Ringers

"Are you here for food, or just a look around?"

Yes, Wetherspoon has certainly been something of a curiosity since it came to Dublin last year, hence the smiley greeter at the door of The Forty Foot on its first morning of business. I was here, since she asked, for beer.

Chances are you'll have seen the shock news as it happened: the pub chain choosing not to stock Heineken-brewed beers. A bevy of substitute bevvies was shipped in to replace them, and that's what drew me.

The stout line-up included Bath Ales Dark Side, and I kicked off with that to get it out of the way. While it's nitro-dispensed there's a pleasant tongue-tingling sparkle to this, though the texture is also plenty creamy. As expected, the trademark Bath Ales butterscotch is present in a big way but it's disguised somewhat by the sweet chocolate. It's a passable pint but you won't catch me drinking another.

Keeping it company at the black end of the taps is Marstons Revisionist Stout, a tiny bit stronger at 4.1% ABV with the informative tap badge helpfully offering black malt and roast barley, so I was hoping for a drier experience to cleanse all that diacetyl off my palate. The head on this one was promisingly darker: a healthy shade of nicotine, but of flavour there was none. Even after letting it warm up a ways there was a vague putty sort of tang but nothing that tasted like beer, never mind stout. My palate was cleansed but so was my optimism that the Marstons Revisionist project can deliver anything worthwhile.

Chances are I wouldn't have opted for Murphy's or Beamish on a visit to The Forty Foot anyway, though I have no objection to either. But these two stouts don't even reach Heineken's low bar.

My hopes were higher when I turned to lager. As titles go, Adnams Dry Hopped Lager really sounds like a winning formula. They certainly got their money's worth out of the Galaxy hops: this is a total mandarin bomb, to the point of being almost too sweet and juicy. There's a little bit of resinous incense spice and some heavier herbal dank, all of it given total free rein by the pristine lager cleanness. With no major bitter element, this is the beer to turn the local collars-up lagerboys into IPA fanatics.

On the journey home, since I was in the South County anyway, I dropped in to the other Wetherspoon: Blackrock's Three Tun Tavern. Mostly I wanted to grab a pint of Devils Backbone Pale Ale, the US-style offering brewed by Banks's for the chain and not yet in stock at The Forty Foot. Here is the bitterness missing from the Adnams lager: sharp and waxy; invigorating and refreshing. The flavour is rich and pithy, all ripe jaffa oranges, and the aroma adds to the waxy bitter effect. I liked it. It functions equally well as a cold, cheapy thirst-quencher and a more considered sipping ale. Would I be shot for suggesting there's a hint of Timothy Taylor Landlord about this?

And ugh, because I have to: Innis & Gunn Lager. My half arrived an innocent pale yellow colour smelling of nothing and tasting of little more. There's a bit of lagery grain husk and just a trace of the standard I&G toffee yuck. But it benefited hugely from the super-low serving temperature and was actually quite refreshingly bland, something I never thought I'd say about an Innis & Gunn beer. Still, I wasn't tempted to let it warm to further explore its charms. Down the hatch and one more for the road.

While waiting to be served that (sadly, second-rate English-style bar service comes with the package) I spotted another Adnams beer in the bottle fridge: Crystal Rye IPA. I guess there's a reason "Crystal" is writ large on the label, because it's writ large on the flavour too: a stiff, chewy toffee character, barely troubled by the hopping which I'm sure is generous but just gets drowned in caramelised sugar. There may be a grassy rye bite in the finish but it's entirely possible the power of label suggestion is putting that in there for me. I'm glad it was cold and I'm glad it's only 5% ABV: it could pass for stronger.

A couple of cans of Sweet Action for the long trek home on the number 17, and my day of 'Spooning was over. Once again the beer quality and price wasn't enough to drag me away from my more regular haunts, but roll on retirement, eh?

Not set in granite

It was a bit of a nostalgia trip to go back to Aberdeen as a guest of BrewDog in August. At the turn of the millennium I was a student in the city and while it's still the charmingly grey tangle of streets it always was, the beer scene is definitely somewhat different.

BrewDog's own bar, for starters, I remember as being a terrifying out-of-the-way dive that not even the slummiest student pub crawl would dare venture into. Now, of course, it's open and bright and cheery, all trendy bare brick with varnished pine highlights. From the guest beers I just had time to gulp a quick taste of Cool as a Cucumber, the Fyne Ales and Wild Beer collaborative saison. A gulp is all that's needed too, I reckon. It's not the most complex of beers, being all cucumber and not much else: intensely green, in fact, like chewing cucumber skins. It's only 2.9% ABV and there's some mint in it as well, so the refreshment power is considerable, as long as you don't mind being slapped about the chops by a giant cucumber at the same time.

Just across the way from BrewDog Aberdeen is the Aberdeen footprint of Six Degrees North, another local brewery. They've settled on a Belgian theme for their beers, though the bar is far from being a brown café, kitted out starkly in grey concrete and steel. I started with Six Degrees North Bière de Table which arrived an unattractive opaque custardy yellow colour. And, unsurprisingly, the yeast utterly dominates the flavour. Not in a warming fruity Belgian fashion, either: more of an unpleasantly gritty dreggy thing. Yes there are big grapefruit hop notes shouting loudly from inside the flavour, but they're struggling to be heard. It could be I got the tail end of the keg, or it could be that this needs a bit more time in the bright tank. I wasn't impressed either way.

The house pale ale, Hopocrisy, was rather better, if not a whole lot clearer. Though a mere 4.6% ABV there's lots going on in here: sourness at first, followed closely by a big hit of juicy pineapple fruit. When those two settle down a little, there's more of a rustic grain vibe to it, a certain charming roughness around the edges. The big fizz makes it difficult to quaff, and the daft insistence on two-third measures means that doing so wouldn't be any fun anyway, but there are good intentions and brewing skills here. I'd like to have stayed to try the rest of the range.

Dinner at Musa was followed by a trip to Casc: a very swish beer and cigar bar in a basement around the corner. I was heading for 19 hours awake at this stage, with about eleven of those spent drinking beer, so the wobbles were definitely setting in. But not so wobbly that I couldn't identify a beer from my to-drink list on the blackboard, slur out an order for it and scribble together some tasting notes. It's Buxton Jaw Gate IPA, sole sassanach beer of the trip. 5.6% ABV and a dark orange-amber, pouring perfectly clear from the keg. While it looks like it belongs on the heavy and resinous end of the scale I found it quite enlivening, all tart and zesty citrus pith. Much as it revived me I reckoned discretion was the better part of valour and when the Beer O'Clock Show's Steve made a bid for the exit, I wisely followed. Thanks for getting me back to the hotel, Steve: your tactic of navigating there worked so much better than my plan of just staggering about hoping the Hilton would simply hove into view.

But we didn't come to Aberdeen to sleep, so it was back to the bar with Steve, Ian, Wayne and me before 7.30 the next morning. The airport bar, that is. The cask selection was fairly uninspiring, though there was Barley Brown's Black IPA. "That'll do me!" I thought, completely failing to spot that this collaboration was brewed at the Caledonian Brewery. Ugh. Entirely as expected it's a mess of sickly brown sugar: thick, cloying, and definitely not what I'm looking for in a breakfast IPA. Yes, there's a bit of a bitter sharpness, but the beer still doesn't amount to more than Caley 80 with a handful of extra hops. I had to cleanse my palate with a Sweet Action immediately after. If for some reason you want to hear what we talked about around the table that morning, Ian caught it all on his reel-to-reel tape machine and has posted it here. Caveat audiens.

And that's where it all ended. Cheers once again to the BrewDog team for inviting us all to play in their backyard for a day.

Canny move

The arrival of three canned American craft beers to UK budget pub chain JD Wetherspoon caused a bit of a stir among the UK beer bloggerati. Six Point in New York are well-regarded and have done several collaboration brews for Wetherspoon festivals in the past. Direct and exclusive shipment of their own product, at Wetherspoon prices, seemed a fair reason to get a little giddy.

We're still a few days away from Dublin's first JD Wetherspoon opening its doors but I caught up with these in The Standing Order, a vast former bank in Edinburgh New Town that now largely sells chips and WKD to stag and hen parties. On a busy afternoon I found what passed for a quiet corner and worked through the range.

I started on The Crisp, a fairly plain pilsner, if a little on the strong side at 5.4% ABV. The visuals are good: a fluffy white mousse on top; a slight haze to the gold below, to show that it's proper craft. They've paid careful attention to the specs for pilsner: there's the sharp, waxy green flavour of noble hops in a big way. Slightly metallic, but with a nice fresh crunchy spinach quality too. I tend to prefer a bit more of a rounded sweetness in my lager, but this is bang on for what it is. Not that I'd be ordering it again.

The inevitable IPA is called Bengali Tiger and is all of 6.4% ABV. Again with the haze. The smell was immediately off-putting, all toffee and swimming pools. Rather than thick and sticky like too many American IPAs, it's really quite thin. The flavour presents harsh acidity and oversweet toffee with no citrus or other late-hop fruity fun. A big disappointment for me here.

Lightest of the lot is Sweet Action at 5.2% ABV. The brewery deliberately avoids assigning a style to it, mentioning pale ale, cream ale and even wheat beer. It's certainly cloudy enough to be a wit: a veritable snowglobe of sediment rendering it opaque. But visuals aside, this beer is all about the green, starting with the spicy resin aroma and moving on to the bit of dank and lots of jaffa in the flavour. For all the hops it's not jarringly bitter and is instead smooth and very thirst quenching. As a mainstream non-aggressive introduction to what American hops do, it's up there with Goose Island IPA.

So coolly refreshing was the Sweet Action that the thought of going to the bar and selecting something warmer and less citrusy from the handpumps offered no appeal at all.