Double Trouble

I've been drinking it fairly regularly all month, so apologies for only getting round to telling you about Trouble Brewing's Dark Arts porter now. It made its first appearance at the Food & Wine Magazine fair in the RDS a few weeks ago, followed by an official launch in the Bull & Castle on 30 November.

It's an unfiltered dark brown session porter of 4.4% ABV which starts out quite roasty and dry but follows this with a long-lasting chocolate and caramel sweetness. Just on the end there's a nip from the hops adding a bitter, slightly sour complication.

Dark Arts is a beer of marvellous balance: light enough for session drinking, but properly warming as well. It's on tap at the Bull & Castle and L. Mulligan Grocer for the next while.

In addition to this and Ór, a third beer comes to us from the Trouble kit, though its origins are rather more obscure. Last year Dublin pubs Sin É and Dice Bar began selling beers badged with old Dublin Brewing Company brands: D'Arcy's Stout and Revolution Red, names that hadn't been seen since DBC went under in 2004. Word around the campfire was that these were Young's Double Chocolate Stout and Bombardier, imported from the UK. And then, just a few months ago, I spotted a new poster outside Sin É proclaiming that Revolution is now brewed in Ireland. Investigations led to Trouble where, I'm told, the management rent out the kit to Revolution's owners and leave them to it.

The beer is quite good too: very sweet, with lots of toffee and smooth caramel. There's a nice roasted element to the flavour as well and just a tiny bit of hop aroma. A well-rounded Irish red, basically: not going to set the world alight but quite enjoyable to drink. And while it's quite possible that it's not terribly different from the kegged Bombardier, I really like that they see "brewed in Ireland" as a significant enough selling point to actually go to the bother of arranging it. Well done them.

...on a such a winter's day

It was lovely to see globetrotting Beer Geeks Chris and Merideth back in Dublin last week. Thursday was Merideth's birthday and a bunch of us bravely crossed the ice floes of Smithfield to gather in L. Mulligan. Grocer for some excellent food and a few beers. The guys had brought some bottles of interest over from California for us to try.

First up was Saison Ale from the recently-established Odonata Brewery in Sacramento. Paler than I would have expected from a saison, this put me more in mind of a witbier, albeit a very very good one. Lots of lovely gunpowder spice on the nose and lovely zesty Belgian yeast flavours on a light and breezy body. There's just a touch of earthy funk on the end which brings it back into more familiar saison territory, but on the whole I'm theorising that this is what witbier used to taste like before the industrial breweries got hold of it.

Firestone Walker Union Jack was my favourite of the set. This is a very heavy, sticky IPA of 7.5% ABV. The aroma sings loudly of golden syrup and sherbet and the opera continues on tasting: a massive malt backbone overlaid with oodles of sweet Californian hops. There's very little of what I'd call bitterness in this: no trace of acidity or harshness, but there's bags and bags of citric flavour, incorporating more pineapples, mangoes and tangerines than grapefruit. Hefty, totally unsubtle, but wonderfully balanced.

The Russian River Blind Pig which followed it was an interesting contrast. It's a wonderful beer (a previous donation from Chris and Merideth was reviewed here), though lighter, paler and bitterer than Union Jack. Proof that American IPA is just as broad a genre as the English ones.

We finished the tasting with Denogginizer, a stonking double IPA from Drake's Brewing. I loved the nose on this: fresh American hops and plenty of them, but the flavour was just overpowering -- a harsh burn from the hops, goaded on by the heat of nearly 10% ABV. There's plenty of toffeeish malt in that deep amber body, but nowhere near enough to carry all that bitterness. It's a beer for people who like their hops in indiscriminately vast quantities.

With these out of the way it was on to dinner (mushrooms and Cashel Blue cheese on toast followed by juniper-spiced beef with roasted vegetables), and a sublime birthday cake for afters, made with Trouble Brewing's Dark Arts porter -- a beer I'm well overdue telling you about properly.

Thanks to Chris and Merideth for the beer and for being excellent company despite what must have been some chronic jetlag; and thanks also to the Mulligan's crew for looking after us on an evening when Dublin's winter water shortages would have crippled many a less tenacious establishment. We beer people really are troopers when we need to be.

The troubled life of Brittany's beers

"Bières d'Excellence" it said on the box of Breton brews that Dave and Laura brought back from holidays for me, accompanied by the proviso that I should expect no such thing from the contents.

The first one I opened was called Dremmwel Blonde: 5% ABV, made from organic ingredients and sporting a jaunty set of Breton bagpipes on the label and cap. Lots of sediment in the bottom of the bottle so I poured carefully, giving me a hazy brass-coloured glassful, topped by a fine foam of purest white. Lots of breath-stopping carbon dioxide from the nose, and an odd herbiness underneath, warranting further investigation. It's not overly fizzy, just a pleasantly busy prickle helping keep the flavours clean. The main one is dry, slightly grassy and vegetal -- asparagus springs to mind. Beyond it there's little by way of malt or hops, but as a light clean aperitif, I was quite happy with this.

The amber followed next: Gwiniz Du. An attractive conker-red body is somewhat spoiled by the large floaty chunks buoyed up by a vigorous carbonation. According to the label it's a wheat beer [correction: buckwheat. French lessons via Mark & Laurent], but there's no sign of the soft texture or fruits or spices that one might expect. Instead it's very sweet, exhibiting lots of dark treacle and a touch of bitter liquorice. As is so often the case with sugar-bombs like this, once it gets warm it becomes sickly and cloying. This isn't my sort of beer but doubtless the style-conscious tramps of Quimper will be all over it next season.

Last of the trio is Celtika. "Enter into Hell" is the strapline on the MS Paint label. Oo-er. That bad, eh? Since it's advertised as a blonde and is 8.8% ABV, and given the satanic branding, I figured they were going for something along the lines of Duvel. It pours rather darker, however: a murky orange with bits in. The aroma has the yeasty spice of a strong Belgian blonde, but the similarities end there. Like Gwiniz Du it's powerfully sweet, full of candied lemons with a finish of aftershave. There's a definite touch of cardboardy oxidation in there, and an unpleasant gastric sharpness. OK, that sounds worse than it is. It's drinkable, but it's no kind of substitute for proper Belgian-style strong blonde ale.

I don't know enough about the beers of western France to start making generalisations, but if this is what gets classed as excellent then there's some work still to be done in getting the recipes right. Thanks again Dave and Laura for generously off-loading these on me.

Lidl donkey

One thing I won't miss about not attending the Pig's Ear festival this year is execrable Christmas beer nomenclature: Rudolph's This, Santa's That -- it's stultifyingly dull. Mind you, the beers are often quite good, at least when they have a bit of oomph to them. I've found in the past that low-ABV Christmas ales are very rarely drinkable.

So it was with trepidation that I approached Shepherd Neame's seasonal offering (sigh) Rudolph's Reward. I was quite fond of their, more soberly-titled, Christmas Ale: a bitter and spicy 7% ABV thumper. But the new kid is only 4%, so how much yuletide cheer is there likely to be inside?

(Can we pause for a second and look at that label? Smirking Rudolph appears to be wearing Santa's clothing, implying some kind of gruesome Animal Farm-style takeover of the North Pole workshop or mid-air sleigh mutiny. Whatever Rudolph is hoisting to celebrate his seizure of the means of production, it is a blonde beer and plainly not Rudolph's Reward.)

The beer looks, in fairness, lovely: dark red-amber, with a long lasting fine-bubbled head. Nothing offensive about the nose: hints of caramel and chocolate. It's the latter which leads the flavour. I say "leads", but there's not really a whole lot else. Just on the finish you get a whiff of Shepherd Neame's signature lightstruck hops, but not enough to contribute much (good or bad) to it. It's mercifully less fizzy than a lot of the brewery's bottled offerings, but the texture is very watery. Stronger it would just be sweet and cloying, however. It needs more complexity before I'd recommend it, even at €1.49 a pop in Lidl.

Fall forward

The new autumn seasonal from Sierra Nevada, Tumbler is a medium-strength brown ale, 5.5% ABV and a dark mahogany in the glass, topped by thick off-white foam. The nose gives fresh, lightly mandarin, hops and a hint of caramel sweetness. It's quite understated in the flavour department, though what's there is nicely balanced between burnt treacley caramel and punchy hop fruits. The hops come out on top at the end, finishing bitter with a hint of saccharine.

I can't help being reminded of lighter, the punchier American and American-style amber ales like Speakeasy Prohibition or Brewdog 5am Saint: they do this sort of thing better. Tumbler is much heavier and creamier in texture, perhaps intended to be a softer, more huggable beer. But those typically Sierra Nevadan hops are just sending me the wrong signals: begging to be taken out for a wild time. A draught version is currently on tap in a couple of Dublin pubs and the hops are even more subdued there, to the point of invisibility.

It's hard to fault it, though. Tasty, smooth and filling it's a nice one to have on hand on a chilly evening, and there's no shortage of those round here right now.

Subterranean homesick booze

A brewpub? Really? That's the place you made an unexpected beer discovery? Well, sort of.

Messrs Maguire has been coasting for some years now. Launched in a blaze of glory in the late 1990s, the multistorey superpub on O'Connell Bridge boasted a lending library and a cask bitter at the beginning. Sadly, it wasn't long before the management sidelined the more high-concept aspects and it gradually reverted into just another brash city centre booze warehouse. It's perhaps suprising that the brewery and its beers survived at all, discounted in both price and brand by the owners. As brewer, Cuilán Loughnane kept the wheels on and the beer flowing, sticking to a punishing routine of commuting from Tipperary up to Dublin and back each brewday. When he finally got his own White Gypsy brewery up and running closer to home it's not surprising that Messrs Maguire production moved there and the pub kit fell into disuse.

A little over a year ago, word had it that the owners had finally twigged that a microbrewery can be more of an asset than a liability and moves were made to revitalise the pub, the brewery and the beer. A new Dublin-based brewer, Melissa Camire, was installed to blow the cobwebs off the kettle and get everything running once more. While the three above-ground storeys of the pub were given little more than a lick of paint, a whole new bar has been opened in the basement. The Brewery, as they're calling it, caters much more to the needs of the beer enthusiast with a fascinating range of continental imports plus specials from both the brewery and its Tipperary cousin. I went along recently with a few of the Beoir guys for the opening night.

Nothing from the in-house brewery was available yet (a brown ale will be first out of the tanks in the next week or two), but there was Melissa's first Irish-brewed beer: Messrs Maguire Pale Ale brewed at White Gypsy though -- Cuilán insists -- without any input from him. It's no hoppy quaffer, this one: heavy and almost English-tasting in its no-nonsense marmalade bitterness on a smooth caramel base. It may lack the zingy high notes of fresh C-hops but it's a lovely one to take a bit of time to sip.

The handpump was serving the latest edition of White Gypsy Emerald blonde ale, this one made with a twist. It's the first beer brewed from totally home-grown ingredients in over a decade thanks to White Gypsy's new plantation of First Gold hops. It's a full 5% ABV though doesn't feel it at all. Light of texture and low on bitterness it's very easy drinking with a beautiful mineral softness underlying the slightly lagery pale malts and gentle green bitterness.

Under the new arrangements, Messrs Maguire will still be an outlet for White Gypsy beer, and Cuilán will continue to brew the core house beers for the upstairs bars. And hopefully that in turn means that we the Dublin drinkers will still have the opportunity to buy his specials and seasonals as well as Melissa's. The coming of winter means the arrival of a beer that's much less unexpected than the above but no less delightful: Messrs Maguire Jul-Ól. Resolutely brewed without spices or adjunct flavourings, this 6%-er has different emphases from year to year. In 2010 we're leaning more towards malt for a very sticky and warming ruby ale. The hops sit in the background and add a bitter complexity to the whole: toffee and jam with a liquorice bite.

I will be back over the coming weeks and months to further explore the new-look Messrs Maguire -- Melissa's beers, the bottle fridge and of course the new food menu. Hopefully it'll all seem like less of a surprise with each visit.

Czech again

I did say I'd be back for a go of the bottled beer at The Porterhouse's recent Czech beer festival. Not everything that was promised arrived in the end, but among those that did was Žatec Xantho, a 5.7% ABV black lager. Very black, in fact: opaque with a hint of red around the edges and a healthy layer of off-white foam on top. The aroma is odd: carbon dioxide and liquorice reflecting both the intense gassiness of the beer and its sticky weight. The two elements provide a balance of sorts.

The flavour is dominated by a kind of sour caramel taste -- lots of dark roasted sweetness and plenty of vegetal bittering hops. More than anything it reminded me of Baltika 6, the St Petersburg brewery's porter, but it's an easier drink than that one.

If you like a bit of meat to your dark lager this is a good one to go for.