has a pungent, bitter, garlic aroma. I expected savoury soup but it does an abrupt and welcome about-face on tasting, showing lots of smooth orange juice and a bite of peach skin. It's heavy, but still has plenty of sparkle, so while it feels as strong as it is, it remains drinkable, if a tiny bit hot.

Our quest ends here. A huge thanks to the Brussels Beer Challenge team for inviting me over and for the fascinating social programme. Let's do it again some time.

No rest for the ticker

Irish Craft Beer Week is upon us once more as the nation girds its collective loins for the craftquake that is the Irish Craft Beer and Cider Festival, now in its fourth year at the RDS Industries Hall, from Thursday.

To whet your appetite for that I thought I'd run through a few of the recent releases from Irish breweries. Bear with me: this may take a while.

The Porterhouse's Pale Ale Festival ended in late July but nobody seems to have told Eight Degrees who had yet another beautiful hop monster on tap at the Temple Bar branch -- and several other pubs besides -- shortly afterwards. Simcoe Rye Ale is the latest in their single-hop series, 6% ABV once again. It's a hazy dark amber colour and the aroma offers a heady cocktail of grassy rye and weedy, spicy hops for the overall effect of a summer meadow on steroids, or getting your head stuck in a pile of damp lawn cuttings. First in the queue on tasting is a dry and punchy bitterness, sharp at the front and then with a longer resin finish, plus just a modest burst of juicy mandarins coming into it as it warms slightly. Behind these is a dense crystal malt base, though the caramel sweetness is felt more than tasted, if that makes any sense. It's a sort of heavy smoothness and brings balance and drinkability to what's an unmistakeably intense hop-forward beer.

International booze behemoth C&C invited me to the launch of their first Irish beer, Clonmel 1650, brewed at the plant best known for turning out the world's supply of Magners. They rented the entirety of swish Dublin superpub The Church and packed it to capacity, adding insanely loud music for extra atmosphere. Still, two free pints is two free pints. First impression of the first pint was of a very dry lager, the flavour evolving into an earthy, mushroomy, dusty, musty unpleasantness. I guess that's why they gave us two. The second was better, with more of a fruity estery vibe, though still pretty dry. Already in C&C's portfolio there's Tennents, Staropramen, Heverlee, Stella Artois and Beck's Vier. Regular drinkers of any of those will find little to surprise them here.

Clonmel 1650 will not be available at the RDS this weekend.

Before the 1650 gig I dropped into the nearby Twisted Pepper to try a new house beer in their Brewtonic series. I missed the first one, brewed last year at 5 Lamps, and this new one came from Rascal's (here's the official making-of blog post). It's a golden ale utilising Magnum, Summit and Cascade, and they've called it Relax the Cacks, for summer and that. It arrived very cold, which I was glad of that particular July evening, showing a slight craft haze in the gold. There's a sweet nectarine aroma, powerful enough to almost pass for Belgian. You get a massive whack of tropical fruit on tasting: peaches mostly, some pineapple, a bit of mandarin. The body is full enough and there's sufficient alcohol heat to keep the Belgian thing in mind, with definite elements of the first-rate sort of Belgian blonde ales. I got the impression it might start to get a little sticky if allowed to warm but there was little chance of that on this occasion.

The Brewtonic guys also had a bar at the first Big Grill barbecue festival which happened in Herbert Park a couple of weeks ago. As well as imported beers, it was serving some welcome leftovers of another one-off that Rascal's did for them, for a different event earlier this summer. Brewtonic Belgian Wit, said Rascal Emma, is a close relation of their own Wit Woo but utilises a little extra Munich malt. Wit Woo is fairly big on the citrus orange notes and while there are definite echoes of that here, this one drops the bitterness levels and adds in masses of extra soft and fleshy tropical fruit, mangoes in particular. There's a small burn of sulphur and the coriander spice levels are low, but they're really not missed with all the juice action going on. An ideal outdoor summer beer, this, and the festival wasn't long in being cleaned out of it. Brewtonic's boss says they're planning a brown ale next. It has a tough act to follow.

Rascal's doesn't have the monopoly on house beers for yoof-oriented Dublin pub chains. The Cassidy's/P. Mac's/Blackbird group have commissioned their own from Trouble Brewing, a 5.5% ABV pale ale called Vietnow. I explored it sitting among the junkshop furniture on Blackbird's terrace. This hazy dark orange beer smells very dank with heavy sandalwood notes as well. Expecting a dense resinous affair I was very pleasantly surprised to get a burst of mandarin on the first pull followed by a dankness that only comes from fresh hops in quantity. There's a thick mouthfeel and lots of that incense-like spicing. While a certain amount of resin lingers late, most of its hop action happens right up front. It was created as a cheaper alternative to Punk IPA, though at €5.40 a pint in Rathmines it's not exactly going for a song. Much as I enjoyed it, I felt my fiver in the Twisted Pepper above was better spent.

Meanwhile, under their own brand, Trouble have released Oh Yeah!, badged as an "American Black Ale". It's an inky black-brown colour with a fairly sedate aroma of spiced oranges and crunchy green veg. It's lightly textured with lots of prickly fizz, something that complements the spicy bitterness which is the centrepiece of the flavour. There's little by way of fruit complexity, in marked contrast to Eight Degrees's recent Vic Secret, instead it's veg and spice all the way. The dark malt contributes a little bit of chocolate and a little bit of roast, but not huge amounts (in the keg version at least; on cask it's understandably smoother and richer). At 5.8% ABV my liver felt somewhat cheated by the lack of complexity, but it's still a very tasty beer, and at just €5.10 in Against the Grain, my wallet was of the opinion that my liver could shut the hell up.

More pint action tomorrow, including a couple of brand new breweries.

All beers to all people

I mentioned in passing recently that Molson Coors's operations in Ireland seem to be ramping up somewhat, after three of years of light-touch beer distribution. It really hit home in the weeks that followed and as a result I've ended up with three sets of free samples from the company, which I guess represent three aspects of the Irish beer market.

The PR firm charged with promoting it all sent me a six-pack of their new lager Molson Canadian. From the full-spectrum advertising it's getting this appears to be pitched squarely at the mainstream drinker, a segment in Ireland which seems already to be at saturation point with beers such as Bud, Coors Light (licensed to Heineken), Miller, Carlsberg, Stella, Beck's Vier and Heineken itself, the brand leader. It's a little strange that they figured there was room for another, but there you go. The accompanying marketing material says Ireland is the first territory outside Canada to get Canadian, while the packaging says it's brewed in the UK. It seems unlikely that they're making it across the water just for us, so presumably there are plans to put it on the British market too at some point.

Unusually for this sort of beer it's a mere 4% ABV: 4.3% is the normal strength for these, demanded by the Irish market to such an extent that AB-InBev brew a special version of Beck's Vier at this ABV just for us. I welcome more lower strength beers, but it still seems kinda risky to me. Pouring revealed a pale gold lager topped by a healthy fluffy froth. It must also have knocked quite a bit of the gas out as it was beautifully smooth on the first sip, and nicely sweet too, akin to the better class of Munich helles, with a hint of dry grain husk. It all unravelled pretty quickly after that, however. The sweetness unfolds into a nasty sweetcorn flavour and is joined by a horrible metallic saccharine tang where the hop bitterness ought to be. By the third mouthful, that metal was all I could taste and only the low carbonation stopped it from being completely undrinkable. Quality pilsner it most definitely isn't.

For the casual drinker of "craft" beers, yet another seasonal from Blue Moon, this one called Valencia Grove Amber. The name suggests someone thought that what Blue Moon needed was more orange, but it's actually got less of a sticky fruit thing than usual. Instead the amber malt flavour is to the fore: an intensely sugary biscuit character that builds as it goes down with no hop bitterness or yeast spices to balance it. The finish is a dusty, musty burlap with possibly a vein of coconut through it. 5.9% ABV would suggest a heavy beer but it's not really, and the residual dark sugars reminded me of the sort of effect you get with England's less pleasant heavy brown bitters. Whoever this is aimed at, it ain't me.

It's hard to know whether to take the final two beers seriously or not. They come from a genuine small brewery -- Sharp's of Cornwall -- are of robust and flavoursome styles and are presented in very sober wrappings with thin san serif text and a graphic of the brewer's signature. But then they also arrived with a matching branded bar of chocolate each.

I opened the Honey Spice Tripel first. It's one of those beers that magically transports me straight back to Belgium on the first sip: that beautiful yeast-derived spicy warmth is present from the outset. There's a lovely honey perfume in the aroma and it drinks smoothly, without too much spicing or heat, despite a whopping 10% ABV. The flavour tails off quite quickly, however, leaving a kind of lagerish watery fizz on the end. Not very complex, but tripel doesn't necessarily need to be. Perhaps a bite of the lemon meringue white chocolate would open it out. Nope! The chocolate is delicious but massively overpowers everything else. The intense sugar and lemon zest completely coats the palate and it's impossible to taste anything through it. I began to worry if I'd ever experience another flavour again, and ended up using the remains of the tripel to try and wash it off. When that didn't work I reached for the water biscuits. Lovely chocolate, but not a match for beer or anything else.

To the Quadrupel Ale next, a reddish brown beer, so a little pale for the style, I think. It's also 10% ABV. The aroma is quite, quite beautiful: fresh C-hops in abundance giving an amazing mango and sherbet effect, like the best American amber ales. This is not a beer for aging. It tastes powerfully fruity, full of prunes in particular, but with elements of dates, figs and similar dark chewy loveliness. After a few sips I began to find the sweetness a little bit jarring but the peachy hop echo in the aftertaste makes it worthwhile. The chocolate is a 70% cocoa dark one and is a stroke of pairing genius: the bitterness counteracts the sweet malt perfectly, without interfering with the hops and actually helps clear the palate, something chocolate is not normally known for. With the prunes subdued, the more vinous qualities of the beer come out and I begin to see why the marketing bumf suggests this as an alternative to port as a digestif.

Molson Coors may not be supplying the best beers on the Irish market, but they certainly can't be faulted on the variety.

Gorgeous Georges

It's still just about apparent that the area around Perrache station was once a beautiful part of Lyon. The railway arrived in 1857 and brought with it the elegant streetscape one sees all over Europe, dotted with grand hotels and apartment buildings. The twentieth century, however, was not kind to the neighbourhood, witnessing the imposition of an autoroute, extra urban trainlines and a tangle of concrete overpasses and throughways which destroy any impression that the district was ever planned with humans in mind.

Cowering in the shadow of the new, modern Perrache station sits Brasserie Georges. It had stood here a good twenty years before the first locomotives, effortlessly transitioning in 1924 from edge-of-town drinks factory to grand art deco railway buffet. Times have been hard since, but in 2005 it was lovingly restored to its previous splendour, with the addition of a shiny new microbrewery tucked discreetly into one corner.

It's an impressive sight when one enters from the dingy street outside: liveried waiters glide across the floor, serving an orderly array of tables from a menu that blends in seamlessly with what this city -- the gourmet capital of Earth's most gastronomic country -- has to offer the hungry diner. Off to one side an aproned gentleman tends the dark wood bar, beyond which the brewkit gleams in copper and steel. Blackboards on the ten fermentation vessels tell us something about the demand being met by the beer supply: six vessels of pils, two of golden ale and one each of witbier and red. So popular, it seems, is the pils that we had to choose something else when we sat down and ordered our round.

Bière Georges Dorée is brewed with honey, though shows little sign of it on tasting: just a delicate floral perfume and a slight waxy bitterness. Other than that it's quite plain drinking, perhaps a little on the heavy and sticky side but not so much that it gets difficult or anything.

The Blanche is a pale hazy shade of almost-green. As is so often the case in French brewing they haven't gone out of the way to produce anything strange or iconoclastic, but as an everyday witbier it's spot on. There's just the right balance of dry wheatiness, laced with gentle spice from the coriander. What marks it out for me is just a few extra notches on the sweetness dial, more candied orange than plain bitter orange peel. It came to me cool rather than cold with a light fizz, making for a wonderfully refreshing drink: everything you could ask for in a wit.

Lastly there was Bière Georges Rousse. This is another almost opaque beer, dark amber in the middle, more watery looking at the edges. A lovely aroma of orange blossom greets the nose and the taste begins with dry roast, turning to mild milk chocolate. It finishes with a wonderful Jaffa flourish, doubtless the result of some surprisingly generous hopping. It's definitely a significant cut above the normal boring old French ambrée and wouldn't be out of place among some of the best German altbier.

If you're in Lyon, Brasserie Georges is unmissable. Even leaving the history aside, the refurbished dining room and bar are spectacular. Prices are fairly reasonable too, with 40cl of beer costing under €5 in a town where even modestly-priced cafés will take €7 off you for a glass of Stella. Brave the concrete jungle out the back of Perrache and spend some time in a more civilised age.

The big guns

To this northern European it's a very alien drinking culture they have in Argentina. It would almost be fair to say that they don't really have one. Beer tends to be treated almost the way we treat wine: shared comunally with meals. The human need for mild psychoactive stimulation appears to be taken care of by the ever-present mate -- a ubiquitous cross between tea-drinking and pipe-smoking. In several places, a request just for beer was met with well-OK-then suspicious looks, though doubtless I could have got my mate thermos filled with hot water as a basic courtesy. On one occasion I ordered a beer while perusing the menu in a restaurant and since my wife didn't, the 33cl bottle arrived to the table with two glasses. These bizarre backward foreigners with their weird notions of beer being something to be served in large bottles and enjoyed with food. What do they know, eh?

One upshot of such practice is that big bottles are the norm for most beers, certainly the stuff the mainstream breweries produce. For some unfathomable reason 970ml is the standard measure (and cm³ is the standard unit). There's a definite thrill of the exotic when glancing through the window of a classy restaurant to see a family at table with giant mutant bottle of Stella Artois in a silver ice bucket on the side.

None of that for me though. On a cool sunny day in downtown Puerte Iguazu, however, I did partake in a big bottle of Iguana. I love the branding on this, though the beer is a very simple and thin quenching hot-country lager, designed for taking edges off thirsts and nothing else. The other biggie I met, again in Iguazu where choice was severely limited, was Palermo Ice. Quite smooth and sweet, this, in almost a Munich Helles style.

Only two servings of Quilmes Cristal passed my lips on the trip, one being in a pub which I'd been told had a great beer selection, and indeed featured well over a dozen taps, but for some reason (recent change of ownership?) was serving only Stella and Quilmes and I was too tired and thirsty to back out. It was horrible. The other was in the Iguazu Falls park itself, after a long morning of trailing about in hot sunshine we sat down for an empanada and an ice-cold Quilmes straight from the can. It was nectar. I didn't enjoy the stout or bock from the same brewery when last we met, but my curiosity was piqued by Quilmes Red Lager. It's a red-brown beer with some nice roasted flavours at first, but it gets too sickly too quickly and I resorted to draining the remains straight from the bottle, confident I wasn't missing much by way of sensory experience.

Imperial Lager I met on the terrace of an upmarket bar in the rejuvenated dockland district of Puente Madero. It looks the part, or maybe that's just because it was a nice day. A bit stronger than the usual at 5.5% ABV, it's another sweet one, expressing hints of banana ester that get louder as it sits around. But that's about it: definitely not as especial as the label would have you believe.

I'm not sure where on the macro-independent-craft spectrum the beer from Otro Mundo sits, but I'm sticking the one I had in here: Otro Mundo Golden Ale: a bold move to sell it in a half-litre bottle, I'm sure. It's very pale and quite hazy with some fun fruit tartness: a bit of apple and some light lemons. First impression is of a light and zesty ale for witbier lovers, though wait a while and there's some toffee to be found in here as well. Passable, I thought.


The brass-neck award for audacious marketing bullshit goes to Schneider, one of the major lager brands and one which makes big claims about its German heritage and standards. Featuring the signature of old Herr Schneider himself, it's brewed "according to German tradition". I caught up with it on the ferry crossing to Uruguay, where the label's fine print confessed to "cereales" of the non-malt variety, as well as stabilisers and anti-oxidants. In short it's a hideous adjunct lager: dry, dull and unpleasant. I don't think I've ever seen a beer put this much distance between what it is and what it claims to be.

And then, just like that, we were in Uruguay.

Love lager

When it comes to beer, Ireland is pretty much synonymous with stout. As far as I can tell, this is largely down to Diageo's marketing power rather than what anybody actually drinks. The latest figures , from 2006 (p.12 here), say that 63% of all the beer sold in Ireland is lager (stout is most of the rest, with ale a mere 5%). The typical Irish pub certainly offers a dizzying array of locally brewed lagers. You'll find Bud, Carlsberg, Heineken, Miller and Coors Light side-by-side on almost every bar. More upmarket places will also have draught imports like Stella Artois and Beck's Vier, and bottles of Sol, Corona and Tiger as well, while pubs serving a less affluent clientele will have local Amstel and Fosters bringing up the rear.

When Ireland's first lager brewery closed up shop in the summer of 1893 after a meagre 19 months in business, I'm sure Mr Stoer who owned it never dreamed that the daring new style he found in Bavaria and the US would one day rule supreme in Irish beer. Yet when the latter-day beer pioneers Oliver and Liam set up The Porter House in the 1990s, it was inevitable that lager would be a key component in their success. The first brews were called Probably Lager and WeiserBuddy, each with its own distinct and individual branding.

Of course, the multinational which holds the licence to brew Carlsberg and Bud in Ireland threw a fit, and the beers were hastily renamed. I've already covered the Porterhouse's Bud clone back here and today I'm looking at the other two lagers they make and sell: Temple Bräu and Hersbrucker. And yes, I'm well aware that by writing about fancy-pants microbrewed beer I'm breaking my own Session rule on plain everyday lager. Sue me.

I got my first sip of Temple Bräu in just before the rain started and we had to leave the beer garden of Porterhouse North. I hadn't tasted it in a long long time so had basically no expectations, other than what you see here: a fizzy yellow lager aimed at the mass market. I was still surprised, however. It's nice. The body is quite full and comes close to the creaminess you get in the best German pilsners. The aroma indicates a definite hop character and it tastes pleasantly bitter with a long aftertaste. All is not completely rosy in the beer garden, however: there's a bit of a metallic tang as well, right in the middle of the whole thing, though not enough to spoil the enjoyment. Despite its flaw, Temple Bräu remain a tasty quaffer for sunny afternoons.

Inside, I moved on to Hersbrucker. Once upon a time, this was Mrs Beer Nut's regular tipple but she quit a couple of years ago, citing an unpleasant change in the beer. I had never been a fan so was very much on the alert as I took my pint back to the table. Rightly so, as it happened. Hersbrucker, slightly darker than Temple Bräu, is damn near undrinkable. The only thing that saves it is its watery hollowness. The flavour starts with nothing but is followed by a massive disinfectant flavour: pure essence of hospital. Sharp, tangy and unpleasant. I did, in its defence, finish the pint, but I couldn't help thinking that I might have been better off with a pint of Carlsberg, sadly.

I was going to leave this post here, but the guilt about drinking microbrewed lager got the better of me. I had to go back to my roots.

It's very hard to find a pint of Harp in Dublin. It was still relatively common in the mid-1990s but pretty much disappeared soon after. Diageo brew it in Dundalk and just about all of it heads north across the border. Fortunately (or not), there are a couple of hold-outs around town, one being O'Neill's of Suffolk Street, a vast pub that seems possessed of the desire to stock every draught beer that exists anywhere on the Irish market. They have a Harp tap. Since it's the beer I drank most when I started drinking beer, I felt I owed you all a pint.

And it's not awful. I was astounded at how unawful it is. It's not in the least watery and has quite a sweet foretaste with a bit, but not much, of a bitter kick at the end. To be completely frank I doubt I could tell this blind from your typical pale Czech lager. In fairness that's probably more a damning indictment of what the multinationals have done to the established lagers of Prague and Plzeň than any kind of kudos for Diageo, but still: I could actually drink Harp without complaining. That's an eye-opener for me.

And that's all I've got to say on the yellow fizz of Ireland. Post your linkages somewhere on here, or e-mail me or whatever. A round-up will be forthcoming some time in the next week. In the meantime, I'm off to Belgium for the weekend where I won't be so much as tempted by a Jupiler. I'll likely be Twittering my way through Cantillon's public brewday tomorrow, but unfortunately won't be able to read your jealous howls until I return.

Wife beater beater

What were they thinking? How many of Stella Artois's core UK drinkers have enough French to get the association? For that matter, how many of them shop in Marks & Spencer? And yet, with its white can emblazoned in red and gold there can be no doubt of the market at which Etoile D'Or is pitched. Maybe they're after ABC1s who like the idea of the strong Belgian lager, but simply cannot be seen buying it, let alone serving it to guests.

Unlike Stella, which proudly proclaims that it contains only natural ingredients like maize, this adds ascorbic acid into the mix. For extra freshness, see? Mmmm... crisp.

I think the contract brewer has done quite a good job of this. It even has a whack of that corny-grainy taste that I used to enjoy in Belgian-made Stella but which seems to have vanished from the British-made variety we get nowadays.

However, it's still quite watery with an unpleasant chemical flavour. Perhaps with strongly-flavoured food it might just work as a barbecue beer but I've a nasty suspicion that bad hangovers wouldn't be far behind.

This can was liberated from my Dad's stash (he has a keen eye for crap lager) so I've no idea how much it costs. I'm just guessing, based on previous M&S experiences, that it's hideously overpriced.

At your own risk, people. Public service blogging ends.

Out and about

An enjoyable side-effect of being a beer blogger is the news, information and plain old gossip I receive from other beer fanatics. At the weekend I spent a few hours trawling selected pubs in Dublin following up on some leads I'd received, as well as doing some research for The Session this Friday.

My first port of call was Thomas Read opposite City Hall. Thomas Read is probably the nearest thing Ireland has to a pub chain. We have lots of businesses which own multiple licensed premises, but (apart from the Porterhouse) the Thomas Read group is the only one that will use the same name for new branches, so there's now a Thomas Read in Smithfield and several at Dublin airport. The brand name came from a seventeenth-century cutlery firm which ran a shop on Parliament Street -- the oldest shop in Dublin -- until the 1990s. The pub owners closed it down when they bought the site, opening the first of their pubs next door and leaving the original shop in its current derelict state.

It was very much a café-bar for the beautiful people when it first opened. I've no idea where it stands in the fashion stakes now as I don't keep track of these things. Anyway, a friend (hi Nick) was telling me that they are currently selling a stout under the Murphy name, but which wasn't branded with the normal Murphy's logo and which came in a fancy stemmed pint glass. Murphy's is, of course, Heineken's property, and big transnational brewers aren't known for their variation and localisation of their brands. So on Saturday I called in to find out what was going on.

Sure enough, there was the pump clip, featuring a naked lady where one would expect to see the sober and authoritative Murphy's badge. The accompanying beermat tells us this is Marie Louisa Murphy (1737-1814), whose steadfast work getting her kit off for Parisian artist Francois Boucher provided venture capital for her family which went on to set up the Cork brewery.

The new stemmed pint glass reminds me a lot of the chalice that InBev are currently touting for Stella Artois, claiming its design helps keep the beer cold. My pint of Murphy's was certainly very cold indeed and it took a while before I was able to taste the sweet roasted flavours that confirmed that this is plain old Murphy's stout.

The whole thing intrigues me: it's so out of character for big soulless breweries to stray from their homogenous branding. Whether Marie Louisa's rosy cheeks are displayed here purely for the jaded poseurs of Thomas Read or whether they're part of a wider rebranding remains to be seen.

My journey around the city also brought me to Messrs Maguire, to follow up on a conversation I'd been having with Knut about their Imperial stout. Was it possible there was a new lower-strength version? The answer is no: in fact, the batch of Imperial had just run out which suggests it was the same big 7%er it has always been. I hope we'll be seeing it again before long. I made do with a pint of MM Best: the cask ale made by MM's brewer for the festivals, guest taps in UK pubs, and other such cask outlets. In its home pub it's bunged into a keg and served on nitro to resemble, as Knut accurately observed, nothing so much as Boddington's or similar crashingly dull English keg bitters.

Not all of this excursion was on foot of third-party observations. I had noticed a couple of days previously that Dublin's eastern European late bar, The Czech Inn, had a sign out advertising a new range of draught beers. They'd taken it in by Saturday, the better to advertise the day's big screen football, but the beers were still there. They're from the Konrad range made in northern Bohemia. Konrad Premium is a pale lager and reminds me more of the Munich style than anything Czech. It's a big 5.6% ABV, and quite sweet with it. Thirst-quenchingly good.

Konrad Dark is sweeter still, almost to the point of being slightly saccharine, but just restrained enough to remain drinkable. At the very end there's just a hint of coffee to add a bit of complexity to an otherwise straight-up no-nonsense sweet dark lager, considerably less demanding than The Czech Inn's test-card-tastic wallpaper.

After that, all that remained was for a quick trip to the Bull & Castle for a couple of Hookers and then home. So concludes the third year of this blog and, while I predicted a fairly limited amount of travel a year ago, it has been a busy time with lots of new beers. I'm not intending to let the momentum slow. Sorry, Mr Liver.

Bankers' draught

I was only in Luxembourg for a couple of hours, so what follows, I'm sure, is not representative of Luxemburgish beer, any more than Jupiler, Maes and Stella are representative of Belgium's.

Bofferding is the dominant lager brand, its green and white livery appearing on countless pub signs around the city. The product itself is a smooth and malty golden lager with, I presume, German roots. Bofferding also make Hausbier, a sweet and malty amber lager with a bit of a sour bite.

For something drier, try Battin Gambrinus, a rather bitter pale yellow lager. Good as an aperitif. Turning up the malt quotient, there's Diekirche lager, only 4.8% but packed with taste. And finally there's Mousel: dry, easy-drinking and pretty much as nondescript as it's possible for a lager to be.

Luxembourg is not one of Europe's great beer destinations.

Kwak goes the Bishop

When I was a nipper my parents would buy The Sunday Times every week. I remember being fascinated by the ads for exotic beers only available in Britain. One of these was something called Bishop's Finger. I'm fairly sure that I bought some the first time I saw it on sale in Ireland, but that was long ago. The Bull & Castle Beerhall Challenge brought it my way again and I confess to having no memory of what it's like. What it's like is bitter -- loads and loads of hops, backed-up by a caramel sugar sweetness. It's not bittersweet; it's bitter and sweet completely separately. Whether the double taste sensation is your kind of thing is up to yourself. It was a bit too much for me. I was much more impressed by another Shepherd Neame brew: the blue-label 1698. This is a much mellower affair, sweet and fruity and artfully constructed. I'd take this one over anything else made by Shepherd Neame. I've already mentioned their lacklustre Spitfire, and of course they make an organic ale, called Whitstable Bay. Once again, it's a disappointing organic: slight, verging on bland, with only a hint of the caramel and hops of the Big Finger. Its green credentials are also compromised by the fact that the hops are flown all the way to Kent from New Zealand. Who buys this stuff?

Another turn-up for the challenge sheet was Kwak. Everybody whose familarity with Belgian beer goes beyond Stella must be aware of the one served in the silly flask in the wooden frame. I had a memory of it being just that bit too heavy to enjoy, but I think my tastes have changed since I last had it. Kwak is one of the lightest beers in the "liquid bread" category: dark, sweet, chewy and quite delicious. I won't be so dismissive next time I see it.

I must say I'm really enjoying being forced to drink beer I'd never normally order. Coming up is one Goose Island IPA,which has been described by ICB members and the Bull & Castle management in the sort of terms that felines might describe catnip. To say I'm intrigued is an understatement...

The bland leading the bland

A quick round-up of some of the less notable beers I encountered on my recent trip to Greece, mentioned purely for completist reasons.

Mythos is the most ubqitous beer I noticed in Athens. It's the standard Mediterranean lager, generically refreshing. Mostly it was served in a frozen pint glass, yet developed what one might call an actual flavour when it warmed up slightly. The other common lager is Alpha, which struck me as blander yet: even when the sun hit it there wasn't much of a hint of a lager taste. Still, it does the job for that place and climate and I'm not complaining.

I travelled through Budapest and just had time on the way back for a swift pint at the airport. The choice was Stella, Beck's, Franziskaner, Leffe Brune or something strange called Borsodi. No contest, of course. Borsodi is pretty cheap and nasty, but when you're drinking it from a plastic cup under fluorescent lights in an eastern European airport it's the only appropriate drink. Just another sacrifice for this blog...

Weiss of the North

I never thought I'd see the day when Hoegaarden was easier to get on draught in Belfast than in Dublin, but there you go. Things have certainly changed in the city where beer was recently limited to Guinness and Harp/Smithwick's or Tennent's/Bass depending on who controlled the supply to that bar.

Amazingly, in the Duke of York, where one can get Hoegaarden, Stella, and Carlsberg (among others) on tap, people were still drinking Harp. What's that about? Still, people were also drinking alcopops so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised it's a low-taste zone.

On the higher-taste front, while in Belfast I discovered an English beer called Curious Brew. It's a strange little dark lager, with distinct yeasty-aley overtones. One to be savoured (and not chugged down in the hotel bar at the end of a ten-hour session and after everywhere else has closed, ahem).

And just for the sake of completeness (which is what this blog is about), I also added Eisbrau Czech pilsner to my list of beers tried (something I will actually add to the side panel one of these months). It's passable, in the mould of Budvar. And, er, that's all I have to say about it.