Time bending

It's hard to discern what "Vintage" means on the label of Beoir Chorca Duibhne's Vintage Ale. No information is given on the label, other than it's "warm & dark" and 5.7% ABV -- not even a year, which I thought would have been an essential part of the concept of vintage. I'm fine with warmth and darkness, though. Let's see where that gets us.

The beer is ruby rather than black in the glass and smells a little roasty like a porter but with a forest fruit element, like... no I'll save that comparison. There are no sudden twists on tasting. Cocoa and coffee are the beginnings, a mix of sweet and dry, and then there's a gorgeous yet understated mix of blackberry, red cherry, pipe tobacco and liquorice. The bitterness rushes over the tongue before spreading a candyshop sweetness across the palate.

My first impression, referenced above, was that it tastes like English old ale, a beer style that's very nearly dead and unappreciated by every beer writer except me. It's drier and roastier than the classics (Theakston's Old Peculier, Arundel Old Knucker) but it does share that dark fruit and chocolate character. I love it, and I don't care that "vintage ale" is a bit of a daft name for it, though in fairness old ales are rarely old. It's wholesome, deep and complex, offering the fun bits of porter, bitter, brown ale and schwarzbier without fully committing to any of them. This is a beer to enjoy on its own terms, and I did.

Galway Bay provides us with another temporal anomaly in the form of Counting Off The Days. This is an imperial stout of 12% ABV, and although they don't say it, I assume it's the beer which goes into barrels to emerge later as Two Hundred Fathoms. Since they now make flavoured variants of Two Hundred Fathoms I guess it's only fair that they let us try a completely naked version as well. There's understandably very little of it in circulation (although...) and I have the brewery to thank for sending me an unlabelled can earlier in the year.

It's hella viscous, the bubbles struggling to make their up through the dense black liquid on pouring. They settled to a thick cream-textured head the colour of a nicotine-stained pub ceiling. The aroma suggests big bitterness to come: hot tar, Balkan tobacco and green veg boiled to mush. Yummy. But there's much more than that. The flavour is quite busy, with the green-hop acidity rubbing up against luxurious chocolate and a whole lot of booze. It's fun, but I can tell it's not really designed for drinking fresh. Everything going on needs to calm down and mellow out. It would be very interesting to see what happens when this ages without the barrels. If I see any for sale you can expect it on Stash Killer! in seven or eight years from now. For the moment, it's an interesting curiosity, a precursor to what will likely be a superb vintage of Two Hundred Fathoms, but not something I'm clamouring for the brewery to make into a regular release.

And that's time, everyone. Come back soon.

Out of the West

Presumably to teach me a lesson for my sarcastic tweets concerning the launch of their latest imperial stouts, Galway Bay Brewery very kindly shipped me a set of them just before Christmas. I mean, I assumed it was a mistake and kept them packed and ready for collection until February, but when it looked like the recall notice wasn't coming, I slid the lid off the box.

As well as the three stouts, which I'll get to, there was an interloping bottle of barrel-aged barley wine: Boulevardier. This 13% ABV monster was created in collaboration with Wrocław's Browar Stu Mostów and has spent two years in bourbon and vermouth barrels. A Boulevardier is a cocktail, I had to be told. I'm the wrong person to assess whether it is accurately represented as beer here. It's very nice, though, and 100% beery, not spirituous or cocktailish. The main flavour is malt: treacly brown bread and plum pudding, with a sticky-toffee sauce texture to match. Chocolate of the sort you'd find in good porter or stout is central also. There's a certain wine-and-herb complexity around this, which I'm guessing is the vermouth, and some of bourbon's vanilla, but not too much. In fact it's all very mellow and well-integrated. Despite being mostly quite sweet, there's a lovely dry finish, which is where it resembles a vermouth cocktail most. Overall, it's a beauty, and excellent nightcap material. But I was only getting started.

What caused the stir over the new Two Hundred Fathoms is that it's been a while. Previously an annual release in February, they skipped 2019 while they were moving breweries, then rescheduled the 2020 launch to the end of the year: arguably a more sensible time to be putting out a fancy box set of barrel aged imperial stouts. The 2020 vintage is the usual 10% ABV. The flavour unfolds gradually, beginning with sweet honeycomb, then Fisherman's Friend, strong filter coffee, herbal liqueur, hard caramels coated in chocolate, and pungent French cigarettes. It's a very 20th century sort of combination; the sort of thing you'd drink during a war, at a café in a devastated city: hard, uncompromising, and thought provoking. I prefer something a bit straighter in my imperial stouts, like a proper kick of green bitter hops. This offers something different from that, and very different from what whiskey casks normally impart. The raw and rough seaside-in-winter kept me interested for the whole half litre, and intrigued me regarding what was to come next.

With Two Hundred Fathoms being such a complex beauty, and its ageing potential well-established, I was more than a little sceptical of the brewery's decision to pastrify their stocks of the 2018 vintage. But they did, in two different ways. Reckoning it would be the more subtle of the pair, I first opened the Calendar Coffee: Teamwork Espresso edition. My photography was too slow to catch the head on this but it was an impressively dark shade of brown, for the few fizzling seconds it existed. The beer, its alcohol boosted to 12%, smells vinous and boozy: it has definitely been aged. The coffee is surprisingly subtle, and is actually well within the bounds of what you would expect from dark malt alone. That side of the picture is relaxed enough to allow the mature plum and raisin notes come through. The end result is a mix of strong and roast-forward coffee with softer and warming Pedro Ximinez sherry. I liked it a lot. This is a whole different perspective on the base beer, and allowing the brewery to do the ageing seems like a very good idea.

The second of the set is with Madagascan Vanilla Beans & Toasted Coconut. The visuals are all the same, as is the ABV. However, this one tastes hotter, with a headachey mix of cough syrup and cream sherry. Once again the flavours are well integrated -- I couldn't pick out vanilla or coconut specifically -- but it's not an improvement on either of the less involved versions. The bitter herb effect is there still, but seems to have become harsher, not mellower, nor softer with the added flavours. A half litre of this was the hardest work of the set. It has its own complexity, and it's definitely not a daft novelty beer, but I found it a tough one to enjoy. This is where I thought, again, that leaving it alone to age without bells and whistles was a better idea.

I'm told this is the beginning of a new annual release cycle for Galway Bay. Later this year we'll see the 2021 vintage accompanied by more flavoured versions of the 2020, as well as a different box of unenhanced vintages. Much as I enjoyed the coffee one, it's the latter I'm looking forward to most. Big thanks to the brewery for sending me these.

Baying for more

With Beoir's Beer of the Year for 2014 and a gold medal at Alltech under their belt, Galway Bay Brewery is not exactly short on laurels, but they certainly haven't been resting on them. This last few weeks has seen a new pub, Alfie Byrne's next to the Conrad Hotel in Dublin, bringing the estate to nine. And there have been several new beers.

It was at the opening night in Alfie Byrne's that I met Galway Bay American Amber Ale -- as a child of the pilot brewery it doesn't appear to get a proper nautical name like its full siblings. It's a little on the pale side for the style, more a dark orange than properly red, and it smells of... swimming pools? One mouthful in and my pint was confiscated by the management. Incomplete line-cleaning, it seems. A replacement was immediately provided. This had significantly less chlorine and a lot more mango in the aroma. At its heart is the big illicit buzz of dank hops: funky, oily and all-pervading. It gradually fades to a pine bitterness with a spike of gunpowder spice. This is a serious beer for serious hopheads but its dark malts make it approachable for normal people too. The biggest surprise came some days later when I discovered it's 7.4% ABV. It really doesn't taste as strong as that. Highly enjoyable, but handle with care.

Before the Amber arrived, the Next Big Thing in Irish beer was Two Hundred Fathoms, a 10% ABV imperial stout aged in Yellow Spot whiskey barrels and released in a limited run of just 900 bottles. I'm not familiar with Yellow Spot though am a big fan of its Green brother so this, coupled with rave reviews from other drinkers, had me very keen to get the waxed cap off. (A word to brewers on waxed caps, though: don't). Gloopy is the first impression, pouring like some diabolical combination of Tia Maria topped by Baileys. When the foam subsided I got in for a sniff, finding dry cocoa powder and a non-specific spirituous vapour. The first pull was hard work, intense viscosity meant a beer which put up a fight leaving the glass. Once in the mouth it explodes in several directions at once: there's the definite burnt-toast dryness of classic Irish stout, then the harsh ball-of-malt burn from the whiskey. More comforting dark chocolate follows and is the lasting impression, simultaneously bitter and sweet. My preference would be for some softer floral or fruit notes, but perhaps these will develop with age. More than anything, I'm reminded of Brooklyn Brewery's Black Chocolate Stout. That's the sort of league we're in. For all the weight, heat and complexity, it's actually pretty easy drinking, another feature it shares with Brooklyn Black Chocolate. It lures the drinker in to its dark world, hence the name, I guess.

Alfie Byrne's has dedicated a tap for special edition beers, named "The Vernon", after the pub Alfie himself ran, down on Talbot Street. That'll be the first place I look on future visits.