Very new, very normal

The latest pandemic-related comeback is The Session, the monthly beer blogging jamboree that ran from 2007 until it sputtered out in 2018. Session enthusiast (in all senses) Al has resurrected it and asked how we're all getting on in the age of Covid-19 and how it has affected our beer-drinking lives.

To be honest mine hasn't changed hugely, other than missing the handful of times a week I would be in the pub, and spending much less time hunting down beers in the off licences of Dublin. It's a bit weird not to be planning a trip somewhere too, but the less said about that the better.

No longer doing the daily commute has changed one thing, though. I found myself still needing the border between work and home life that my twenty minute cycle provided without my realising it. I have filled the gap with beer, making a habit of drinking just one serving of something undemanding immediately after closing the laptop for the day. In the beginning this was Manislav, Tesco's very decent and very cheap Czech-style lager. On a subsequent supply run to Aldi I substituted Rheinbacher, though they only had bottles. I found I just didn't enjoy them as much as the canned Rheinbacher I remember. The working hypothesis is that twist-off cap: I suspect it's not as good as it needs to be to keep oxygen out. When the first six-pack ran low I staged a blind test against Manislav and was quite surprised to find bottled Rheinbacher my favourite of the pair. And so it was back to Aldi, where I was ecstatic to discover the cans were back. So that's me committed to a daily Rheinbacher for as long as this whole thing lasts.

I'm still getting ticks in, of course. It's very strange to be trying a new Porterhouse beer at home rather than in in one of their pubs, but here's two of them.

Session Pale Ale has inherited the branding palette of the late Hop Head IPA. There's a certain resemblance in the liquid too: a clear amber colour, not quite as dark as Hop Head but darker than its replacement, Yippy. A sharp grapefruit bitterness is the centre of the flavour, with a slightly soapy lemon twang after it. Belma has been used, alongside Amarillo and Centennial, but I couldn't detect its signature strawberry flavour. It's light but not thin, and after that initial jolt of bitterness there's very little follow-through. This is simple and straightforward, and perhaps a little old-fashioned with its west-coast sensibilities. The name isn't an affectation: it is very much built for the session; easy-drinking without being bland, and only €3 for the half-litre bottle. There's absolutely nothing to stop you from opening another bottle if you are so minded.

But I had another Porterhouse beer to tackle, their pandemic theme beer Stay Home, badged as an "isolation IPA". Juice is promised here, via El Dorado, Enigma and Ekuanot. It's only slightly hazy and again a dark orange colour. The aroma isn't juicy but it is sweet, with a fair whack of vanilla in there. The flavour is better: tangerine and satsuma in the foretaste, buoyed up by the big texture. It gets a little sickly in the finish -- the revenge of that vanilla effect -- but it's only 4.6% ABV so once again the finish is quick and it doesn't get cloying. It's an interesting counterpoint to the previous one: a similar strength but lacking the pointy C-hop edges. I don't know that it's better, though. I found myself craving a bitterness kick that was never part of the deal.

Yeah, pale ale is fun and all, but neither of these are candidates for my every day beer. I fully intend to surf out the crisis on a wave of Rheinbacher.

Year-end pints

This month makes it ten years since Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg suggested categories that beer bloggers might like to use for an annual run-down of the best in beer. I've stuck with it steadfastly since, even if I do change my criteria for the winners each year, and sometimes during the process of writing that year's entry. It's not meant to be taken seriously or considered meaningful, is what I'm saying.

2019 has been a dramatic year in beer, in Ireland and abroad. To mull it all over I've chosen something with a bit of wintery heft: Abbaye de Vauclair Biere Ambrée, a large bottle I picked up for loose change in Lidl. They're not lying about the "ambrée", it's a very ambrée hombre indeed: a beautiful clear polished-copper colour with a generous head which expertly laces the glass. I wasn't prepared for how sweet it is; it is extremely sweet, suggesting treacle, muscovado sugar and similar cake-baking ingredients you're not meant to eat raw. I was a few sips in before I noticed the balancing factor: a dry and slightly bitter tannic twang, which I'm guessing has both a hop and malt component. It doesn't stop the sugary onslaught but it does make it manageable, rendering the beer drinkable as a result. The sum total is a beer that's quite light-bodied for 6.1% ABV and tastes like a cup of very sweet cold tea. I quite liked it, but it's not one you can rush, which suited my needs perfectly. And so...

The Golden Pint Awards 2019

Best Irish Cask Beer: Porterhouse Yippy IPA
The decision to replace heavy, resinous Hop Head with pale dry Yippy was not without controversy. For the record I still miss HH's clean punchiness. To begin with, I treated Yippy like a newborn younger sibling, resenting its usurpation. It was some months later that I first encountered it on cask at Porterhouse Temple Bar and finally got it. I suspect the brewery has sneaked a Yorkshire bitter onto the Irish market dressed as an American. On cask it has that same blend of honeyed pale malt and waxy hop bitterness. It's clean, elegant, moreish and generally a fiver a pint. 5% ABV is a bit too high for a proper guzzlable session beer (bring back TSB!) so you have to pace yourself, but the result is very rewarding.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Land & Labour Coolship (2018)
The sour and the funk may become a bit of a theme in this year's edition as some Irish brewers are getting extremely good at this sort of thing. This one, sampled at this year's Hagstravaganza, was damn near lambic-grade and a very clear indication that local brewers are approaching that standard. There was also a blueberry version showing just how easy it is to mess up something this delicate. Steer your Coolship straight and true, and everything will be OK.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Wide Street Saison Sunday
It's their only bottle, but still the best beer they've released so far. I reviewed it here only a couple of weeks ago, but I hope I can avoid accusations of late-year bias by pointing out that I drank relatively few bottled Irish beers this year now that the can is king. I can see this category becoming the purvue of barrel aged beers. That said...

Best Irish Canned Beer: Wicklow Wolf Pointy Shoes
The canned Golden Pint has to go to a dark beer as we have had a slew of worthy examples from various local breweries in recent months. Larkin's Morrigan, White Hag Festa Nuda, Lineman's Astral Grains and Wicklow Wolf's own Apex and Locavore all deserve a share in this prize. But Pointy Shoes, brewed to mark Wicklow Wolf's fifth anniversary, and as the valedictory beer from the Bray premises, went beyond what any Irish stout barrel-ager has managed to create thus far.

Best Overseas Draught: Ca' del Brado Û baccabianca
Chasing the grape ales has become a travel pastime for me, one which doesn't always land great beer. I hit the jackpot in Billies in Antwerp, however, with this one from Emilia-Romagna. Ca' del Brado is a brewery now firmly on my drink-on-sight list.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: 3 Fonteinen Cuvée Armand & Gaston 2018
Every year should involve ticking a few things off the list, and I was happy to realise an ambition I'd had since the 2017 Toer de Geuze to go to 3 Fonteinen's tap room on an ordinary day and drink some beer there. And I did, and it was this, and it was very impressive. How much of that was down to the occasion? Who cares.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Crooked Stave Sour Rosé
I had to go all the way back to the start of the year to dig this one out. It's another super-complex mixed fermentation job, this time from the US. And it's permanently available in, among other places, the 4-for-€12 fridge at Stephen Street News. You're in a much better position to argue with me about this one than the previous two, but you have to buy it first.

Best Collaboration Brew: Jackie O's/Cycle Anything And Everything And Nothing At All
The runaway standout beer at the Fidelty beer festival during the summer. You think you've tasted everything that's possible to achieve with barrel-aged imperial stouts, and then along comes this. Fascinating and delicious in equal measure.

Best Overall Beer: Û baccabianca
I know. I'd love to have given this to something local, or to something readily available, but I look back on the finalists and think of my reaction to first tasting each of them, and this was the one that induced the cartoon-character-in-love effect. A-wooo-ga!

Best Branding: O Brother
The brewery's Off The Wall series of collaborations with graffiti artists began last year and has now clocked up two dozen beautifully designed cans.

Best Pump Clip: Five Lamps Tilted Drum
I liked the badge Five Lamps came up with for the Convention Centre's house beer, blending the building's distinctive shape with a beer keg.

Best Bottle/Can Label: YellowBelly Bushido
Well of course it was going to be a YellowBelly one. In picking a pastiche style for this black IPA, artist Paul really excelled himself. The beer was pretty damn good too.



Best Irish Brewery: Third Barrel
This was a tougher call than usual, with quite a few breweries doing amazing work. I'll save a special mention for Larkin's who've had some real stunners coming out especially in the latter half of 2019. But Third Barrel has really been putting the graft in. This year was the first time I found beers to impress me released under their Stone Barrel brand: Slammer and Awesome Sauce in particular. Third Circle's Needs More Cowbell and fruited Brett IPA were highlights, and then all the hyperactive hop activity under the Third Barrel label itself, as well as launching The Format, Pleasuredome and other client brewers. I'm exhausted just writing it down. I hope the pace is sustainable.

Best Overseas Brewery: Tilquin
Our dalliance was brief, but I had a lovely couple of sessions at the Tilquin blendery during this year's Toer de Geuze trying all their various experiments. They've never struck me as a particularly playful producer and perhaps it's the market that's pushing them into doing new things. Regardless, they're generally very good at it, that maple syrup lambic notwithstanding.

Best New Brewery Opening 2019: Wide Street
The promise of this all-wild-fermentation brewery in Co. Longford is enormous and the beers, in general, have been great so far.

Pub/Bar of the Year: La Venencia
Since I first visted this Madrid pub in 2009 it's been a firm favourite. I was actually apprehensive on going back last October, for fear it would disappoint. It didn't; it's still amazing. The best feature is that it doesn't serve beer, only sherry, so I get to put my notebook away.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2019: BrewDog Outpost Dublin
I've only been once and I haven't written about it yet, but I respect the sheer commitment of BrewDog in taking on 1,100 square metres of bar and restaurant space in the Dublin docklands and adding an in-house brewery to it. It's a big place and big things are expected.

Beer Festival of the Year: Fidelity
As usual I feared the worst: big queues and braying edgelords. But Ireland's first all-inclusive beer festival, organised by Whiplash and The Big Romance, was quite chilled in the end. There were lots of amazing beers and, if you didn't spend too long chatting, it was quite easy to get one's money's worth.

Supermarket of the Year: Fresh, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7
It's not what it used to be though I have found myself increasingly coming back to the beer section here, often finding things I couldn't source anywhere else. Supermarkets in general seem to have done away with continuously updated beer ranges -- it mustn't have been sustainable for anyone. Fresh is clinging on, though. Turnover isn't as rapid as you'd find in an independent, though I rarely leave empty-handed.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Redmond's of Ranelagh
I always have to make a special effort to go over, but it's always worth it. The exclusive beers created with DOT are what tipped it into the winners' enclosure for me this year. Shouts-out, of course, to my regular haunts DrinkStore and Stephen Street News.

Online Retailer of the Year: The White Hag
They sent me a free case to test their website, which was nice. It arrived very quickly after I ordered it, which was also nice. And the beer was good. Other than that, I had no cause to buy beer online this year, as usual.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Pierre Van Klomp Says No: Life, Death and the Meaning of Beer
Another default award this, being the only beer book I read this year, and that was in ten minutes over breakfast on the morning it arrived. It's still a beautifully put together piece with evocative photos as well as earthy Belgian wisdom. Thanks to Pierre's literary agents Boak & Bailey for sending it to me.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Food For Thought
You may have noticed the occasional snarky morning tweet from me about the drinks industry. And the occasional genuinely interesting industry news story. Many of these are fuelled by the daily email from FFT, so this is just by way of thanks to the team there for all the hard work they do collecting and presenting Ireland's hospitality news.

Simon Johnson Award For Best Beer Twitterer: @BeerFoodTravel
Liam has been a bit quiet on the long-form front recently, but his snippets of Irish brewing history throughout the year have been enlightening. He takes a good beer photo too.

Best Brewery Website/Social Media: Galway Bay Brewery
I don't think I've ever given the pub taplists on the Galway Bay website a nod, and they deserve one, even if they're not always up to date (has somebody lost the keys to the Against the Grain page?). The Black Sheep is generally spot on, I get a Twitter notification when something new is tapped, and I find that very useful.


And that's another year over. Thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.

Simply not cricket

We the drinking public were saved the horror of a year without the Irish Craft Beer Festival via the good offices of the Leinster Cricket Club in Rathmines. The event which had been hosted in the lavish surrounds of the RDS since 2011 was scaled back and placed in a big top tent on the lawn. The last-minute arrangements meant that the selection of beers and breweries to choose from was... let's say manageable. There was still a great atmosphere and a proper buzz about the gig.

My first port of call was to Rye River who were launching beer four in this year's limited edition series, a spruce-tip saison with the questionable title of Just the Tipple. You'll have to excuse the darkroom effect of photographing beer in a red tent on a sunny day. My first impression of this harkened back to the previous one in the series, the orange lager, because this too is hella orangey, in a cool, smooth and refreshing sort of way. The spruce arrives late, leaving a spiky pine residue in the finish. It's not the most complex saison ever, and is a little overclocked at 6.5% ABV, but it's enjoyable nonetheless.

Local outfit Priory had brought along their fourth ever release, and the first that isn't an IPA. Plenary Indulgence is a porter of 4.5% ABV. There's generous dose of brown malt in here, along with the black and chocolate varieties, and that lends it a wonderful richness, beginning with an alluring coffee aroma, which extends into mocha and cappuccino in the taste. A crisp burnt-toast blackness finishes it on a dry note, balancing the sweetness nicely. As presented it was a little undercarbonated, being perhaps not quite ready for sale, but it'll have matured by the time you read this and is well worth checking out.

It was also beer number four for Bridewell Brewery, all the way over from Clifden. This is their Kölsch-style, and I was confused as to why they've done a second top-fermented yellow beer when their flagship is a top-fermented yellow beer. A helpful side-by-side cleared that up: Bridewell Blonde is in an English style with some Belgian trimmings, rich with honey and flowers. The new one is dry and crisp with some wholesome autumnal red apple and caramel. It's perhaps a little warm and fruity for true fidelity to the Kölsch profile, though the basics are definitely there.

O'Hara's was centre stage, of course, and new from them is 51st State Session IPA, a 4% ABV version of their 51st State New-England-ish IPA at 6%. If the original is quite distant from NEIPA (it is), this is even further out of sight. It's dry with a sharp bitter snap and a dank oiliness. I was reminded a lot of the standard O'Hara's IPA: that strong, almost harsh, hop kick. This one certainly packs in a lot for the modest strength.

Another vintage Irish microbrewery and another new IPA. Yippy is set to be the replacement for Hop Head after ten years of loyal service. It, too, is 5% ABV and it's very dry. There's a saliva-stripping chalk effect and a green asparagus savoury quality. I found it all a bit too severe and unbalanced. I will miss the richness of amber Hop Head when it goes.

That leaves just the token foreigners. Brewdog had a full bar at the event and went all out for stout. I began with their Small Batch Maple, a 7.5%-er. "Sweet" barely begins to describe it. The maple flavour is extremely real and extremely prominent, given an extra sugary caramelised edge. After the initial glucose explosion there's a richer toffee and brown banana sweetness, and a smoky complexity creeps in as it warms. It's not a subtle beer by any means but I enjoyed it.

Keeping it pastry but scaling up the alcohol, there's Mallow Mafia at 12% ABV. The nerve-jangling sugar is here joined by nerve-jangling coffee notes: concentrated ristretto at first, turning to warming and wintery Drambuie in the finish. The coffee also brings a strong enough roasted bitterness to hold the sticky sweetness in check. The marshmallow is present but not prominent, which is probably for the best. This imperial stout is all over the place like a clown car and it certainly entertained me.

The Carlow Brewing bar included offerings from the company's subsidiaries and imported ranges. My last one was Wild Beer's Funky Dory. This is a Brett-fermented pale ale, 5% ABV and pouring a bright gold colour with an aroma of white grape, turning to purest Champagne on tasting -- the same mix of luscious fruit and clean crisp toastiness. A peach and pineapple tang slips in behind this adding a wonderful complexity. It's perhaps a little thin, with the flavours crammed together instead of roaming free on the palate. I loved it, though: it's a beautiful example of what Brettanomyces can bring to a beer.

Naturally there was an Urban Brewing tap on the Carlow bar too but I didn't partake, having just been to the brewpub quite recently. Before this week of Irish beer posts ends, I'll lever those beers in here.

The name of Pilsner Vol. II implies that they've made one previously, though I must have missed it. This one is 4.7% and a perfectly clear shade of gold with a fine white mousse on top. A vinegar aroma set alarm bells ringing, however, and this proved an accurate warning. The main taste is the clean and sharp tang of white spirit vinegar. Around this there's a smooth and creamy texture and flavours of crusty bread and celery, all of which are hallmarks of truly great pils. That vinegar, though. Let's drop that from Vol. III please.

All the lagers come at once, it seems, and pouring alongside was Urban Brewing Oktoberfest. The deep orange colour had me expecting one of those horrible syrupy American versions of the style but it's actually pleasingly subtle, bringing light golden syrup, white pepper and crisp burnt caramel set on a perfectly autumnal chewy and warming body. There is a slightly nasty marker-pen phenol note in the very finish, but the good sides do more than enough to outweigh it, and the end result is as moreish as the style is meant to be. While not quite up there with the mighty Eight Degrees Märzen of 2012, it's not far off either.

Finally, it looks as though the big sack of lemon verbena that Urban acquired for its summer IPA is still not empty. The herb got another outing in a Lemon Verbena & Sage Saison. This is a murky yellow colour and a sizeable 6.4% ABV. A dry straw flavour forms the base, built upon by green oily sage and a floral meadow perfume with a green peppercorn spice in the finish. It's a fun combination, and while it may come across as a little medicinal, it's in the wholesome olde-worlde home-remedy sort of way. This is exactly how I like my saisons: bring that pepper every time.

And now it's back to building up a new backlog of Irish beer tasting notes. I'll post them once I've processed the beers I found on my summer holidays, coming up next.