English spoken here

My third entry from Borefts 2017 concerns the breweries from the English speaking countries: England, Scotland, Ireland and the USA. Not that the beers had anything particular in common but I need to put some sort of order on this, however arbitrary.

It was Cloudwater's first outing to the festival and I expected them to be mobbed, in accordance with their current status at the top of the hype heap in British brewing. And yes there were queues but not really as big as I anticipated, given the size of the event and the profile of the clientele. On a mission to have a beer from every brewer exhibiting, I took my one from Cloudwater early on day two.

NW DIPA Galaxy was the beer in question, 9% ABV, murky of course, and smelling strongly of orange marmalade shred. The flavour is a mix of orange pith and spring onion -- quite harsh and acidic, though offset somewhat by the creamy texture. A faint burr of cardboard creeps in at the end. It's certainly big flavoured, and it hides the alcohol well, but there's a lack of finesse here, a certain roughness crying out to be polished. I wasn't getting back in line for another.

One stand to the right, and attracting almost as much attention, was our own Galway Bay Brewery. Their flower power festival special didn't involve hibiscus for once: Saison Phi was brewed with chamomile, fennel and rose petals. There's not much of the novelty about it, however. Instead you get a rock-solid classic saison, opening with juicy honeydew melon and then turning drier for a poppyseed savoury note, in addition to Belgian yeast spices. All done at just 5% ABV too. Pure quality, no messing.

Also playing the Greek letter game were Brew By Numbers who have a pilot series designated by π. π|10 was pouring here, a pear and ginger saison. I'm unconvinced about pear as a beer flavouring addition: it rarely seems to impart much. This one manages it, however, with a genuine juicy ripe pear sweetness balanced with a kick of fresh ginger. Beneath this is another rock-solid saison, bigger than Galway Bay's at 6% ABV and with a serious farmyard funk. Perhaps not much of a thirst-quencher but interesting, tasty, and not overwrought.

I also had a go of the Bermondsey brewery's coffee porter, 10|10. It's a dense black colour with a deep tan head, reflecting the ballsy 10% ABV. I was expecting something big and rounded but found it rather dry and quite acrid. There's lot of coffee in both the flavour and aroma, however it's all bitter burnt grounds instead of the lovely rich oils you get in better examples. A pass from me.

Weird Beard's strong stout was more enjoyable. They were alternating versions of Sadako imperial stout and it was the rum barrel one when I got to it. It certainly smells of dark rum though the flavour is more of a tiramisu, tempered but not dominated by dry roast. 9.5% ABV gives it a gut-sticking texture exuding belly-warming spirit vapours. Simplistic, perhaps, but it gets the job done.

Their festival special was also a stout, though only 4.2% ABV. Hippy Hating Hippie uses rose hips and cinnamon in the recipe and I had no idea what that would do. The end result is red-brown in colour and, amazingly, does not just taste of cinnamon. There's more of a black pepper quality, with just a faint floral sweetness behind. It is a little thin, but at a forgivable level as it's nicely easy drinking. Refreshing after a round of booze bombs.

Speaking of which, two heavyweight brand extensions from Beavertown next, starting with Lord Smog Almighty on the right, based on their Smog Rocket porter, barrel aged and raised to 12.7% ABV. Putting a heavily smoked beer into an Ardbeg barrel wasn't a great idea. It's insanely phenolic, TCP-laden, like Laphroaig on steroids. Too much hospital disinfectant and not enough beer here.

And if that's too light, there was also Heavy Lord, a blend of their Heavy Water imperial stout and the legendary Three Floyds Dark Lord. 14.5% ABV, so probably one to finish your session on. The flavour is pure dark chocolate: slabs of the stuff, dry and bitter. A gentler black cherry fruit helps lighten the mood and overall it's quite a charming package and far from extreme. I don't know that it's better than the sum of its parts though I liked it a lot.

Flying the flag for Scotland was Tempest whom I almost missed but I grabbed a quick glass of Bourbon Mexicake as I was finishing up. This 11.6% ABV imperial stout does exactly what the name suggests: a dry chilli burn, some sweeter cinnamon and all the sweet cake richness of a moist chocolate muffin. The bourbon element was understated but I was happy it didn't get in the way of everything else.

Borefts fixture Hair of the Dog brings this post to a close, starting with one of the core range: Blue Dot. The brewery calls it a double IPA though it's only 7% ABV. An unusual feature is the inclusion of rye in the recipe though I can't say I noticed its contribution. It has a similar sort of dense maltiness as the other strong beers from the brewery, and while the west coast hops add a spritzy jaffa foretaste, there's an earthy English quality to it as well. For a double IPA brewed in Oregon, it's remarkably balanced and mature tasting, low in bitterness and quite easy to drink.

I couldn't resist getting some Cherry Adam to go with it, a cherry-infused version of Hair of the Dog's old ale. It's blood red in colour and quite headless, smelling as syrupy as it looks. And obviously it's very heavy going; definitely a sipper at 13.5% ABV. It tasted most of all like chocolate sauce, with overtones of cherry liqueur and an edge of soy sauce autolysis. The umami-driven Samuel Adams Triple Bock sprung to mind, a beer I'm very fond of. This is similarly smooth and warming. I couldn't tell you which parts are deliberate and which, if any, were technical flaws; only that it made for damn fine drinking.

One more post from Borefts to go, this one featuring, erm, everyone else.

Thar she blows!

The Session this month includes one of my hobby-horse subjects within its remit. Mr. David J is our host and "Don't Believe The Hype" is the topic he has chosen: does a beer's reputation affect how we perceive it?

Following on from this issue is the whole matter of high profile "white whale" beers: the limited editions and hard-to-finds that plague the beer world. Not that they're bad beers, normally. My experiences with the likes of Westvleteren 12 and Dark Lord have been very positive indeed, but there are plenty of beers out there in the same league that don't have so much of a fuss made about them. The drive that some beer drinkers have to capture the white whales unsettles me a little. The make-it-anywhere-from-anything nature of beer means that the notion of special rare beers is a bit ridiculous, and label-chasing makes beer culture a little less of a pleasant place to be. I find more than an echo of the wine snob about some of the Captain Ahabs I've encountered.

All this makes me a little wary when a new, rare, special, limited edition beer comes my way. Yes I want to drink it -- it's what I do -- but I end up trying not to make a big deal of it, unless it warrants it, of course. The hype ahead of the Franciscan Well's new one was substantial. Like last year's Shandon Century it's a strong-ish stout presented in a numbered 1 litre bottle. The big change this year is barrel-aging. At first the brewery gave no more detail than it was maturing in a cask acquired from the Irish Distillers plant in Midleton. The lack of whiskey specifics left me wondering if Irish Distillers simply don't distinguish between the casks used for their many whiskey brands, or whether the brewery didn't want their beer associated with Jackeen labels such as Jameson and Power's, produced in Cork though they may be. They came clean eventually and Franciscan Well Stout Aged in Jameson Irish Whiskey Casks is the full title: 7.8% ABV in a run of 900 bottles.

It pours out jet black but not thick or gloopy and the mouthfeel has a little creaminess yet remains light and easy-going. The carbonation level is set only little above token, of which I heartily approve. There's not much of an aroma either, but it seems to be mostly a sweet and slightly burnt treacle thing, with just a brief hit of the whiskey vapours if you inhale deeply enough.

Charmingly for a strong barrel-aged stout, it's not a smack in the face on the first sip. A host of flavours line up politely to be appreciated, starting with the dark dry roast, overlaid with more of that treacle and accompanied by subtle honey and vanilla from the Jameson. There's a surprise in store at the end when a fairly generous hop character asserts itself: the big vegetal, almost metallic, flavours I associate with bitter powerhouse stouts like Wrassler's XXXX. The hop tang is the takeaway from this feast of a stout. I wasn't expecting that.

No, it's not Dark Lord, true; and nor is it trying to be. But while it's a wonderful example of what you can do with barrel aging a stout it's not worth obsessing over either. It's barely possible to justify the €12 price tag it came with so it would be foolhardy, in my opinion, to pay multiples of this on the grey market. When it's gone, it's gone: accept it and wait for the next beer.

And by all accounts it may not be around much longer. Bottles have been selling fast in what's already a busy season for this sort of beer. And today offers a rare opportunity to try it from the cask at the source. Only two have been filled and one will be tapped tonight and given away free, and exclusively, to Beoir members. Drop along to North Mall from 8.30 and bring your membership card.

Or you can wait for the second cask, scheduled for public consumption at the Cask and Winter Ales Festival in the 'Well in a couple of months' time (edit: confirmed for 15-17 February 2013). I can't make it along this evening so am planning to be there early for that.

Everybody will be talking about it, after all.

Sahti'll do

Mr Dredge has requested an awardy round-up thingy from the beer blogosphere, and I went looking in my stash for a suitable beer to drink while I performed my deliberations. The one that's been nagging me to drink it for a while now is Nøgne Ø-Dugges Sahti. I recall Knut Albert telling me it's not a true sahti, presumably because of the malt and hops. But such intricacies concern me not. All I'm worried about is how it tastes.

It pours a cloudy, murky orange-yellow giving off some interesting herbal and sticky sugar aromas. The body is very heavy and the first sensation I got was sweetness, leading me to believe that this is somewhat under-attenuated -- perhaps made with bread yeast as I understand is traditional for sahti. So that's the first bit I got wrong: the yeast is a blend of German, Belgian and British strains and is efficient enough to whack the finished product up to 11% ABV. Funny how it's only when I know that that I start to feel the warming sensation.

I didn't even begin to try and identify the flavours: it's sweet like the aroma with a sharp berry undercurrent and a spicy Belgian-yeast finish. The berries are juniper and I'm guessing that at least some of the bitterness -- the grassy sort -- comes from the use of rye, while more is from an exciting-sounding Nordic herb called "sea wormwood". As for the sweetness, part of it must be the big boozy body, but at the very front, and in the aroma, the herbal sweetness is from heather honey. It's great to find another beer like BrewDog Speed Ball/Dogma where honey works harmoniously with the other flavours: just adding that little bit of extra complexity when lots of other things are going on. And Dogma's a heather honey beer too. I think honey quality might have a lot to do with how well it works as a beer adjunct.

I like this. It's a lovely winter sipper and I could write about it all day. But I've got gongs to hand out. So here goes:

Best Irish Draught Beer: Goods Store IPA
The best thing to happen to Irish beer in 2009: a cask IPA with whackloads of dry Cascades. Access is strictly controlled by the Bull & Castle management, but I hope this will continue being brewed in 2010, even though it owes its name to being the last ever batch made at the old Carlow Brewing Company plant in the railway station's former goods store. "Muine Bheag Business Park IPA" doesn't have the same ring, unfortunately, but I'll still drink it. A big hand for its creator Liam Hanlon (right), please.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Clotworthy Dobbin
Yeah, an obvious choice, beating stiff competition from newcomers such as Porterhouse Hop Head and Plain, and Whitewater's own first-rate Belfast Black. But this chocolatey ruby porter is the one to beat. The recipe includes a late Cascade addition: I think a pattern may be emerging here.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Affumicator
Beck Bräu's utterly batshit dreidoppelrauchbock gave me pause when I encountered it in Amsterdam back in September. There's just not enough smoked lagers in the 9.4% ABV category around.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Wädenswiler Hanf
I very nearly made another obvious choice here, and Three Floyds's Dark Lord is very very good indeed. But this award goes to the little Swiss beer that could: Wädenswiler Hanf. So drinkable; so peppery; and a big inspiration to me to get off my arse and start assembling my own hemp beer recipe.

Best Overall Beer: Goods Store IPA
And out of the lot, I'm going for Goods Store, not just because of what it is, but also what it means: hoppy Irish ale was unknown just a couple of years back; cask was something you got up North, at festivals, or from a token handpump in selected Porterhouses. Goods Store -- which flies out of the cask -- gives me such hope for the future of beer in this country. Excuse me, I have something in my eye...

Best Bottle Label or Pump Clip: Zeitgeist
This was the hardest one to pick. I learned to brew this year, and also learned that the best bit of the whole process is designing the labels. Nothing that I'd seen during the year really struck me, as especially brilliant, though the sparse monochrome De Molen branding immediately jumped to mind. But I think I'll give this one to Heather Brennan -- designer of BrewDog's Zeitgeist label. Even I look cool holding one of these.

Best Irish Brewery: White Gypsy
Goods Store isn't the only cask IPA knocking about Ireland, you know. White Gypsy's, though not as full-on, is damn good. However, it's a bit harder to find, what with the brewery's dogged determination to carve out a niche in rural Ireland where the stranglehold of Diageo, Heineken and C&C is strongest. The courage to draw a line in the Tipperary sand, to make and distribute top-notch beer from behind it, is where this nomination comes from.
(Photo courtesy of Laura. Who's currently in Jamaica, so the least we can do is nick her stuff.)

Best Overseas Brewery: De Molen
For consistent wows. Beer after beer of brilliance, to the point where a white label with plain black text turns me into Pavlov's beer drinker. Though I'd like to add an honourable mention for Cantillon of Brussels, whose public brewday in March was one of the best days out I had all year.

Pub/Bar of the Year: The Bull & Castle
A no-brainer. A consistently good selection; the introduction of regular cask beer; the continued tolerance of homebrewers treating the place as a club house. I'm proud to call it my local, even though I have to pass at least half a dozen pubs to get there.

Beer Festival of the Year: Hilden
For proper festival atmosphere it has to be Hilden -- the last weekend in August. This year was better than ever, with an extra bar, more shelter, and a bigger crowd of my beery friends. The Franciscan Well at Easter is the AGM of Irish brewing, but Hilden is the after-party.

Supermarket of the Year: Tesco
I've probably bought more beer in Superquinn than any other supermarket this year. Their commitment to diversity and changing the palate of the Irish beer drinker deserves enormous applause. But Tesco's occasional discounting of Brooklyn Lager has made it the bigger influence on my day-to-day drinking in 2009. Mmm... Brooklyn Lager.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Deveney's Dundrum
A blog; a monthly beer tasting; a forthcoming festival; a consistently wide range of beers. Deveney's has become a regular supplier for me this year, and Ruth's commitment to beervangelism is highly commendable.

Online Retailer of the Year: DrinkStore
Another easy one. Ken and Richard were pushing an open door when they set-up a website through which buyers nationwide can assemble a case of whatever quality beers they want and have it delivered at a reasonable rate. The days when decent beer was limited to Ireland's big cities only are over.

Best Beer Book: Hops & Glory
A daft category, Mark. One beer book has been head and shoulders above the rest. You'll laugh; you'll cry; you'll get very very thirsty. Actually, you've probably already read Hops & Glory. Why am I even bothering? Honourable mention to Ben McFarland's World's Best Beers -- a lavish coffee table job, but well assembled with virtually no filler beers (you know the ones I mean -- the national icons that are really worthless macrocrap) and a great section on beer and food.

Best Beer Blog: Zythophile
I've ticked so many beer bloggers (yeah, I ticked you when you weren't looking; feel dirty now?) that it's hard to separate the blog from the person, so I'm limiting this to beer bloggers I've not actually met, and despite a too-long hiatus, Martyn Cornell is still top of the pile for style and content.

Best Beer Twitterer: @beerinator
The wittiest of the beer Twitterers. Pointing out "Goose Island cask stout is better than you. No offense" is what got me into Twitter in the first place.

Best Online Interactive Brewery:
I'm not awarding this one. Sure, there are loads of breweries doing some great interactive stuff at the moment. But of the ones that make a difference in my normal drinking life: nada. Most have poorly maintained websites; some have Facebook and Twitter accounts where nothing happens for months. Irish breweries are terrible at the Internet, and until that changes I can't think why anyone should be commended here. Must try harder.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year: Bull & Castle Fisherman's Pie with Galway Hooker
Reuben put me on to this one, and I've never looked back. The hot, cheesey, fishy, spuddy, rib-sticking goodness of the pie meeting the chilled, sparkly, bitter bite of the pale ale is classic.

Open Category: Best Beer Town: Amsterdam
I've hit lots of great beer cities this year. York was a fantastic discovery and highly recommended. But it's always going to be Amsterdam for me, for Wildeman and Arendsnest (right) alone. Throw in Bierkoning (whence my sahti) and Cracked Kettle; Gollem and Belgique; 't IJ and BeerTemple; and Amsterdam is my beer heaven. Plus, you meet a better class of drunk in the pubs there.

Next Year I’d Most Like To...: Go to Copenhagen
At the moment my one ambition for 2010 is the Danske Ølentusiaster festival in Copenhagen on 6-8 May. The last one, back in 2008, was unutterably brilliant (and by "unutterably" I mean I went on about it at considerable length last September). I'm well up for that again, and hope that by writing it down here I'll be more likely to do something about organising myself to go.

Which brings us neatly back to Scandinavia. It's possible that my foreign bottled beer judgement might have been different if I'd opened the gorgeous looking Norwegian winter ales Knut gave me a few weeks ago, but I haven't yet. Perhaps they'll feature next year.

Hell, damnation and easy listening

I left out the beer from two breweries from my piece on last week's trip to the Netherlands so I could group them all together here. One of them I visited couple of years back, but the other we showed up to on Wednesday afternoon for a tour.

Formerly based in Amsterdam's suburbs, on the delightfully named Helicopterstraat, De Prael moved to a prime location in the Red Light district in the last year, as part of the city's attempt to clean the area up using something more than a powerhose. The building still isn't finished, with a tasting room no further than foundation level. What's standing is a shopfront, backing on to the small brewery at the rear. The authorities forbid serving beer in a shop, but boozing in the street is just fine, so pre-tour tastings are conducted in the narrow alley beside the building. Offered a beer each by our host, Barry, Mrs Beer Nut, a rather stoned Californian tourist and I picked a selection and shared the bottles round.

De Prael beers are quite distinctive from their modernist labels and odd titles. It turns out that most of them are named after local crooners from the '50s and '60s, and their LPs adorn the shop walls. Suddenly that bottle of Willy (their dark winter ale) isn't nearly as amusing.

But I didn't get to taste any Willy as the chap showing us round failed to offer us some. Selfish git. We made do by starting with Heintje, the witbier. This has a little more yeasty spice than your typical macrobrewed Belgian wheatbeer, a sort of rough hand-crafted quality that's enjoyable within the limitations of the style, but not exactly inspiring. There's also a pale winter ale called Willeke which I found rather boring. It left me even more curious about Willy. My wife the bock fiend went straight for Nelis, one of the typically dark ruby autumn bocks that start to appear this time of year in the Netherlands. Again, it's no barnstormer -- some pleasant sweet caramel as you might expect, a mild warming booziness, but not a whole lot else.

So far, so ordinary. But one De Prael beer did stand above the others, one presumably not named after a loaf-haired warbler: Zwarte Riek. This was on tap in 't Arendsnest and poured a dark ruby colour with a blend of light roasted porter notes coupled with very autumnal smoke and caramel flavours which make it much more of a success as a beer for this season than Nelis.

Workmanlike is the word I'd use to describe De Prael's beers: turning out, for the most part, good but unexciting interpretations of the common national beer styles. Not like the next guy.

Judging by the massive selection of his work on the shelves of De Bierkoning, it's a wonder Menno has time to do anything other than brew (though he did make an appearance at BeerTemple on its opening night). As one might expect, the Wizard of Bodegraven features prominently at 't Arendnest, not least because of the striking stark-but-informative labels on most of the De Molen beers. He's also taken to coating the necks of his capped bottles in wax, à la Three Floyds Dark Lord, and I'm not sure I approve of that pretension.

One scurrilous gossip I met told me that he doesn't make the same imperial stout twice, which helps explain why there are so many of them. The first I had on this trip was Mout & Mocca, flavoured, as the name suggests, with coffee. Even cold from the tap this is highly aromatic with a slight sour touch on the nose. The flavour blends bitterness both from the hops and the coffee with a sugary sweetness which, combined with the coldness, had me thinking of your typically Caribbean sort of strong stout. The sort of 10% ABV black beer you want on a warm afternoon like last Tuesday.

To the waxy bottles, then, and a Hel & Verdoemenis. The aroma gives off powerful sweet roasted promises, like sniffing raw chocolate malt, and the mouthfeel is as thick as one might expect from such a big 12%-er. Flavourwise, where do I start? The boozy vapours are the first thing to hit the palate, and there's a lasting undercurrent of big hop bitterness. The middle flavours are all about coffee roastiness, floating on the alcoholic heat haze -- Mrs Beer Nut's descriptor was "Tia Maria made from finest arabica", and I think that about sums it up. Each sip brings flavours that last forever, so even at €7 a bottle down the pub, this is good value for money.

The tap list in Wildeman advertised a 12% beer called "De Molen Black Jack" but I can't find anything about it on the web. Is it the Struis one? (edit: no, it's just very new. Thanks for the update, Barry) Anyway, this was good stuff: lots of sweet coffee and chocolate -- liqueurish again -- and a bit of phenol, though not enough to spoil it. Very tasty. That leaves just one other De Molen beer, and I moved away from the black stuff for this. Heil & Zegen is a double IPA of a beautiful dark ruby shade. There's no head and the body is thick and almost syrupy -- more of an American-style barleywine I'd have said. But it's very well balanced: no harshness, just a strong herbal hoppiness and a smooth weighty body without any trace of sickliness. It's yet another De Molen beer to take some time over.

And the other beers from this trip? They're still capped and stashed away at home for leaner times this winter. I'll be rationing them out to myself when I feel like a treat. Or run out of things to write about. Whatever.

Welcome! What's in the bag?

Obviously, being a member of the international beer drinking community is its own reward. You meet lots of great people from around the world and you tend to socialise over the best available beer wherever you happen to be. Our opinions on what makes a good beer may vary -- quite a lot in some cases -- but we all care about quality and we tend to recognise it when we see it.

However, I'd be lying if I denied that another enormous benefit is the bucketloads of interesting, exotic, rare -- and often mind-blowingly delicious -- beer I get given free by the people I meet along the way. It just so happened that last week was particularly good on that score. On Thursday night, the Bull & Castle played host to visitors from Chicago in the form of Dave and Deena (members of Irish Craft Brewer and RealBeer.com may know Dave as "Mill Rat"). They'd brought along a goodie bag of beer from their neck of the woods for a few of us to sample and, punctuated by a few of the best of what Ireland's brewers have to offer, we worked our way through them.

We started at Three Floyds of Munster, Indiana. The town is named after a Dutch guy, but that hasn't stopped them from producing a tribute to Ireland's Munster in the form of Brian Boru, supposedly an "old Irish red ale" but a zillion miles from anything made in these parts. It's red, all right, with sweet clean-tasting malt and a rather quaffable disposition (hiding 5.9% ABV) but the dominant feature, unlike most any Irish beer, is hops. Big big fresh citrus hops saturate the air above the beer's surface and the flavour is heavily infused with them. The whole package is really quite delicious, reminding me a bit of the excellent Red Frog from California which a couple of Irish off licences are carrying these days. So these Three Floyds seem to know what they're doing.

We moved on to Two Brothers and their Cane and Ebel. I found this a much bitterer affair, though definitely malt-driven. It took me a couple of minutes to twig that the base grassy bitterness wasn't from hopping, but from rye. On top of the bitter foundations they've built a slightly chewy malt edifice which balances the whole thing quite nicely. Not a show-stopper, this one, but solid, well-made, and interesting.

Last of the pale ales was an imperial IPA by Southern Tier called Un*earthly. Like a lot of the strong IPAs from the US I've had lately, this manages to strike a tasty balance between the high-alcohol (11% ABV) malty warmth, and the big fresh-hop bitterness. Effectively, the citric hoppiness allows Un*earthly to cleanse the palate as it goes, keeping it from becoming difficult. I'd count it as dangerously drinkable, had I not been sharing 66cl with six other people, with no question of opening another bottle.

The second Two Brothers beer of the evening was their coffee porter, Red Eye. It reminded me a lot of the coffee stouts my home brewing friends have made, which is a good thing. The coffee adds an extra dimension to the very dry roasted porter notes, but at no point takes over the flavour: this is still porter first, then coffee. The texture is excellent too: smooth and rather creamy.

We paused for food before the final beer. I'm not a subscriber to the whole bolloxology that surrounds Three Floyds Dark Lord. I think their decision to only sell it from the brewery on one day a year is a bit of a cynical marketing ploy, to be honest, but I'm still glad that Dave took some time out in 2007 to go and buy some. It's a cracker of a beer. You can smell the heady chocolate aromas from the far side of the table once the cap comes off. There's a lot going on in this 12% ABV imperial stout: definite porty notes, more than a hint of chocolate syrup, a bit of sweet dark fruit -- cherries and raisins -- and all based on a thick, gut-coating, molasses-like body. Beautiful stuff. Hardly unique, though. I was put immediately in mind of Avery's Mephistopheles, Djævlebryg's Pride of Nekron, and even Samuel Adams Triple Bock. Nøgne Ø's Dark Horizon is a fair comparator too.

And then it was back to Irish beer until chucking-out time. It was a great evening, and honestly the brilliant free beer was only part of what made it so. I haven't mentioned that Dave and Deena weren't the only Americans with us that evening: Chris and Merideth from TheBeerGeek.com are visiting Wales and Ireland at the moment, and I had a couple of pints with them last week. A brace of fine looking Californian beers have been added to my stash and I'll be getting into them in the near future.

Who says you have to go travelling to get great beer?