What's indie box?

Indie Beer Week was back! After a one-year hiatus for obvious reasons, the independent brewers' annual profile raising celebration returned in May, centred around a series of online meet-the-brewer events hosted by the boundlessly energetic Brian of Craic Beer Community. To give his liver some respite, I co-hosted one of the evenings, which got me the accompanying tasting pack, including a few that were new to me.

Pre-event, I popped open Hope's Summer Seasonal 2021: Hazy Session IPA. This is a teeny 3.6% ABV, and I think the lack of substance may have affected the head retention, as there's none really. It's wanly, waterishly hazy under the level top and seems rather lifeless by appearance. The aroma is good, though: brightly tropical lychee and passionfruit. While yes it's a bit thin and a bit flat, it has plenty of flavour too. There's less of the real fruit in the taste but it's replaced by a jolly Skittles-and-Starburst candy vibe up front, with an oilier dank bitterness arriving late and providing a finish that's far from watery and even gives a little burn in the back of the throat. I don't want to overstate things, and it is a long time since I last had any cask beer, but this has a bit of a cask ale vibe, with that level of complexity on a low-strength base. Hyperbole aside, easy-drinking summer quaffer? Yes, job very much done.

My other sneaky preliminary came from the opposite end of the scale. Golden Ticket is a purported 90 IBU double IPA from Black's of Kinsale, 8.2% ABV and claiming pineapple flavours but doing it with hops rather than fruit. It's quite a deep orange colour in the glass, with an aroma that says pineapple candy or syrup to me rather than the real thing. It's reasonably thick without turning cloying and the heat is minimal considering the strength. Hopping dominates the flavour, as one might expect, although it's bitterness first: a tongue-numbing aniseed or fennel effect. The sweeter pineapple arrives late and is respectful of what went before. This double IPA is no silly Wonka confection but serious and well put-together: one to sip and appreciate.

At the event itself there was the first Dead Centre beer I'd had in ages: Across the Pond. The brewery describes this as an "American wheat ale", something that used to mean something like a weissbier but with neutral-tasting American yeast but now signifies lots of hops in quantity and, in this case, a neutral-tasting American yeast as well. Citra, Amarillo and Mandarina Bavaria are the hops, bringing a classic grapefruit pithiness with a long finish of oily citronella. The wheatiness is minimal and I felt it could have benefitted from a fuller texture and better head retention. The pay-off is that it's only 4.5% ABV, placing it in the sunny-refresher category where it has an edge on many others, thanks to that generous hopload. A few pints of this on the Dead Centre taproom deck would be very decent.

The last new one for me came courtesy of Trouble Brewing. The house IPA they brew for P. Mac's, Vietnow, is a perennial favourite. It got a bigger brother called Bombtrack in 2017 but it wasn't around long and I didn't get to try it. Now they've brought it back in a slightly more modest form, reducing the ABV from 8.7% to 6.9%. It still packs a punch, however, being a dark amber colour and quite heavy-set. A red strawberry sweetness combines with drier tannins to form the base, assisted by a sprinkling of peppery rye. The hops add a different sort of dryness: earthy and a little vegetal, in that old-fashioned west-coast way. Sierra Nevada's Torpedo and Kinnegar's Rustbucket both came to mind as I drank it, and I'm sure the brewers won't be offended by such comparisons.

A big thanks to Elisabeth from the ICBI, and Brian, for including me in this year's Indie Beer Week festivities, and not least to Liam and the BeerCloud.ie team who shipped me the beers. Until next year then!

Drumming up business

On a free weekday afternoon in early January I took a spin up to Dundrum. I stopped by Deveney's off licence and also had a swift Vietnow in the new P. Mac's attached to the shopping centre. But the main reason for the excursion was to try a few of the exclusive beers pouring at Brickyard.

The house beer is called Brick Red and is brewed by O Brother. Red ale at 4.2% ABV is not, I'm sure, intended to induce yelps of amazement, and indeed this doesn't. It is pretty good though. There's no cheap watery thinness and certainly no clunking sugary toffee. While sweet, that comes from a fresh strawberry and raspberry flavour, finishing cleanly, aided by a soft soda effervescence. Solidly sessionable and accessible house beers are something I associate more with pubs taking a chance on one independent draught option so I found it a little odd that there's one here among the 23 other taps. I'm sure it has a following with the regulars, though, and might even persuade them to explore further.

Brickyard seems to be a kind of unofficial brewery tap for local brewer Priory, and had exclusive rights over Priory Red IPA, their second release. This was created via the we-got-the-wrong-sort-of-malt-by-mistake method of recipe development. It's more of a dark orange colour than actual red, and I didn't get any redness in the flavour -- no toffee or caramel, and no summer fruits this time. Instead there's a beautifully juicy mandarin foretaste, followed by a pinch of caraway seed in the finish. It's another smooth-textured one too, very easy drinking for the substantial 5.9% ABV. Two good red beers in a row: what are the odds?

A final new tick for me was Snakey One IPA by Bog Hopper in Donegal. I haven't been impressed with their beers so far, but this one was getting good press so I was prepared to give it plenty of the benefit of the doubt. Alas it suffers from the same rough dirty quality that most of the rest of the range do, like they've been homebrewed without proper temperature control or maturation time. It is mostly clear, so certainly isn't murky soup, but I got a nasty twang of rubber in the foretaste, burying what little citrus character it had beneath it. While I can't pinpoint any specific technical flaw it just tasted not right, and especially not for an IPA.

Should you happen to be out Dundrum/Balally way, Brickyard is a must. I'm probably the last beer drinker on the southside to point this out.

The gaze of Janus

Hidden Agenda joins Graffiti and Vietnow in Trouble Brewing's OMG All Teh Hopz family of pale ales, this one at the 4.5% ABV mark. Australian varieties Vic Secret and Summer are providing the show here but it's not really one of those soft tropical fruit jobs you often get from Aussie hops. Prepare yourself instead for a major blast of fresh, sharp citrus and pine resins. Only in the finish is there any more rounded fruit taste, a swift suck on a mandarin but nothing more. I assume some malt has gone in here from the orange colour but I couldn't taste its presence: it's actually a little watery at its heart, especially when arriving cold. Still, I welcome the clean zippy hop bang and hope they make more like it.

White Gypsy's cask winter seasonal is a big 5.7% ABV dark ale called, appropriately, Dark Night. There's lots of chocolate in here but it's not overly sweet and, while rich and warming, doesn't taste all of its strength. When acquired fresh in The Brew Dock there was an extra bitter bite in the background, for a sort of Wrasslers effect. I couldn't be sure if it was generous hopping, a yeast bite or even an immature greenness I was tasting, but it added an extra dimension to the flavour, one which was gone a few days later when the pub was clearing the cask for the Christmas break, leaving behind some unseasonable but tasty strawberry sweetness.

And across the Galway Bay pub estate we're starting to see the appearance of Heathen, a 3% ABV sour black wheat beer. I've got through a lot of this since it first appeared in The Black Sheep: it's light and clean and super quaffable. The puckering dark vinegar tang is shocking at first but once you've settled in to it the flavour and high carbonation make for a refreshing oxyclean scrub for the palate.

The last of the new breweries to send beer out in 2014 was O Brother in Wicklow. They made sure I got some exercise by keeping the two first-run beers on opposite sides of the Liffey in L. Mulligan Grocer and The Norseman. Believe it or not the two glasses of The Fixer here presented were both poured from the same keg within seconds of each other. It's described as an American Red and it's very bitter: green cabbage and metal, plus some chewy toffee. There's more of a strong English bitter feel to it, I thought, than anything stateside. The cloudy version was actually a little softer, though still rather acrid.

I much preferred their pale ale The Chancer. Startlingly pale and with every right to claim the "'n' hoppy" that goes with it. Bright fresh lemon zest is the principal flavour; malt sweetness steers it towards candied peel, though it does build, becoming a bit piney floor cleaner by pint's end. Overall, a very good quality effort and it will sit well alongside more established luminaries like Metalman and Black's of Kinsale pale ales.

Irish brewing is in fairly good nick, then, if this lot are anything to go by. The current renaissance in international beer styles, starting in 2006 with Galway Hooker, is well documented. But it's the story of Irish brewing before that that I'd love to see told, in answer to Alan's question for this month's session: What beer book yet to be written would you like to see published?

I remember, and drank, the Irish craft beers of the early 2000s, and have seen tantalising glimpses of the extinct breweries which dotted the country in the previous five centuries through the work of Barry, Martyn, Ron and others. But while I'm sure all the information is out there somewhere, and that there are plenty of wonderful stories to be told, nobody has yet taken the time to write a properly wide-reaching history of Ireland's beer. I'd even settle for Dublin's.

In general I'm quite happy with where we're going in this country. I'd just really like to know more about where we've been.

No rest for the ticker

Irish Craft Beer Week is upon us once more as the nation girds its collective loins for the craftquake that is the Irish Craft Beer and Cider Festival, now in its fourth year at the RDS Industries Hall, from Thursday.

To whet your appetite for that I thought I'd run through a few of the recent releases from Irish breweries. Bear with me: this may take a while.

The Porterhouse's Pale Ale Festival ended in late July but nobody seems to have told Eight Degrees who had yet another beautiful hop monster on tap at the Temple Bar branch -- and several other pubs besides -- shortly afterwards. Simcoe Rye Ale is the latest in their single-hop series, 6% ABV once again. It's a hazy dark amber colour and the aroma offers a heady cocktail of grassy rye and weedy, spicy hops for the overall effect of a summer meadow on steroids, or getting your head stuck in a pile of damp lawn cuttings. First in the queue on tasting is a dry and punchy bitterness, sharp at the front and then with a longer resin finish, plus just a modest burst of juicy mandarins coming into it as it warms slightly. Behind these is a dense crystal malt base, though the caramel sweetness is felt more than tasted, if that makes any sense. It's a sort of heavy smoothness and brings balance and drinkability to what's an unmistakeably intense hop-forward beer.

International booze behemoth C&C invited me to the launch of their first Irish beer, Clonmel 1650, brewed at the plant best known for turning out the world's supply of Magners. They rented the entirety of swish Dublin superpub The Church and packed it to capacity, adding insanely loud music for extra atmosphere. Still, two free pints is two free pints. First impression of the first pint was of a very dry lager, the flavour evolving into an earthy, mushroomy, dusty, musty unpleasantness. I guess that's why they gave us two. The second was better, with more of a fruity estery vibe, though still pretty dry. Already in C&C's portfolio there's Tennents, Staropramen, Heverlee, Stella Artois and Beck's Vier. Regular drinkers of any of those will find little to surprise them here.

Clonmel 1650 will not be available at the RDS this weekend.

Before the 1650 gig I dropped into the nearby Twisted Pepper to try a new house beer in their Brewtonic series. I missed the first one, brewed last year at 5 Lamps, and this new one came from Rascal's (here's the official making-of blog post). It's a golden ale utilising Magnum, Summit and Cascade, and they've called it Relax the Cacks, for summer and that. It arrived very cold, which I was glad of that particular July evening, showing a slight craft haze in the gold. There's a sweet nectarine aroma, powerful enough to almost pass for Belgian. You get a massive whack of tropical fruit on tasting: peaches mostly, some pineapple, a bit of mandarin. The body is full enough and there's sufficient alcohol heat to keep the Belgian thing in mind, with definite elements of the first-rate sort of Belgian blonde ales. I got the impression it might start to get a little sticky if allowed to warm but there was little chance of that on this occasion.

The Brewtonic guys also had a bar at the first Big Grill barbecue festival which happened in Herbert Park a couple of weeks ago. As well as imported beers, it was serving some welcome leftovers of another one-off that Rascal's did for them, for a different event earlier this summer. Brewtonic Belgian Wit, said Rascal Emma, is a close relation of their own Wit Woo but utilises a little extra Munich malt. Wit Woo is fairly big on the citrus orange notes and while there are definite echoes of that here, this one drops the bitterness levels and adds in masses of extra soft and fleshy tropical fruit, mangoes in particular. There's a small burn of sulphur and the coriander spice levels are low, but they're really not missed with all the juice action going on. An ideal outdoor summer beer, this, and the festival wasn't long in being cleaned out of it. Brewtonic's boss says they're planning a brown ale next. It has a tough act to follow.

Rascal's doesn't have the monopoly on house beers for yoof-oriented Dublin pub chains. The Cassidy's/P. Mac's/Blackbird group have commissioned their own from Trouble Brewing, a 5.5% ABV pale ale called Vietnow. I explored it sitting among the junkshop furniture on Blackbird's terrace. This hazy dark orange beer smells very dank with heavy sandalwood notes as well. Expecting a dense resinous affair I was very pleasantly surprised to get a burst of mandarin on the first pull followed by a dankness that only comes from fresh hops in quantity. There's a thick mouthfeel and lots of that incense-like spicing. While a certain amount of resin lingers late, most of its hop action happens right up front. It was created as a cheaper alternative to Punk IPA, though at €5.40 a pint in Rathmines it's not exactly going for a song. Much as I enjoyed it, I felt my fiver in the Twisted Pepper above was better spent.

Meanwhile, under their own brand, Trouble have released Oh Yeah!, badged as an "American Black Ale". It's an inky black-brown colour with a fairly sedate aroma of spiced oranges and crunchy green veg. It's lightly textured with lots of prickly fizz, something that complements the spicy bitterness which is the centrepiece of the flavour. There's little by way of fruit complexity, in marked contrast to Eight Degrees's recent Vic Secret, instead it's veg and spice all the way. The dark malt contributes a little bit of chocolate and a little bit of roast, but not huge amounts (in the keg version at least; on cask it's understandably smoother and richer). At 5.8% ABV my liver felt somewhat cheated by the lack of complexity, but it's still a very tasty beer, and at just €5.10 in Against the Grain, my wallet was of the opinion that my liver could shut the hell up.

More pint action tomorrow, including a couple of brand new breweries.