From high in the Belgian mountains

I'm so far behind on my American beer ticking it's just not funny. Not that there's anything funny about ticking, you understand: like serial killers we do it because we have to. It's a while since I've seen anything from Denver's Great Divide, but they're back on Irish shelves now with their Belgian style pale ale Belgica.

It's a style I have a lot of time for. You get the weight of a strong and sweet Belgian ale, a softness and gentle spice from the yeast and then some serious fun with the citric high-alpha hops. There are loads of examples from both Belgium and the US and they all emphasise different parts of the formula, so finding a new one is always interesting.

Alas, Belgica doesn't deliver where it counts. It's incredibly sweet, with a sticky, sickly aroma and a bitter sugary flavour. The C-hops have made it taste like orange barley sugar sweets. Cheap artificial ones. There's no proper malt backbone behind all this sweetness and fruit: a catastrophic oversight in a 7.2% ABV beer.

I should point out in its defence that the missus and I were tasting this alongside Flying Dog's Raging Bitch. I hoped it would be a fair comparison but it's really not. Raging Bitch remains the Belgianised American pale ale to beat.

Bohemians on the southside

The already-busy Porterhouse festival calendar has a new date on it: last Thursday saw the opening of a ten-day celebration of Czech beer to mark 21 years since the Velvet Revolution.

When my shiny new camera and I went along for a shufti, the bottles hadn't arrived yet and it turned out we're not getting one of the highlights (Budvar yeast beer) at all in Ireland (booo!). Some interesting alternatives on draught, though: Bernard Dark, Budvar Dark and some strong pale fellas from Žatecký Pivovar.

Baronka looks quite innocent: a rich shade of gold, maybe a little bit darker than you might expect a typical pale lager to be. The aroma is the first sign that we're beyond plain pils territory, heady bananas and zingy peaches were my first impressions. It's mouth-coatingly full-bodied -- sitting cosily in the stomach and radiating a gentle alcoholic warmth, though it is only 5.3% ABV. The flavour starts by mixing these warm and fruity elements but the hops don't lag behind and there's an early smack of tangy, grassy Saaz. The finish is all hop too. A beautiful, balanced, complex winter lager this.

Two taps over they'd stuck up an innocent looking Žatec badge and biro'd in the word "Strong" beneath. In Czech terms Žatec Strong is an 18º lager -- 7.3% ABV to you and me. I only had a sample but could see it's a beautiful dark honey colour, and virtually headless. While it tastes all of its strength and more, it's not overpowering. There's no trampy cloying sweetness about it: I'd say this is all malt and lots of it. Maybe not exactly brimming with character but very smooth and a lovely sipping lager.

The plan is to get back in for a go of the bottles before the festival ends on Sunday.

Aladdin Sainsbury's

I took a trip north on the bank holiday Monday a few weeks back. The euro was riding high against sterling so I had very few qualms about going to the beer section in Sainsbury's and putting some strain on a trolley axle. They have quite a few own-brand ales and I think I came away with one of most of them.

First up, Basics Bitter, a whole 2.1% of alcoholic goodness goes into this red-amber affair. It's very fizzy but, on first impressions, is convincingly beer-like. Give it a few seconds, however, and the facade starts to crumble. That caramel sweetness is probably not malt-derived but is more likely down to the addition of actual caramel (there's no ingredients listing, so no way to find out). Most of the rest is wateriness, but dig deep and you may just find a whisper of an echo of a trace of hops bitterness.

Honestly I don't know what the point of this beer is. Something for non-drinkers to torture guests with? It's too thin even to cook with.

Onwards and upwards to the "Taste the Difference" range. Shepherd Neame's porter wasn't an option, but I did take a punt on the Kentish Ale. In the comments of a previous Shep rant, arn pointed out that this is probably a rebadge of Early Bird, a beer I didn't have a great time with a while back. I couldn't say for sure if this is exactly the same, but it certainly has the fizz-to-skunk ratio right. Lots of pungent green crunchy vegetables, a massive carbonic dryness and plenty of burps. All that said, it tastes like nectar next to the Basics Bitter: the joy of actual real hops and (somewhere) proper malt. Not that I'll be buying it again or anything stupid like that.

For real hop action I turned hopefully to the Taste the Difference India Pale Ale. Brewed by Marston's, of whom I'm not a big fan, but at 5.9% ABV it should at least have been interesting. But it wasn't, really. The hops are only just detectable and have to share the stage with Marston's distinctive sulphurous Burton flavour. And even these meagre talents get buried under the boozy malt weight. It's a lot of work to drink and the rewards for doing so aren't up to much.

People round these parts tend to regard Sainsbury's as a cut above in the beer stakes. And yes, in the trolley with this lot there was also a significant quantity of Clotworthy Dobbin and Old Peculier: stalwart favs of mine. But then when I read what Tesco UK are up to with their own-brand beers I think that beer shopping up north is perhaps best done at more than one venue. Or, y'know, a proper off licence.

Brett and Buddha

We've already had one new pale ale from Franciscan Well this year -- the rather wonky Golden Otter, a beer with more than a hint of wild yeast in it, plus oodles of possibly my least-favourite hop, the sickly Styrian Goldings. Well, they're at it again and the new one is called Smiling Buddha. I went to The Bull & Castle to give it a go.

It arrived a slightly hazy dark orange colour, giving off a mild aroma of spicy hops. The first taste gave me a big hit of yeasty flavour -- maybe not the farmyard of Brett, but definitely in the Marmite zone. The malt layer is slightly musty, reminding me of certain full-on German pilsners, and from behind this peeks some fresh English hops, tasting of jaffa oranges and cedarwood.

It's streets ahead of Golden Otter in my book, but I can't help being distracted that yeastiness. Yet the beer isn't actually all that hazy, so I don't know if something like more time in the bright tanks or a stronger hand on the filter would turn it into the clean-tasting bitter I'd like it to be. It's all very confusing. But the Buddha just keeps on smiling.

Wheat beat manifesto

It's wheat beers on The Session this month, a genre I find it hard to get excited about. Sure, I like the odd Schneider-Weisse or Aventinus, and I'm perfectly content holding a Hoegaarden, but generally speaking I don't go out of my way for wheat beer. It's more of a fallback thing.

In an effort to rekindle my interest, I decided to open something a bit special for this post: Hvedegoop, the "wheat wine" brewed as a collaboration between Three Floyds and Mikkeller. Something about the -goop suffix had me expecting dark beer, maybe along the lines of Haandbryggeriet's Dark Force wheat stout. Instead it's quite a pale cherrywood colour, with a short-lived skim of ivory foam on the surface.

The brewers' renowned love of C-hops is immediately apparent from the aroma on pouring: sticky nectarine fruitiness made extra potent by sweet caramel-candy notes from the malt backbone. That this is a strong sipper (10.4% ABV) is never in doubt.

One expects a certain soft mouthfeel from wheat beers but there's none of that here. Instead the gentle fizz and powerful-yet-subtle booze heat gives it a definite wine vibe, much more like an American barley wine. And that continues into the taste: big big hops, but balanced by lots of sticky malt -- I really can't find anything to indicate we're dealing with wheat malt here rather than plain old barley, and I doubt that any of the yeast strains most commonly used for wheat beers have been employed.

More than anything, it reminds me a lot of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, which brings me on to Mrs Beer Nut's observation. She liked it a lot, but reckons it needs another year or two of maturation to mellow and soften, just like Bigfoot does. Me, I liked the in-your-face double IPA kick and didn't find it remotely harsh or difficult, however I can't help but agree it would be really interesting to find out what happens to it after a couple of years.

As a strong-and-hoppy late-night sipper-to-share I rate Hvedegoop very highly. Whether there was any point in making it with wheat rather than all barley, however, I really couldn't say. But if anyone's using this Session to argue that wheat beers are intrinsically dull or samey, here's the killer argument against.

From the weedpatch

It's a couple of years since Hall & Woodhouse's collaboration with River Cottage was the talk of the beerweb. Actually, you don't hear much from the Badger brand at all these days. I'd sort of forgotten about them until I spotted two of the River Cottage / Badger beers on the shelf of an off licence recently. I hadn't even realised there was a new one.

The original is Stinger, made with nettles for a "tongue tingling" sensation. Well maybe it takes a bit more to get my jaded old tongue tingling these days, but this wasn't doing it. The first thing I noticed was that despite the greener-than-thou organic badging and copious information on the hop:malt:fruit ratios on the label, there was no actual listing of ingredients. And when breweries throw odd things into their beers they usually follow it with a hefty bag or two of sugar, just to be sure. I think that's what's happened here: you get a heavy, thick, syrupy golden ale without much by way of aroma. There's a spice to it as well, buried quite deep, but I challenge anyone to drink it and tell me it tastes of nettles. Mind you, this is apparently what proper nettle beer tastes like, and this is a measure of its quality so maybe the bags of sugar were a good idea.

I expected more of the same from the dandelion one, called Dandelion ("Stinger" having exhausted the branding guys' imaginations). This time the sugar does add a bit of character -- it may even be brown sugar -- but beyond it there's absolutely nothing: another sweet syrupy ale with maybe a tiny herbal complexity at the back, but nothing that would make you think of dandelions.

I shouldn't really have consumed them back to back. I started to get a bit angry. I mean: how hard is it to do this sort of thing properly? Williams Brothers, for instance, turn out some fantastic beers with heather and spruce and seaweed. I've made one gruit ale once, flavoured mostly with yarrow and sage, and it was pretty damn drinkable. Marketable, even. So why is it that so many brewers, English ones in particular, think that when you break from the malt/hops norm you have to turn the whole thing into an alcopop? These ones may have organic credentials and a chef off the telly but they're really nothing more than Crabbie's in disguise, and a short skip through the meadow from blue WKD.

Stuff like this gives unusal ingredients in beer a dreadful reputation (though, granted, Dave in the links above isn't helping either). What's wrong with a bit more diversity?

Leann on me

Hooray! The Carlow Brewing Company have had another go at recreating their fantastic 10th anniversary celebration stout. As with the last attempt, they've badged it Leann Folláin, but this time we're getting proper half litres of it rather than the small bottles they gave us before. I wasn't a fan of Leann Folláin Mark I, with its massive sweet woody flavours, and I hoped they'd toned them down for the new one. Last Thursday they held the official launch in the Bull & Castle with a cask of Leann Folláin Mark II, and of course I went along.

One thing was very apparent as soon as head brewer Liam poured me a glass of the viscous black liquid: it's complex. The aroma gives off lots of chocolate, the sweetness tempered with vegetal hops. These themes continue on tasting, with the first sensation a combination of candy-sweet and bitterness, like liquorice, though smooth and not at all sharp. The chocolate arrives next and includes more than a hint of boozy syrupy heat -- perhaps more than you'd expect from 6% ABV -- and finally the hops make a last stand to finish dry. It's a real workout to drink and I'd say I'd struggle with a pint of it, though others at the table didn't seem to be having much difficulty in that department.

Cask isn't likely to be available on any kind of regular basis, but I did get a brief taster of the bottled version. It has all the same flavours, but arranged differently. The aroma is much more full-on and the hop bitterness a bit more pronounced. In fact, I think the bottles may still be a little green and will probably be at their best in a few months from now, much like the revamped Porterhouse Celebration which is drinking great at the moment.

With this strong stout and the recently-launched pale ale, Carlow are definitely doing their part to move beyond the stout-red-lager/wheatbeer range that so many Irish micros have stuck with in the past. I can see Leann Folláin being a big seller abroad, worthy of shelf space beside craft brews from all over Europe and beyond.