Points of order

A rapid catch-up with some beers from London brewery Five Points today. They've been fairly throwing them at the Irish market and I can't hope to keep up. Here's what's in the backlog.

There's a series of single-hopped cask bitters which have been popping up at UnderDog in recent months. The only one to coincide with me visiting was Green Hop Fuggles, and I'm on record as not being much of a fan of this classic English variety, so I was apprehensive going in. I shouldn't have been. It's lovely. I suspect a lot of Fuggles went into this as it's sharply herbal and bitter, to the point of being spicy, and none of the nasty soil flavour I associate most with Fuggles. There's a decently sweet base to balance it, with notes of toffee and fruit candy. I tend to prefer a bit more tannin in my brown bitters, but this one is perfect without it. It's still English bitter with the volume turned all the way up.

I wasn't that impressed by the last fruited pale ale from the brewery, Field Day, back in April. I still took a chance on JUPA when it landed, claiming pineapple and mango flavours on the front of the tin but not listing either of them on the ingredients. I guess we have to use our imaginations. It's a pale hazy orange in the glass, with not much aroma. I braced myself for the wave of fruit in the flavour, but no: exactly like Field Day it's all savoury sesame and caraway; aggressively so, drying the palate and offering only the faintest, distant citrus fruit. Not offensive, but definitely disappointing.

The brewery's fifth birthday saw a slew of collaboration beers land in at UnderDog. I began working through them with the Table Beer, a copper-coloured offering at a daring 2.2% ABV, with Wiper & True sharing responsibility. I got an odd tinny tang from this, like you'd find in a cheap English supermarket bitter at around the same strength. It's saved somewhat by mild grapefruit and a surprisingly rich layer of toffee, serving to make it helpfully thirst-quenching. But that metallic tang kept niggling me all the way down.

I thought I was on safer ground with the Magic-Rock-assisted IPL, failing to notice the formidable 6.5% ABV. It's not shy about reminding you either: there's all the syrupy thickness of a super-strength lager with a powerful, and slightly harsh, bitter finish. "Tropical" said the breweries' description, something I didn't get from it at all. It tasted classically German to me; a weighty, chewy märzen or Dortmunder. I'm sceptical about the India Pale Lager style to begin with, and this was a classic example of the "India Pale" being superfluous.

Good old Belgian Wit, that most reliable and accessible of styles, wasn't going to let me down, was it? This one, aided by Burning Sky, was a middle-of-the-road 5% ABV. But that's where the safe and mainstream aspects end. Witbier generally has a gentle citrus bite; this one was pure meringue pie perfection, concentrating the lemon sweetness into a luxuriously smooth confection. And yet it's not hot or sweet, the dessert aspect giving way to an aperitif (stay with me) full of spicy black pepper, thyme and rosemary. The texture is soft yet light and the combination is a bright and summery zippy homemade-lemonade thing. I have a tendency to fall back on the classics with witbier -- St Bernardus and even Hoegaarden. If you're going to tamper with it, however, here's a masterclass in how.

The most outré of the lot is the Blueberry Sour on which our own YellowBelly collaborated. Deep purple with a cerise head, it lays on the fruit flavour strongly, giving a first impression of fizzy Ribena. It's only 4.3% ABV and is quite thin, but turns jammier as it warms up. There is a real blueberry flavour and a persistent Berliner weisse sourness, so it's exactly as advertised, even if it doesn't do anything very exciting within that.

We finish on a bottle of Old Greg's Barely Wine from 2016. It poured iceman-flat, a hazy dark red colour. There's still a strong aroma: a toffee and sherry buzz that reminds me of English classic Thomas Hardy's. The "wine" part of the name gets a proper outing in the flavour, a raisin and cedar richness, like something dark and red and Iberian. The "barley" bit elbows past that, bring malt's caramel and treacle. A scratch of old-world bitter green hops finishes it off. The sweetness is maybe a little too much in charge, but that's a minor quibble: it's an excellent beer. I fully expect later vintages are worth ageing.

And right on cue, a fresh bottle arrived at a bottle share, via brewery rep Francesca. Though labelled as the 2018 vintage, this was brewed in late 2017. It was very different to the above, starting with the colour: a bright orange-amber instead of wine-red. It showed a zesty, spritzy flavour on top of a toffee base: a bite of satsuma and kumquat. There's much less warmth here, despite the ABV climbing from 9.2% to 12.4, and there's no sign of the classy richness of the older one. I expect that will develop in time, though I can't imagine they'll end up identical. It's tasty now, and likely to remain so for a number of years. Win-win.

One of your classic mixed bags here. At least Five Points can't be accused of standing still.

The Four Pubs and One Offie of Christmas

The 2013 amateur drinking season has been somewhat ameliorated by the arrival of some new seasonal Irish beers. Only one of them has gone all-out Christmassy in its branding, and that's St Cuilan's Christmas Ale by White Gypsy. It is left to the drinker to decide whether this 8% ABV Belgian-style warmer is named after the 7th century founder of Glenkeen monastery, or its brewer the beatific Mr Loughnane. The name is recycled, having previously been used by White Gypsy Ruby at the family pub. Anyway: bananas. Big bananas, ripe bananas, sweet bananas are what characterise this beer. There's no mistaking the strength either: these are warm bananas too. Behind them you'll find some brown sugar and a little manadrin zest. Plain fare, all in all, but clean and not a spiced-up mess.

Recently arrived at JW Sweetman is the 4.6% ABV Sorachi Zuki. Aren't Sorachi Ace hops more of a summer thing? Not really, I was surprised to discover. This is a dark beer, for one thing: almost black. Its aroma is toasty and crisp, like a plain porter or dark ale and the generous addition of coconut means there's a kind of macaroon biscuit opening to the flavour. This is quickly followed by a wall of hops: a wave of pine bitterness first, settling to the signature orange and lemon taste from the Sorachi Ace. As with the St Cuilan, it manages to be festive without any cinnamon sickliness, calling to mind more old fashioned Christmas fare: nuts and satsumas. Err... and coconuts. Anyway, fans of Sorachi Ace will enjoy it; and there's enough other stuff happening for sceptics of the Japanese variety to like it too.

The wintery themes end here, in favour of good quality year-round beer that just happens to have been released recently. Like Farami, a strong coffee and vanilla oatmeal stout produced at the Brú Brewery by Otterbank, a new gypsy brewing operation. I found it on tap at 57 The Headline. The name comes from the type of coffee used, carefully chosen with the assistance of experts at Dublin's top coffee hole 3FE, and it's present in a big way, with the cherry complexity from the coffee actually coming out in the beer. There's even a hint of quality custard from the vanilla as well. 6% ABV and you get the full benefit of that: a massively rich and silky body and beautifully warming. It does a lot of the things that Carlow's excellent Leann Folláin does, but is that bit more complex. A magnificent début.

Sticking with the gypsies, Stone Barrel released their second beer -- the first to be brewed in Ireland -- at WJ Kavanagh's last weekend. C No Evil is a 5% ABV pale ale brewed with Cascade, Centennial and Citra. They had been disappointed with the aroma element in their first beer, but there are no such reservations here: you can smell the pine and eucalyptus from this a mile off. The bitterness is huge and grapefruity, set on a low carbonation for a puckering sherbet effect. Just a tiny hint of digestive biscuit peeks through to make an effort at balance, but really this beer belongs to the American hops and is strictly for their fans.

We finish at home, with a bottle of the new one from The Porterhouse, acquired at DrinkStore. The Devil's Half Acre (a nickname for Dublin Castle) started as an 11% ABV double IPA, boosted by time in a Kilbeggan whiskey barrel to 13.5%, making it possibly the strongest Irish beer in recent years. It pours dark garnet with a healthy ivory head and smells of the world's best cough mixture: bright and sweet, intense unctuous raspberry and cherry. There's a definite wood character in the flavour, dark chocolate, rosewater, and all those cherries again. The ghost bitterness from the double IPA base is still in there in the finish, but the transformation to barrel aged barley wine is pretty much complete. Too hot and heavy to drink in quantity but up there with Thomas Hardy's Ale and Rochefort 10 in the complex strong beer stakes.

Something for everyone in that lot, I think. Unless you like boring beers, obviously.

The old boys

Back here I mentioned that I'd set aside a box of beers for a year or so, just to see what happened to them with a bit of aging. In fact, the box has spent two years in my oubliette, though hasn't survived completely intact. The strong Belgian ale that Barry and Kieron brewed didn't survive last winter (and was delicious); likewise the 2007 Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, so I've started that process again by cellaring the 2008 and 2009 editions.

But the Old Engine Oil which prompted the experiment remains, and last week I nipped in to DrinkStore to grab a fresh bottle for comparison. The young one had the same rather subtle dark fruit flavours as I recall from two years ago: quality drinking, but with nothing really jumping out of it. And the older one was along very similar lines, but there was a noticeable difference. The fruity sourness had rounded out and become somewhat more pungent -- reminiscent of that almost solvent-like flavour you get with super-strength barrel-aged imperial strength stouts, only with half the impact and allowing all the gentle chocolate and coffee shine through as well. This extra complexity means that aging is definitely the way to treat this beer. It won't turn into the world's greatest strong dark ale, but it definitely adds to the enjoyment.

The last Rip Van Winklebrouw is a Thomas Hardy's Ale, purchased from Redmond's in 2007, though dating from the 2003 vintage. The nip bottle does its best to justify a €5 price tag with a unique number, gold foil and some neck bling. It'll have to do better than that, I thought, taking the cap off. The aroma asserted itself immediately -- that rich sweet pudding scent which I got from the fabulous Samuel Adams Triple Bock. With a slightly murky dark ruby colour, the texture is thick and heavy, but there's definitely a light sparkle there, and no syrup or unpleasant stickiness. The flavour has the sweet, yet bitter, yet dry character of crumbly high-cocoa dark chocolate. It's also nicely spirituous, which all adds up to a wonderful cherry liqueur chocolate effect. End-to-end quality and not a single bum note anywhere.

Apart from the question I ask all beers -- "I wonder what that stuff's like" -- the only other question I had for Thomas Hardy's was "Should I buy some more?", especially now that O'Hanlon's have stopped brewing it so there's only a limited supply floating about in Dublin. That'll be a yes.