Eternal return of the same

Today's beers were released late last year by Galway Bay Brewery but strictly speaking they're not new ones. They were brewed and sold as versions of The Eternalist sour ale, and bottled about three years ago. I only ever had the raspberry Eternalist, back in 2015, so both of them are still new to me.

The first they've called Ash, and it has added cherries in, as well as vanilla and tonka beans which aren't mentioned on the label. It's a deep purple colour with a firm pink head and smells strongly of the cherries: ripe and luscious and real. It's sour but not sharp; tangy more than tart, I'd say, and with a big and rounded body, reflecting the substantial 6.8% ABV. I can't say I was able to identify the tonka or vanilla, but there is a certain sweetness which can't be assigned to the cherries alone. It's entirely complementary with the sourness and quite different to the sugared-up effect of Belgian candy-kriek. Here, it's an added richness, of the sort you get from an amber-coloured malt. This does come at the expense of the wildness: I thought that a barrel-aged beer with wild yeast would be funkier but there's only a very faint trace of that here, right on the very end. On the other hand, I like cherry beer to actualy taste of cherries and this does so, quite beautifully. So while it's not as serious as many a cork-stoppered wild ale, it's very enjoyable in its own fun way.

The companion piece is called Oak, and this time the added ingredient is apricot. It's a plain golden colour, and the aroma shows little sign of the fruit, instead exhibiting a mineral spicing of the sort you often find from geuze: that brick-cellar nitre effect. It's even stronger than the last one, at 7% ABV, and again the mouthfeel is weighty, almost chewy. This offsets the sour punch, but here there isn't all the fruit to counterbalance the flavour, so it's plainer overall; or more subtle, depending on one's viewpoint. There is a certain tang from the apricot but it's far from central in the taste. For the most part, this presents like an unadorned lambic, albeit a strong and weighty one. There's a wax bitterness, the same mineral spice as I found in the aroma, and a lightly citric acidity which makes it refreshing and clean, despite the high strength. This is a classy character, wearing the added fruit and the barrel ageing lightly while exhibiting very proper wild beer characteristics.

I had skipped the two new versions of The Eternalist when they first came out, and that appears to have been a mistake. I'm very glad to have been able to catch up, even though I didn't know it's what these were when I bought them. Both belong in the canon of high-end wild Irish beer, and since there likely won't be any more, I recommend picking them up if you see them.

Stainless and hoses

New York brewery Community Beer Works seems to be conducting a bit of market research via this month's Session. The somewhat needy theme is Are Breweries Your Friends? posing questions about whether we like breweries engaging with their customers on social media, and asking for examples of breweries who do it well. It's all very unbeery if I'm honest, and I suppose that's what I'll use this platform to say: if you're a brewery with a social media presence tell us about the beer. There's a huge difference in the way social media marketing works compared to other forms: you're not just throwing a message out there hoping it'll stick, like you might with a poster or TV spot. The people who see your social media content have made an active decision to follow it; we want the details. Tell us about the recipes, what's currently in the bright tanks, Vine the bottling line. The pictures on your feed should be full of stainless and hoses. If there's nothing but professionally taken product shots, hackneyed inspirational quotes or, worst of all, repetition of messages from people who've tagged you in to their comment about how great your beer is, rip up the strategy and start again because you're boring your audience.

I make no comment on the social media nous of the breweries whose beers I'm covering today. These draught specials are all stragglers from the festive preliminaries that got left out of my big Christmas Eve Irish beer round-up.

The first is JW Sweetman Belgian Blonde, the latest seasonal from the central Dublin brewpub. It was a served a clear pale gold colour, giving off a gentle aroma of lightly spiced mango concentrate. First sip reveals it to be quite heavy and warming but this is neatly offset by a sprightly fizz. The foretaste is full-on Belgian: hot esters and sticky honey putting me immediately in mind of Leffe Blonde, a beer I quite like in keg form. And like Leffe Blonde this is also 6.6% ABV and that was enough for me to check with the brewer that it isn't a cheeky rebadge. It isn't, he was friendly enough to confirm. An oatcake crunch finishes the flavour on a sweet grainy note. It's not terribly exiciting, but it is a well-made homage to the medium-strong Belgian blonde style, and as a variation on the winter warmer makes quite a refreshing change.

Galway Bay has a matching pair of winter seasonals on the go, available as a boxed set of 375ml bottles for an eye-watering €16. Fortunately it's rather cheaper on draught in the pubs and I caught up with both in Against The Grain.

Space Suit is a sour amber ale, mixing up Lactobacillus, Brettanomyces and Galaxy Hops for a nasty-and-nice combination of power moves, though the ABV is a modest 5.5%. The sourness and the citrus both arrive simultaneously in a big way, and the combination works incredibly well: you get a juicebox of refreshing tropical fruit and then an acetic scrub on your teeth afterwards. Unfortunately it has the same Achilles' heel as its predecessor The Eternalist: the murk. Its appearance is a muddy brown and there's massive savoury interference from the yeast over what deserve to be pin-bright sour and hop flavours.

The counterpart is Diving Bell, a "salted caramel" scotch ale at 9% ABV. It's surprisingly light-bodied for something so strong and malt-driven, which is very much in its favour. There's all the flavour of toffee with none of the density or cloying sweetness and then a cleansing tang at the front of the palate from the salt. This combination makes it extremely moreish in a way that beers of this type so rarely are. I managed to limit myself to one glass but I could see myself getting dangerously merry on this stuff.

And lastly to Wigwam, the latest bar in the Bodytonic chain, a refurbishment of the grotty-but-loved Twisted Pepper into a much more grown-up food, booze and coffee outlet. They've made the innovation of putting the taps on an underback behind the bar which is a great idea, opening up the counter space and banishing the barman-in-a-cage effect that Against the Grain suffers from in particular. Diageo and C&C dominate the content but there's Founder's All Day IPA and a selection from Rascal's, who act as surrogate brewery to Bodytonic's beermaking offshoot Brewtonic. And there was a new limited edition beer from them: Hoffmann's.

"Belgian Ale 5% ABV" is all I had to work with on being presented with a handled mug of murky amber beer -- it could be anything. On tasting... oh! Sour! I wasn't expecting that. It's not excessively tart but there's combination of funk and tang that acts as the centrepiece of the flavour. Behind it there's a sweet summer fruit quality for a kind of balsamic strawberry effect, with enough unattenuated body to give it a satisfying heft and smoothness. The finish is a rounded cereal chewiness, like a typical Belgian brown ale. I'm still no wiser as to what it's meant to be, except... wait a minute: isn't "Hoffmann's" the name that Waterford Brewery used to give to the beer composed of all their batches of other things that went wrong? Is that what we have here: something or somethings that didn't pass quality control and got rebadged as something else for sale? It is an acceptably drinkable beer, however, so I'm not criticising if that's what's happened. But more information would be nice, perhaps on social media. That's what a friendly brewer would do.

While I was away

In between my excursions to Lithuania and the Netherlands which have been occupying this blog of late (and the one to Belgium on the way) the Irish beer scene has been chugging along as usual. I've long since given up trying to get hold of every new Irish beer, but I have managed to get my hands on...

Rascal's Rugby World Cup special was a pale ale called Holy Schmidt. At 4.5% ABV it's clearly designed to accompany big-screen sports though it's not lacking in substance: the inclusion of oatmeal in the grist lends it a nice weight and a certain pleasant stickiness. Pleasant because of the lovely fresh candied orange imparted by the El Dorado hops, alongside the earthy bitterness of Cascade. Classic flavours and a very enjoyable, sessionable pint.

In other pale ale news, the second beer in Carlow Brewing's single hop IPA series, O'Hara's Hop Adventure Galaxy, arrived last month and a couple of samples were kindly sent over by the PR squad. They've stuck to the 5% ABV spec, brewed pale to get the maximum impact from the hop. It bears a striking resemblance to the Irish Pale Ale from the core range: a similar lemon biscuit aroma and a crisp dry flavour, with maybe a little juicier passionfruit where the other has grapefruit but this is still plenty bitter, a refreshing acidic bite that lingers long. I can't help feeling that a bit more balancing malt would have enhanced the juice-giving properties of Galaxy, and this certainly isn't the hop showcase that the Sorachi Ace one was, but then Sorachi Ace is a very showcaseable hop. Still, a decent beer but if you can't find it, an O'Hara's Pale Ale will do just as nicely.

Galway Bay's sour beer project produced two new ones in recent months. The first is Godspeed, 5% ABV and with added peach and mango. Like its predecessor Maybe Next Monday, there's an unsettling fruit yoghurt aroma but the fruit almost disappears in the flavour. Instead, the foretaste is all about the funk: a gritty spiciness that almost resembles the saltpetre effect found in proper geueze, with  a pinch of added pepper. The tropical fruit floods in after this but doesn't really add anything useful to the overall flavour and then it finishes on a really quite nasty oxidised cardboard twang. It's a cut above Maybe Next Monday in terms of complexity, but it's not a beer I'd choose to drink again. I think I'm pretty much done with these sorts of fruited sour beers.

Then with much fanfare the next Galway Bay sour beer arrived in bottles. The Eternalist was created under the direction of Enda Cleary who was a home brewer when the beer was brewed but has since gone on to found Wild Bat Brewery. 24 months in Cabernet Sauvignon barrels, brettanomyces, lactobacillus, pediococcus and raspberries are all part of the vital statistics here and the end result is 5.5% ABV. While I was expecting something pink it's more of a murky orange-brown. The aroma is the first indication that this supergroup is being fronted by the fruit and the brett: tart and funky. The body is thin and fizzy and the raspberries jump in first but there's not a whole lot behind them. There's a kind of savoury rye bread flavour which I think is masking the sourness, a dirty yeast effect which I'm used to interfering with hoppy beer but it's the first time I've met a sour beer that could do with cleaning up. It has a lot going for it, but like the other sour Galway Bay beers it's merely a point in the journey towards making these styles as good as the Belgians do. I'm not at all convinced that the complicated biochemistry involved here, with its attendant price tag, was worth the effort. If you have an unopened one, I suggest leaving it to settle for a winter or two.

Last but by no means least, the second release from young James Brown, a follow-up to his award-winning Chocolate Orange Stout, and brewed once again at Brú. This time it's American-style IPA that gets the fruit treatment and, by his account, Rhubarb Tart IPA has a lot of fresh rhubarb added to it. By way of beery balance it's a big 7% ABV and hopped with Cascade and Chinook. It's a dark orange colour with maybe a slight pinkish cast and the aroma is all about the hops: classic American grapefruit. The texture is very light for such a strong beer and there's a lot of fizz to begin, though it actually becomes quite smooth when that fades. The hops dominate the flavour too, at least when the beer is cold. As it warms, however, the rhubarb acidity builds, adding a gentle refreshing green sharpness to the finish as well as a slight metallic aspirin tang. The fruit and hops work surprisingly well together with neither dominating the other. At its heart it remains a US-style IPA, but with just that slight twist making it more interesting than most. I've certainly never encountered anything like it before.

That's all for the moment, but I can already feel the next backlog starting to build.