End of the year content filling

Thank you to Alan for the title. And so, once again, it's time to take stock of the year in beer just gone, using an increasingly irrelevant template, last revised in 2013. Changing it now would be akin to re-making Dinner For One in colour HD -- completely missing the point. As usual, deliberations are aided by something from the fridge which is hopefully a bit special.

This year it's a Chardonnay barrel aged wild sour ale from Wide Street, called Réserve Spéciale. It's had two years in the casks and poured a bright golden, almost completely clear. The aroma certainly shows off the wine, and very much that Chablis Burgundy dry fruitiness. The oak is perfectly integrated into this, just like with good wine itself, and there's no tacked-on vanilla or butteriness. At only 5.4% ABV it's light-bodied and crisp, refreshing even, its flavour opening with an immediate kick of Golden Delicious apples, tart gooseberries, soft kiwi and real white grape. More typical oak vanilla arrives late, but doesn't last long, and it finishes on a light saltpetre spicing of which I would have liked more. The fruit is almost at the level of a grape ale, and I commend this in particular to my fellow lovers of that style. In the 75cl bottle it makes for an excellent special occasion beer, and ideal for proselytising the wonders of wild fermentation and barrel ageing. But there's only one special occasion on my agenda today. Time to get on with...

The Golden Pint Awards 2024

Best Irish Cask Beer: Hopkins & Hopkins Sitric
It's a beautiful pale ale, no question, but this award is in part for what it represents: it was the first beer to show up on the revived cask handpump at The Porterhouse on Parliament Street, and it has been a regular there ever since, though occasionally time-sharing with Lough Gill's beers. Neither The Porterhouse nor H&H needed to do this; it's totally out of keeping with trends in Irish pubs and beer, and I've never seen anyone but me order it. But it is massively appreciated by this drinker and adds a wonderful bit of diversity to a beer market that can feel a little samey betimes. A Golden Pint is the least I can do as a gesture of gratitude.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Otterbank Oíche Mhaith
It's probably a lot more common bottled than draught, and the keg which went on sale at UnderDog in February was doubtless a rarity. Nevertheless it counts, and I don't see any reason why 9.4% ABV vatted porters can't be sold on draught in Irish pubs as a matter of course. Everyone just needs to grow up a bit.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Beoir Chorca Duibhne Leann Láidir
Honestly, the headline beer on this post is a contender, and I'm only having my second glass of it now. But on mature reflection, West Kerry's barrel aged rye porter was the Irish bottled beer that best delivered the goods for me this year. That was back in June, so finding it may be difficult at this stage, though I bet it didn't sell quickly and that there are still bottles to be had.

Best Irish Canned Beer: Third Barrel Hello Yes
Maybe it's because I'm quite jaded about IPAs in general, and that's what most canned Irish beers are these days, but it was a struggle to find a stand-out winner in this category. The one I picked is an authentic-tasting Czech style pilsner, though you'll have to wait until next week for my review. Take my word for it, however: cans of this one are still readily available and well worth picking up.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Uiltje Pomme Pressure
I'd say I drank close to a thousand different beers in 2024, though only a handful of them taught me anything new. This dark barley wine aged in Calvados barrels had a very special flavour profile and one that has stuck in my memory as distinctive and delicious. That's enough to mark it out for an award.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Den Herberg Geus Genereus
After a sizeable hiatus, the Toer de Geuze happened for me again this year, and included plenty of beers and breweries I knew little about. The specification of this complex geuze caught my eye from the brewery's temporary festival bar and delivered absolutely all of the implied complexity. Up top, I said that I would have liked more spice in the Wide Street beer. This one had spice enough for both.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Metalhead Metalworks
In the summer I went to Bulgaria, and while the beer I found there often wasn't the best, there were some stand-out moments. Those produced by a group of heavy metal fans on the edge of the Black Sea (possible beer/album name?) were among the most memorable, in a positive way. Metalworks is a barley wine with figs, dates and spices, but pulls off the trick of tasting balanced and integrated while still being a playful novelty beer. They compensated for the frustratingly tiny can with a huge and brilliant flavour. 

Best Collaboration Brew: Sofia Electric / Põhjala Väga Suur
And I'm as surprised as you are to find another Bulgarian beer at the races this year. In fact, this was originally picked for best overseas bottle, but with an absence of other suitable collaboration beers among the year's highlights, it made more sense to slot it in here. It's another complex barrel-aged barley wine which has been skilfully blended to create a unique drinking experience. Bulgarian brandy barrels get filed along with Calvados as ones to look out for. 

Best Overall Beer: Metalhead Metalworks
I look at the eight champion beers and try to think of the one that made the strongest impression on me; the one I can still taste and react to, just by reading its name, and that's the Metalheads of Burgas this year.

Best Branding: Kestemont
Back to the Toer de Geuze, and a visit to a brewery I'd never been to before, nor tried any of their beers. Kestemont has only been going since 2022 and doesn't try to pretend to be a vintage institution making old-timey beers. The branding is clean and modern, though also conjuring a more primitive age, for example the woodcut-like dashing hare on their Oude Geuze.

Best Pump Clip: Fat Cat House Ale
I remarked at the time that the house bitter at The Fat Cat in Sheffield is better than it needs to be, and the artwork on the clip is also a cut above. I don't know if it's based on a real cat or, if so, if said cat actually wears a monocle. I just enjoyed his stoic reaction to the shite Yorkshire weather, as seemingly rendered by Frank Miller. 

Best Bottle/Can Label: Lacada Out On A Shout
Lacada cans are always beautifully designed, but the one that stood out for me this year was a beer I've never had, a pale ale produced as a fund-raiser for the RNLI and making wonderful use of the beneficiary's particular turn of phrase. There's something about how it brings the reality of lifeboat work to the prospective beer purchaser that made it instantly memorable to me. Maybe I'll get to drink it at some point.

Best Irish Brewery: Galway Bay
While the company's pub end took something of a battering through 2024, the work done by the folks on the production side has been excellent. They've cornered the market in Irish-brewed Catharina sours and also rocked the dark and strong styles with Baltic porter, pastry stout, doppelbock and imperial porter of superb quality. And the schedule has been delightfully relentless, with new beers for me to try at The Black Sheep every few weeks. Throw in some excellent lager, which they did, and that's nearly everything I want a brewery to do.

Best Overseas Brewery: Dok
I had some fantastic beers at this Ghent brewpub when I visited last month, particularly the cherry and grape ale, and the black IPA. They narrowly missed out on the individual beer prizes so I'm happy to award this one for their output collectively. Their whole approach is cheerfully upbeat, and the creativity is matched by the quality of their beers. 

Best New Brewery Opening 2024: Smithfield Brewing
I mean, the beers aren't brilliant, being very much designed for mainstream pub-goers at the venues run by the brewery's owners. Rather, this award is for the project: the return of brewing to the old Dublin Brewing Company site in Dublin's north inner city. It looks like they're planning to open for visitors, being centrally located not far off the tourist trail with a bar just inside the entrance. And the old redbrick soap factory they're in is a lovely bit of Dublin's historic industrial architecture. In short, there's a lot of promise, and I hope to see it realised in 2025.

Pub/Bar of the Year: UnderDog
Ho hum, right? Where else would a thirsty person go for a quality selection, constant turnover, and an opportunity to rub shoulders with the cream of Dublin's beer geekery? UnderDog is the place and that's all there is to it, really.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2024: The 108
Strictly speaking this is a change of management rather than a new opening, but enough changed after Galway Bay vacated their Rathgar footprint that I'm counting it as a new opening. While there's a more mainstream appeal to the offer these days, there's still a good choice of quality beers (hello Kinnegar), and getting that out in the D6 boondocks is a rarity to be treasured. I'll throw in a most honourable mention for Bier Draak in Norwich which opened in May this year. It's an extension of the Sir Toby's market stall, but with worthwhile innovations such as a roof and a toilet. The beer list is impeccable.

Beer Festival of the Year: Borefts
It's been a while since De Molen's two-day shindig has troubled my Golden Pints, and nothing much has changed with it in a few years now. But it's my call, and I had a wonderful time at this year's gig. I'm sure the great weather had a lot to do with that, and the fact that I missed last year. It's still a bit overcrowded and some breweries are overly fond of making punters queue for timed special releases, but mostly it works brilliantly, the exhibitors are well chosen and the whole thing is a quality affair. I'm looking forward to next year already.

Supermarket of the Year: Lidl
This year, it's an award for reliability and dependability. Aldi had the turnover of beers, but I bought more in Lidl because they have such solid reliables on the shelves permanently: fridge-fillers like their Crafty Brewing IPA and American Brown Ale, but also modern classics including Little Fawn, Scraggy Bay and Rustbucket. Grabbing a handful for a weekend of unfussy drinking has become a regular habit.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Molloy's
Specifically this goes to the Francis Street branch which has done best at offering me beers that I didn't see anywhere else, and all without having to go outside the canals. Yes, your Martin's and your Redmond's and your Blackrock Cellars have better ranges, but for the convenience/price/selection criteria, Molloy's on Francis Street covers things best.

Online Retailer of the Year: Craft Central
And Captain Obvious's Retail Recommendations continue here. Just as UnderDog is the place where gobdaws like me sit in to drink, Craft Central is where we get our cans of whatever was just released or imported. I don't (often) touch the stupidly expensive ultra-rare imports, because haze is haze and they don't make it magically better in Illinois or wherever, but CC has a proper devotion to Irish beer and even stoops to selling Irish breweries' bottled beers on occasion. As well as this award, I present them with the encouragement to do more of that sort of thing.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: The Devil's in the Draught Lines
We have two books in contention this year, but I think the prize has to go to this wide-ranging, deep-diving and wonderfully person-centred account of women's place in the beer world, past and present, commissioned by CAMRA and written by our own Dr Christina Wade. It's a story that needed told and a document that will stand witness for future writers on the subject.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Belgian Smaak
My runner-up book was Breandán Kearney's Hidden Beers of Belgium, which is genuinely excellent, so I'm very happy to award this equally prestigious Golden Pint to Breandán for his website. Output isn't exactly quickfire but the quality is worth waiting for. Claire Bullen's delving under the skin of Brouwerij Boon, and Breandán's own telling of the Eylenbosch/Boerenerf saga, were literally my two favourite pieces of beer journalism I read this year.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: @articnead
I think Simon would have been quite happy for us to include Bluesky under the remit of this award now, and although I'm doing that, and Sinead does have an account on The Nice Place, this is still mostly a Twitter thing for probably the last time. Our winner does a marvellous mix of nordie snark, righteous outrage and old-school good-time bants, often within the same 280 characters, and generally gives proper vintage-era Twitter vibes, the way Bluesky is supposed to but doesn't. I very much doubt she reads this, so you can pass on the good news for me, Sean. Thanks.

Best Brewery Website/Social media: Ballykilcavan
And also in the fractured social media space, we have Ballykay shining a light of positivity, interesting happenings, more righteous outrage, and fleeces, into the swirling maelstrom that is today's beer internet. More Irish breweries should be telling us what they're up to and what's on their mind via a held up phone in a working brewhouse. Casting a new Cleo the spaniel will be a tough task, however.


Is that it? Have we only 25 categories? Cuh! I could have gone on all year. Congratulations to all 2024's deserving winners, and shame on you who got nothing: you've seen the bar, now get planning how you'll raise it. Me, I'm still very slowly getting through the tail end of 2024's Irish beer releases. You can expect opinions about them arriving here well into January. No rush with whatever you breweries have in store for us in 2025.

To the sea

The final segment of my Bulgarian adventure brought us to Nessebar, a cutesy and well-preserved mini city on the Black Sea coast. It's well preserved by the strictures of UNESCO, though increasingly encroached upon by the towering holiday apartments of the neighbouring resorts.

It's a small place, and opportunities to drink interesting beer are very thin on the ground. There's only really one outlet: the beer shop which I think is called Shark, but it doesn't have that written anywhere, only a carving of a shark above the door. A sign above it says "You Need A Beer" and it seems to be occasionally known as that too. It's very much a shop, bordering on a stall, open onto the street with fridges on one side and shelves on the other. But they have a portable draught system for three beers, and barrels and window ledges you can stand and drink at. In the absence of anything better, it serves.

On the one occasion of drinking there, I picked the stout called Kom Emida, a 6%-er from a contract brewer in nearby Burgas, called Beer Bastards, a name which deserves to be consigned to the same early-2000s bin as "Punk IPA" and "Evil Twin". It poured worryingly headless and a dark brown colour. Despite lacking foam, there was a certain gentle sparkle going on, and the flavour was quite proper. Dark chocolate gets together with thick espresso, leading to dark dry toast in the finish. It's a little thin, especially given the strength, and some creaminess would have set it up beautifully. As-is, and visuals aside, it's a workmanlike stout, and all the better for showing up in a part of the world where I would not expect such a thing to be pouring.

I had another of theirs, back at the hotel, courtesy of the Shark. The beer is called Opasen Char, which apparently means "Dangerous Charm" -- the name of a famous Bulgarian film of the 1980s. It's an IPA of 6.6% ABV and was knocked down to a bargain price even by local standards as the best-before date had just passed. That doesn't seem to have done it much harm. It's still a rock-solid IPA, broadly in the west-coast genre, amber in colour and fairly clear with it. The flavour is a bright mix of succulent jaffa oranges and spritzy lemon zest: simple yet delicious, and the sort of profile that made hoppy American ales famous in the first place. Quite a low carbonation and a weighty texture give it an attractive smoothness and make it very easy drinking. This, and a generally low-key bitterness, lend it some shades of New England, though it's neither as sweet nor as fluffy as they typically tend to be. Despite the high-concept art and too-cool thin 33cl can, it's simple and approachable, and very enjoyable for that. I don't know if it's being phased out, or is simply out of season, because this sort of beer should be a cornerstone of every independent beer scene.

The latter might be the case because I also found Opasen Char Summer Edition, which has a different coloured can to the regular, though I couldn't figure out what other differences there are. It's still an IPA, still 6.6% ABV and still a mostly clear and a medium amber colour. I didn't drink them side-by-side, but I thought that maybe this one, despite being fresher, had more malt going on. Zesty marmalade, dank resins and a whack of toffee or caramel were the principal players. Early double IPAs did all this, although this is quite a bit more modest in strength. It's certainly not a double IPA to taste, low-balling the alcoholic heat and adding a clean crispness to the malt side which underplays the toffee. The hops are still singing, in a deep and slightly sticky baritone: jaffa rind meeting piquant peppers over a warm mixed-herb gravy. It is at once fruity and savoury; enjoyable and exceedingly retro. Even avowed west-coast practitioners tend not to make IPA like this any more. The kids might complain, but this old-timer got a rare taste of when beer was exciting and a bit scary, something the Americans since taught everyone else how to do. Putting a bit of piney funk into your IPA may indeed be dangerous these days, but it's also very charming. Fair play.

The same brewer, with a similar look, makes Basi Kefa, a white IPA. It looks a bit orange for that, and the writing on the big-art, poor-information can doesn't show enough to tell me what it actually is made from. Nothing suggests anything different from ordinary IPA, though: an aroma of peach and mandarin is followed by a flavour along very similar lines, offering posh and highly-sugared cloudy lemonade and a slightly harder bitter grapefruit skin on the end. The only "white" bit I got was that there's a touch of herbs -- coriander and basil -- right on the end, but I would be fully prepared to believe I imagined them. This is a perfectly cromulent 6.7% ABV IPA, in the American style, with nothing fancy going on. If they've added wheat and herbs to make it into something else then they haven't really taken, and that's not a problem for this drinker. It does the job and doesn't try any silly tricks of the sort that make white IPAs too often taste soapy and savoury. This is IPA first, and "white" maybe, if you squint and turn your head sideways.

From Sofia brewer Alchemik comes Cherry Amaretti, one of those supposedly sour but actually sweet beers, though one which incorporates some of my favourite flavours. It's a deep shade of scarlet in the glass, and smells of an ingredient which isn't advertised in the name but is mentioned on the can, tonka beans: that sweet and spicy mix of chocolate and cinnamon. There's less of that in the flavour, where the billed cherry and Amaretto almond really do pop, suggesting cakey dessert, fruity cocktails and a little extra serious sourness as well. While sweet and quite thick, it's only 7.5% ABV, and the brewery deserves credit for keeping it so modest -- it stands to the beer. I don't think one could mistake this for one of the lesser "sour" fruit beers. It's been thought out, trialled and errored, and optimised for the drinker. I do like finding a novelty beer that's been done properly.

Along similar lines, the brewery also produces a beer called Peach Bellini, one containing actual sparkling white wine among the ingredients. It doesn't look attractively cocktail-like, being a murky orangey brown without a proper head. It's no quaffer either, at 8.5% ABV and soupy thick, much like all those other fake-sour fruit beers. This is very much in that genre, and exactly as not-sour, with peach syrup as the main feature. At least we're spared any lactose vanilla. And... and few sips in, I think I found the wine too. There's a certain oak character telling us that at least part of it has spent some time maturing in a wooden container. That's nice. That makes it a little bit of a cut above the usual; just a shame the usual is so very poor. I did like the wine element. Alas, you probably need a much more liberal excise regime than we have to make that possible here.

Bulgarian craft beer still has bottles. Imagine! The aptly named Sans Changement is from Bulgarian contract brewer Dunav but actually produced just across the border in Greece. It's an India Pale Lager and has a bit of a homebrew look -- bottle-conditioned and fairly murky as a result. Happily, the flavour is completely clean, if not very lager-like. The hops are fresh and citric, at a bitterness level somewhere between lemon rind and grapefruit flesh, but there's quite a hefty malt component which makes me question (a little) the cool-fermentation credentials. Not that it's a bad beer by any means, but don't come to it for crispness; that's not on offer here. The finish is a little on the quicker side than a typical pale ale, but otherwise it's pretty much one of those. Dunav, and the people it pays to make its beer, do seem to know what they're doing, however.

Ready comprehension of beers wasn't much of a problem for me, but I was stumped by this next one at first, thinking it another Dunav beer because it's in a half litre bottle and was next to it on the shelf. It's not, though. This is CH IPA by Trima i Dvama, whom we last met back in Plovdiv. It's a 7% ABV job, very much in an old-school American style, and a bit rough with it, shot through with yeasty dregs a-go-go. The aroma says toffee and marmalade while the flavour piles in unsubtle lime, grapefruit and pine in an  oily way that's all about shock bitterness with no regard to freshness or zest. This is American IPA made by people who have never tasted fresh American IPA -- a frequent problem in a global industry that depends on products being consumed close to source for best effect. It's not unpleasant, and I would guess this has changed the perspective of more than a few nascent Bulgarian beer fans on what's possible once you get away from yellow lager. It's all good from there on in, right?

My last, desperate, sweep of the shelves at Beer Shark in Nessebar yielded several cans I didn't get to drink until I came home. The Peach Bellini was one; another was Pelta's Can-Ye-West, a West Coast IPA, of course. This tied together the trip neatly, being a collaboration between Pelta/Hopium over in Plovdiv but also the High Five bar back in Sofia. It's a dark amber colour with a generous head, which is lovely, and massive gobbets of yeast bobbling through it, which is less so. The aroma is mostly sweet, but piney resinous too, channelling perfectly the dankbro IPAs of our youth. The hops go AWOL on tasting however. There's an initial rush of jammy summer fruit but right where the hard citric bitterness ought to kick in, there's a blank space. At the end there's a wisp of dry tannins and a little cedarwood spice, and that's your lot. I applaud that the floaty dregs didn't interfere in any of this, but dammit I wanted hops. This has mastered one side of the classic US IPA formula, but totally neglected the other, equally important, one.

The big finish brings us all the way back to Sofia Electric, and one they made with Põhjala, called Väga Suur. This barley wine is born of of a 12-hour boil and blended from batches which were six-month-aged in brandy, rakia and virgin Bulgarian oak barrels. Hoist the green, white and red! It's 12.5% ABV and a mahogany brown in the glass. There is a reason that breweries tend not to use fresh oak, and this smells of it. It's a sappy, syrupy sweetness that shouts over the top of anything else. I could still smell a little cherry-liqueur fun behind it, but would liked to have had more of that. The flavour is better balanced, and while the oak and fruit are still there, they meld together nicely. It's viscous and sweet, and there must have been a temptation to go big on the hops to try and balance that, but they didn't, and I think it's a better beer for it. On top of it all there's a sprinkling of dessicated coconut, making the whole thing taste and feel like some idiosyncratic eastern European dessert. It's quirky but absolutely excellent. In this run-through of my experiences in Bulgarian Craftonia the tone hasn't always been upbeat, so it's nice to finish on a high note.

From Nessebar it was the big schlep 400km back to Sofia, and then home. But I haven't told you about all the fizzy yellow lager they have in Bulgaria, and that's much more useful information than all this fly-by-night craft stuff. Come back to me on Monday and I'll tell you all about it.