The single Irish

Poking around in the back of the fridge for something suitable to post about on St Patrick's Day, I noticed a few long-term residents in there, standalone beers from Irish breweries that I hadn't managed to fit into a post yet. I thought it might be appropriate to bring them together for the national festivity. Of interest (possibly to nobody else but me) is that they're all on the dark and malty end of the spectrum. It sometimes seems like new Irish beer these days is an endless parade of IPAs, but these aren't.

The nearest to an IPA, in fact, is Full Power from Lough Gill, an "extra special bitter" at 5% ABV, making it the third Irish ESB in a row to do the electrical pun thing. I initially suspected some relabelling shenanigans here because the brewery released a beer in the same style, at the same strength, as an Aldi exclusive last year, called Watt. Have they simply taken it in house? Watt's signature feature was a hard bitter astringency, and I'm not getting that here. It's a soft beer, from the cask-like gentle sparkle to the biscuit malt sweetness. The tannins and English bittering hops wait their turn and appear only in the finish. Before that it's chewy and sweet, subtly blending caramel, chocolate and berries into a highly drinkable combination. Proper bitter, then. I like. If it was a deliberate attempt to improve on Watt then it worked.

The punning continues with the next one from Wicklow Wolf, though you'll need your cúpla focal to get it. Another Nut is a pastry stout, channelling the world's favourite chocolate and hazelnut spread. It's fully black though relatively light at only 5.5% ABV. The aroma really brings the nuts: not hazelnut specifically, but also overtones of peanut and coconut, oily and both savoury and sweet. I've never known a nut-flavoured beer to smell so absolutely nutty. That's present in the flavour too, though here it's joined by the chocolate, and I think of Bounty and Snickers bars ahead of spread. It's not full pastry either, delivering a more serious hop bite at the end. They've brewed this to be fun, and it absolutely is, though there's a well-crafted balance in it as well, keeping the sweetness in check in a way pastry stout brewers rarely do. Like the above there's a lot of understated excellence on display here.

The alcohol level steps up a gear with Kinnegar's Brewers At Play 28: Barleywine. They've set this at 9.5% ABV and it's the requisite deep ochre colour. Indeed, it's requisite all the way down. I sometimes worry that "At Play" can mean doing silly things with recipes in the hope of no consequences, but this is absolutely to-style for an Americanesque barley wine and bloody lovely as a result. There's the dense cakey pudding thing, sharply bittersweet red liquorice ropes and a mix of tangy herb topnotes. The body is as viscous as this requires but all the flavours are clean and distinct; the after-effect warming, not hot. It isn't quite the hop bomb that, say, Bigfoot is, but there's plenty to keep you entertained as you sip.

Last in is Valhalla, described by Wide Street as a dark sour ale. It's certainly dark: a deep black/brown shade, and strong too at 9.7% ABV. I can't think of anything from the mainstream or larger breweries designed to be like this. The aroma isn't far from Flanders red: sour with hints of cherry and raspberry. There's a bit more of a stout character on tasting -- it's still sour but there's some chocolate as well. It has a bright and brisk sparkle, so isn't one of those dense and boozy strong sour beers, and hides the alcohol extremely well. It's a subtle and easy-going affair, well balanced and classy, going to no extremes, other than the hefty €8.50 price tag. The oak ageing does its job, though I would be interested to find out how that develops after another couple of years. We'll get some interesting things when Wide Street has a cellar full of foeders.

That's all for now. Enjoy your St Patrick's Day, and any Irish beers it sends your way.

Clearance ale

I'm off on holidays for the next while, which meant doing a bit of fridge and notebook clearing before I went. Here's most of a summer's worth of randomly assorted Irish pale ales and IPAs.

Nasc was a traditional music festival held back in May at which Four Provinces had a beer of the same name. It subsequently showed up on draught in their pub which is where I found it. This is a pale ale of 4.5% ABV, amber coloured and decently weighty for the strength. Fresh American hops, and I'm thinking Cascade in particular, give it an intensely perfumey resinous character, reminding me a lot of Galway Hooker's now-iconic pale ale. It's every bit as sessionable as that one, cool and sinkable but with a long lasting bitter finish. I can see this being perfect for a festival, refreshing and unfussy but also packed with flavour. Only the slightly overdone carbonation would give me pause before going back to the bar for another.

Kinnegar has taken on one of my favourite beer styles, the sour IPA, with Brewers At Play 25. It's a modest 4.9% ABV and a lovely crystal-clear pale gold in the glass. The aroma suggests mandarin segments with a little zest while the flavour opens on a clean and refreshing tartness, with a kind of ascorbic minerality scouring the palate slightly. The vitamin C character continues into the finish with the return of the sweetly citric notes from the aroma. It works well, and I particularly enjoyed the way it emphasised the sourness over the hops. It's nice not to be complaining about breweries using the word "sour" on things that aren't.

I haven't seen beer from Tyrone's Baronscourt Brewing down in these parts before, or indeed at all, but Aldi had one in stock, a pale ale called Not A Flying Duck. It's a Lucozade amber colour and smells sweetly of sherbet and marmalade, very much in the English style. The label says it's slightly hazy with tropical aromas and it's neither, so let's draw a veil over that. I do believe them when they say it's dry hopped with Citra and Simcoe, so I guess it's the weighty roasted malt that covers them up in an effect that used to be called "balance" when such things mattered. The end result here is a traditional, retro, broadly American-style pale ale, with the clean tannins of a British bitter. It's been a while since I've tasted anything like it and it was fun to revisit.

Perhaps someone at Aldi likes a bitter because there's a new commission from Lough Gill as well, in the ESB style, called Watt. It's amber too and piles in the tannins. No pretence at tropical or American hops here: the flavour is very earthy and English. Lighter notes are thin on the ground but I detect a certain amount of summer fruit, some mild strawberry or cherry. Overall, though, it's a bitter bitter -- dry and attenuated, with even the malt seeming muted for 5% ABV. I got through it OK, but I didn't smile much.

For something fiercely modern, here's Hopfully in collaboration with Bullhouse, haze enthusiasts both, with a pale ale called Upstairs. The aroma is a little lacking in this, smelling delicately of sherbet and zest rather than anything brasher. The flavour too lacks hop impact. There's a pleasant lemon-sorbet bite and none of the vanilla sweetness nor garlic oiliness that often comes with these. But there's not a whole lot else. I find myself a little disappointed that it's not awful the way hazy hoppy things sometimes are, but neither is it one of the good ones. One-off collaborations tend to be on the extreme end of the spectrum, because why not, but this doesn't taste like two breweries who do this sort of thing as a matter of course trying to impress each other. If hazy pale ale were a shrug...

Lough Gill travel on the same lines with New Journey, a self-styled "DDH juicy IPA" of 5.7% ABV. No skimping on the haze here either: it's a bright eggy yellow, as I've come to think they all should be. Juice is promised and juice is delivered, from the noseful of freshly-squeezed you get from the aroma to the more intense lemon and lime of the foretaste, leading on to brief but pleasant mango and pineapple in the finish. Full-spectrum juice, this. Alas, that's not all and there's an element of dry and savoury grit which harshens the zing and roughens the zest. It may seem unreasonable to request a clean-tasting can of murk but I know it's possible so I'm keeping to my standards. As is, this is only OK. I don't know exactly where the polish is needed but it could do with some buffing up to really sparkle. Nice try, though. It had me for a moment.

Dublin contract brewer Fat Walrus has invented the "space IPA" style, for reasons of their own. Maybe it's the addition of Galaxy hops which make it so, but it's the reason it's called Galaxy Shmalaxy. It's a heady fellow, taking an age to pour and finishing with an impressive foamy bouffant over a translucent pale orange body. It follows that it's highly carbonated and that interferes a little with the foretaste. When the carbon dioxide subsides there's a lovely bittersweet twist of mandarin peel or orange liqueur, in classy cocktail kind of way. That fades to a dry bitterness which makes for an interesting contrast with a big fluffy mouthfeel, the sort of thing that usually comes with juicy tropical New England-style IPAs, and this isn't one of those. Yet it's no palate-scorching west coast creature either. Instead, it's a balanced presentation of Galaxy at its orangey best. Lovely. If that's space IPA, I look forward to the next one.

Hasn't O Brother run out of ways to make IPA at this stage? I haven't been keeping count but they've got through a lot. The newest is called Social Proof, Amarillo and Mosaic, 6.5% ABV and with a spritz of mandarin in the aroma. Nice. It's not exactly New England style but the mouthfeel is certainly smooth and soft, which is in its favour. No vanilla or garlic in the flavour, thankfully, and instead it has a lightly bitter meringue-pie filling character, finishing swiftly and neatly on citrus peel. It's an understated and unfussy sort of IPA, and I liked that about it. There's a lot to be said for not trying anything fancy.

The dadrock lyrics are in endless supply at Third Barrel, with the next being a double IPA called Coming Through In Waves. Hopwise they've thrown everything at it -- Mosaic, Sabro, Cryo Pop and HBC 630 -- though the strength is modest for the style at 7.8% ABV. It's extremely hazy, the colour of beaten egg with a gritty texture. The flavour has a certain amount of tropical fruit but it's in the ha'penny place next to a big garlic and spring onion twang, as well as a booziness that shows the strength as perhaps not so modest after all. It's not a great example of the style and I think the hopping may have been overambitious. Less garlic, more guava, please.

That's it for now. There was still plenty of beer in the fridge when I left but it'll have to wait until the autumn nights are drawing in before I get to it.