Flashing the lights and sweeping up

And so we bring down the curtain on 2022 with the year's final post. It wasn't a bad one for me, all things considered, and I was able to get out and about more than in previous recent ones. This was the year beer festivals returned, and I was lucky enough to get to attend them in three different countries. While I tot up the particular highlights, I'm aided by something suitably strong and wintery.

Kinnegar has substantially re-jigged its sweet stout Winterland for its second outing. Now it's gone imperial, with the ABV up at 9% and coconut as the added ingredient. Is that Christmassy? Christmassy enough, I guess. It's thick in the glass, shimmering black under a tan coloured head. The aroma is sweetly floral, suggesting rosewater or cherry liqueur to me. They haven't gone overboard with the coconut, and before that arrives it's a roasty and bitter old-fashioned stout, perhaps more in the Foreign Extra genre than imperial. There's a slightly unctuous quality, giving an early impression of super-strong filter coffee and leaving that as residue in the finish. The coconut makes an appearance in the middle where it's very much dry and toasted rather than fresh and moist. This tones down the novelty factor and complements the dark grain well. Despite the slight severity of the bitterness this fulfils its role as a cuddly winter beer very nicely.

So I am positively aglow as I face into...

The Golden Pint Awards 2022

Best Irish Cask Beer: Brehon Black Hills
Options around Irish cask beer have been severely limited this year and it didn't feature at any of the Irish festivals I went to. On the plus side, JD Wetherspoon has a new commitment to Irish cask, making arrangements with Brehon and Dungarvan to have at least one of theirs on the handpumps at any given time. I've not yet seen Dungarvan's Black Rock stout in the wild, but have had the pleasure of Brehon's excellent Black Hills (aka Ulster Black) oatmeal stout and it really sings in this format. Do not pass it up if you see it.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Third Barrel Funk's Old Brother
This aged Brettanomyces-fermented red ale showed up at the Fidelty festival over the summer where it wowed me with its endlessly unfolding complexity.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Land & Labour Bière de Rhubarbe
Ireland's spontaneous-fermentation guru would be claiming a few spots if this were a top ten instead of single winners. However, this was the one I thought most accomplished of the offerings so far, and was a highlight of the Mullingar Wild Beer Festival where there was plenty of competition.

Best Irish Canned Beer: O Brother Opus One
We have not been short of big stouts this year, with Lough Gill, Larkin's and Wicklow Wolf all releasing multiple versions. Opus One, a 12.5% ABV job given a gentle whiskey barrel treatment, was my favourite of the lot. Everything to enjoy about the style was ably demonstrated.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Eik & Tid Barbar
When I'm compiling these, I try as much as possible not to refer to notes. I'm looking for the memorable ones. This Norwegian sour ale I found on tap at BXLBeerfest was one of the year's showstoppers for me. I don't remember exactly how it tasted, but I remember how it made me feel. A close second place goes to the mighty Keesmann Herren Pils, and drinking it at source in Bamberg was one of my year's beery achievements.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: HORAL Oude Geuze Mega Blend (2021)
I've had a few vintages of this and they haven't all been brilliant. This one, however, was utterly magnificent, even by the standards of high-end oude geuze. A  nine-way collaboration seems like a recipe for watered-down mediocrity but instead they've made something better than I've had from any individual producer.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Hoppin' Frog T.O.R.I.S. the Tyrant
It was fun going through all the B.O.R.I.S. variants back in February, and it isn't often that such a variant would outshine a classic original. T.O.R.I.S. did, though, simply by bigging up what was already there. Fair play.

Best Collaboration Brew: Otterbank/Third Barrel Time Will Tell
Like our Irish Keg winner, this was another heavy red ale given the Brett 'n' bugs treatment with spectacular results. It arrived in April as the first in a collaboration series which then went no further. Was the brew day that bad?

Best Overall Beer: HORAL Oude Geuze Mega Blend (2021)
The fact that I drank this in early January and I'm still thinking about it means it's the obvious candidate for the top prize. I have another bottle too, so you may be seeing it here again.

Best Branding: Larkin's
Brightly coloured cartoons of anthropomorphic animals aren't just a sound financial investment, they also look good on beer cans. I've been enjoying the most recent Larkin's rebrand, especially the action foxes on the imperial stouts.

Best Pump Clip: Ca' del Brado Cerbero
I went through my photos for the year and found very few pumpclip images. It seems cool bars and festivals don't use them much any more. I liked the shaggy purple doggo on this old ale from Emilia-Romagna's finest, however.

Best Bottle/Can Label: Whiplash Chimes
Second year in a row for Whiplash, which I doubt anyone familar with the brewery's can art will be surprised at. Chimes is a pale ale produced for the Bunsen chain of burger restaurants. "Let's put a burger on it, which is also a bunsen burner". Simple, a bit daft, but it amused me and that's what counts.




Best Irish Brewery: Galway Bay Brewery
I'd be prepared to give them this on foot of the return of Märzen To The Fire alone, but we also got new Two Hundred Fathoms, a West Coast IPA that actually means it, a bunch of stouts and some fun tinkering in the broad Belgian farmhouse genre.

Best Overseas Brewery: Moersleutel
The Dutch brewery graduated from one whose beers I enjoy when I find them to one I actively seek out. It was all imperial stouts until this year's Borefts Beer Festival where I tried a double IPA they'd made and it was at exactly the same high standard. They're occasionally available in Ireland, if you want to find out what the fuss is about.

Best New Brewery Opening 2022: Original 7
This was a tough one. 2022 has been much more about breweries closing than opening. We said goodbye to Metalman and St Mel's, and are watching with concern as Eight Degrees slips into a zombie half-life while the stupid multinational that acquired it tries to find a buyer. There have been rays of light, however, especially up north, but nothing that I've actually been able to drink. I haven't had any beers from Cork's Original 7 either, but I'm giving them the award for what they represent: the spirit of independent brewing after Molson Coors has come in and absolutely trashed the brand you built previously. Let's hope for something similar for Eight Degrees.

Pub/Bar of the Year: Foeders
It has taken me far too long to find my way to this geeky heaven in Amsterdam, very much one of those for-people-like-me bars. An excellent beer line-up and lovely service. If they gave the floor an occasional sweep it would be nearly perfect.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2022: UnderDog @ The Legal Eagle
"Will it / won't it" was the talk of Dublin's beer scene since version one shut up shop during the throes of the pandemic. Consequently there was proper elation when Dublin's only beer-first pub found a new home, where the winning formula of constantly rotating high end beers and first rate service has been reinstated with more legroom and actual windows. Most pleasing of all is that fact that the regulars are back and once again we have place to pull up a barstool and set the beer industry to rights with whomever is there to listen. There was a late contender for the title with the arrival of Fidelity on Queen Street just last week. More about what's going on there early in the new year.

Beer Festival of the Year: BXLBeerFest
So many great candidates but I'm picking this one because it was the most me of them. The range of beers and breweries wasn't the biggest, but there was a theme of wild and funky running through it which I wasn't expecting but valued hugely. The atmosphere was upbeat, the seating was plentiful and at the end you got to go drinking in Brussels. If all that seems like the kind of thing you might enjoy, stick it in your calendar for late August.

Supermarket of the Year: Polonez
There wasn't a whole lot of special interest beer at my usuals, but I did enjoy the occasional foray into the eastern European supermarket chain for exotic items, mostly of the lager variety.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Mace SCR
I usually go in for something specific and come out with a bag bursting at the seams. Serendipity, thy name is the Mace on the South Circular Road, at the back gate of James's Hospital.

Online Retailer of the Year: Craft Central
Can't argue with the numbers here: I bought more beer from Craft Central than anywhere else in 2022. The system is simply too easy: new beers arrive, they go up on the website, I order them and pick them up next time I'm passing. There's a slight premium to be paid for the convenience but it's very much worth it to me.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: none
I usually award this one by default for the single book I read during the year, but I don't even have that for 2022. A symptom of wider malaise in the beer publishing industry? Nope, just me being bad at reading.

Best Beer Blog or Website: BeerFoodTravel
April was the only month that Liam didn't have a new post for us, which counts as prolific in beer blogging these days. It's all great stuff too, meticulously researched and entertainingly written. This Golden Pint is very much a personal token of appreciation for the effort that goes in.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: @alldoomandgloom
In-jokes are the best jokes; the more specific and audience-tailored the better. Ross gets to them faster and better than I do. I don't know how much longer I'll still have a Johnson to give, but for now it's his.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: @PilotBeerUK
They last collected this one from me in 2016 but they're still at it and it never gets old. I don't get to drink their beer and daft tweets is the second-best thing a brewery can produce.

There. That'll do for 2022. I have a generalised bad feeling about what 2023 will bring to the small and independent brewing sector in Ireland and abroad so I'll sign off with a wish of good luck to all who may be affected.

Green and black

Always one for smashing national stereotypes, I'm writing about Irish stouts this St. Patrick's Day.

As it happens, there's a plethora of them about. When I started planning Monday's general Irish beer round-up I noticed the black seam running through it and decided to separate it out. And here we are.

For two of them I didn't have to even move barstools in The Black Sheep. A pair of their cask beer engines were dedicated to stouts, one of them an intriguing collaboration between our own Trouble Brewing and prize-winning Danish brewers Coisbo. Coalition, apparently, is mainly destined for Denmark and is a milk stout with added vanilla, at 5.6% ABV. It goes for chocolate in a big way, bearing a strong resemblance to the excellent Porterhouse Chocolate Truffle Stout which itself has just made its annual return to the taps across the Porterhouse estate. Coalition adds in a full-fat milky wholesomeness, in texture as well as flavour. It's a long time since I last came face to face with a bowl of Coco Pops, but this beer really went Proustian on me. Searching for the vanilla turns up a custardy crème brûlée lacing running through it. There's a deft bit of balancing going on here, between the childishly fun dessert effects and an elegant, silky-smooth drinking stout. I thoroughly enjoyed all of its aspects.

One pump to the right there was Ulster Black, a new oatmeal stout from Monaghan's Brehon brewery which also turns out the excellent Shanco Dubh porter. The aroma had me expecting another chocolate bomb: a huge sweet and creamy hit from the get-go. But, bizarrely, there's none of that on tasting. Instead it wrong-foots the drinker into a serious burnt -- almost carbonised -- bitterness, tasting purest black with notes of tar and coal dust. Once I was over the initial shock I found a warm blanket of oatmeal in behind, offering a kind of porridge or Ovaltine winter's day comfort. Nobody will mistake this for a kiddie's breakfast cereal: its pleasures are very much grown-up ones.

JW Sweetman, meanwhile, has been tearing through a batch of cask Stout lately on its shiny new beer engines. The sparkler is optional (I went without) and the beer is pretty much much bang-on for an Irish session stout. A tweaked version of the Barrelhead Dry Stout first produced in 2014, this retains a dry, crisp, dark roast smacking the back of the palate, but up front there's an altogether more cuddly chocolate and coffee flavour. And then a surprise pinch of light sourness which I can only (but shouldn't) describe as Guinnessy. While deliciously complex it is, gloriously, not a sip-and-consider beer but one to be poured into the face in quantity, as our grandaddies intended, post-1961 anyway.

And finally, the coup de grâce and pièce de résistance: O'Hara's Imperial Stout, brewed to celebrate the company's twentieth birthday. I'm sure you all remember my post about their tenth anniversary stout exactly, err, eight years ago today. I never thought that there'd be an event for the twentieth, and certainly not that I'd be speaking at it. But so it was on Tuesday evening, in the venerable surrounds of Neary's, a panel discussion on stout in general and O'Hara's in particular, ably hosted by Wayne and including founder Seamus and head brewer Conor. We got the first taste of the beer, so fresh that the bottles weren't quite ready for uncorking so emergency large bottles from the brewery were substituted in. At its heart, O'Hara's Imperial is a typical Irish stout: there's the classic coffee-like roasted dryness right in the centre. Its prodigious 10% ABV is noticeable most in the warming vapours of its aroma. And the hops have plainly been piled in as a green, slightly metallic, tang finishes the flavour off. However the different flavour elements don't quite gel together, or at least not yet. I think this will age nicely and should be in fine form by the time we celebrate ten years since the tenth anniversary beer was released. A cask of this is due to be tapped up tomorrow evening at the Irish Beer & Whiskey Village in the RDS. The blending effect of cask serve on the flavours will have a positive effect, I reckon, so give it a go if you see it.

For my part, I'll be at the festival this afternoon, just as soon as I've shovelled an enormous fried breakfast into myself. All in the spirit of the day, of course.