Gill trip

Prolific Sligo brewery Lough Gill has three for us today. I tend to associate their output most with fruited sour beers and amped-up pastry stouts, but they're only reverting to type with one of today's selection.

The latest in this year's slew of Irish witbiers is Bán. The name gives it an Irish twist but otherwise it's straight-down-the-line Belgian-style, with wheat, orange peel and coriander. So it goes with the medium-orange hazy appearance, though the aroma lays on the herbs a little more thickly than most of these. Same for the flavour, unsurprisingly, but before you even get to the oily coriander there's the very dry wheat husk to contend with. Witbier shouldn't taste rough but this does. There's a strong bitterness from the hops and no balancing zest or sweetness from the orange. The finish is slightly funky, with a saline sweaty quality. Maybe Hoegaarden has infantilised my palate for witbier, but this is an acquired taste which I was not prepared to try and acquire.

The brewery turned five years old recently, marking the occasion with a re-imagining of one of its original recipes, Thieving Bastards. Five Candles is paler than the precursor, and clearly labelled as an Extra Special Bitter -- I marked TB down originally because I wasn't sure while drinking it what it was meant to be. I'd like to think there would be no mistaking this one: it's a rich amber colour and mixes weighty caramel malt with distinctively English hops which are a little floral and a lot tangy. A serious waxy bitterness in the finish gives it an assertive personality: this is no bland brown bitter. 5% ABV is modest and it tastes bigger, with bags of comforting warmth. It's a very well-made example of ESB and it's nice to see the style represented on the off licence shelves locally. A cask version, now...

That's it for the solid, reliable, 20th century styles. Obviously there has to be some contemporary nonsense, and in fairness Lough Gill does contemporary nonsense better than most. Loconut is an imperial stout of 10.5% ABV with coconut, blueberries and vanilla. Blueberries tend to disappear into the background of beers but they were immediately apparent from the aroma of this one as it poured. They're still there when sniffing the glass, and the coconut too: fresh and greasy, and surprisingly complementary. On tasting... omg blueberries. All the blueberries. Too much blueberries? Quite possibly. It's very jammy and extremely sweet with it. I found myself searching for the stout side of the equation, finding a little chocolate, a tiny pinch of roast, but all of it buried under the mashed blueberries. I was disappointed at first: it's hard drinking; unsubtle, too sweet, and not properly beerlike. The saving grace is the aftertaste: there's a lovely afterglow of fruit-infused milk chocolate that makes the initial difficulties worth suffering through. This isn't Lough Gill's best work in the silly stout genre, but my main takeaway is that proper blueberry stout is possible. I have hope for the future.

Taken together, they're a pleasingly diverse bunch. The colours alone bring us on a journey.

Cheeky cans

Today I'm looking at the initial three packaged beers sent to me by one of Ireland's newest breweries, Lough Gill Brewing, in Sligo town. It's the creation of entrepreneur James Ward, who previously set up the neighbouring White Hag Brewery before leaving the company and, like White Hag, there's a definite eye towards the US market with these. Unusually he has chosen 440ml packaging, with the observation that it's fast becoming America's favourite can size. These ones aren't quite legal in Europe as they only display the capacity in US imperial units: 14.9 fl. oz.

I started with the brown ale, Mac Nutty, which is 5.5% ABV and flavoured with macadamia nuts. It looks the part: a rich chocolate brown colour with a generous topping of café crème foam. The aroma is similarly attractive -- caramel, raisins and hazelnuts -- while the flavour raises milk chocolate notes and just a very slight bittering edge for balance, no more than you'd find in a decent piece of dark chocolate, with an added subtle tang of blackcurrant. The best feature is the texture which is luxuriously smooth. This, combined with a sweetness level that doesn't build or cloy, makes it slip down indecently fast. Brown ales are too much of a rarity in Ireland but this one serves as a fine example of how to do them well.

Given the massively asymmetrical nature of Irish brewing it's perhaps surprising that there isn't more macro-bashing going on. There was, of course, The Porterhouse's infamous initial releases of "WeiserBuddy" and "Probably Lager" but not much since. Lough Gill seem to have decided to take no prisoners with their naming, and so the pale ale is called Thieving Bastards, in part, perhaps, as a nod to a certain Heineken-owned pseudocider, but making reference also to the provenance controversy which raged last summer and hasn't gone away you know.

It's almost as dark as the brown ale, pouring a deep garnet colour with a beige head. A long way from pale. I don't get much of an aroma and the flavour is surprisingly dry, with a substantial portion of roast. In fact it tastes far more like a porter than a pale ale, with maybe just enough light summer fruit and toffee to tip it into the Irish red ale category, albeit a strong one at 5% ABV. And like most Irish reds, it's pretty inoffensive: the deviance from style is about the only thing I can criticise it for. Perhaps I was too ready to read "American" in front of the words "Pale Ale", where "English, circa 1970" is more appropriate. I queried this with James who confirmed that "ESB" is the style they were shooting for. That makes sense, though it would have been a good idea to mention it on the label.

And finally the totally legit and trademarked Heinoweiser: an IPA of 5.5% ABV. We're staying on the dark side, though this is merely amber coloured. Malt is ahead in the aroma, toffee mostly. The flavour is predominantly sweet too, combining the milk chocolate from the brown ale with the grainy roast of the pale ale. I can barely make out any hop notes at all, which is a bit of a mortal sin in an IPA these days -- there's just a very vague tinny bitterness. The overall impression is of an IPA that's been aged past its best but I know that can't be the case.

My overall impression is that Lough Gill has got the hang of malt all right but definitely needs to put a bit more work in on hops.