What are you rebelling against?

Having previously tackled industry giants such as The Portman Group and CAMRA, BrewDog's caustic attentions now seem to have been turned to the beliefs of small children. It's a fair target: like the other two, small children have some odd ideas and could do with being taken down a peg or two. Hence There Is No Santa, a seasonally-adjusted stout.

It's a dark red-brown colour with a nice thick stouty head. And it tastes of gingerbread. Cocoa nibs and ginger stems are listed as the bonus add-ons, but I'm not getting much chocolate flavour, or stout flavours generally. Just gingerbread, or possibly ginger biscuits. Nice as it goes, but I was bored before the end of 33cl.

Just as well there's another one in the range, then. Despite the less cheeky name, Christmas Porter sounds very promising. Based on the damned decent Alice Porter with added cacao, chilli and spices. My kind of beer all round.

A point and a half stronger than TINS, at 6.2% ABV, showing an enticing beige head with a subtle chilli bite in the aroma. It wears that chilli up front, and it's more about the peppery flavour than the heat. I think I can forgive that. In the middle there's lots of chocolate and the chilli comes back at the end for a dry fruity finish. Again, it's nothing extreme or wildly off-kilter, but there's plenty to enjoy. As drinkable, sinkable dark beers, both are well-suited to the season of overindulgence.

Happy Christmas, readers!

No bollekes

I had no idea what to expect from these two: big 75cl corked bottles with a very modernist new-world-wine sort of label, though peer closely at the enigmatic logo (a wineglass on its side? a malt shovel? a man with a crewcut asleep?) and the brewer's initials are revealed: the ordinarily staid and traditionalist De Koninck of Antwerp. What are they up to? Let's find out.

I tackled the blonde first: Gusto 1833 is the title, commemorating the year the brewery was founded. Perhaps the first part of the name is a sign that they're making a play for the whole Special Beer For Food thing, which may be in danger of becoming a niche. I get a loud pop as the cork comes out and lots of short-lived champagney fizz while it pours. A centimetre of head sticks around, over a hazy pale gold body. There's a mild sherbet aroma, and on tasting my first impression is of standard Duvelesque Belgian strong blonde. At 8% the ABV is in the right ballpark too. Then my nosehairs start to burn. This beer is very highly carbonated, to the point where it becomes difficult to taste. I need to leave it to flatten out for a while.

When I do, it's still very Duvelish: sweet, soft and boozy, like a pissed-up peach. Squinting for difference there might be a little bit of extra sweetness, some floral perfume perhaps, but no real distinction I can nail down with certainty. All that matters is that it's enjoyable, I guess, which it is. With food? Sure, why not?

Gusto 1833 Ruby Red appears to be a brand extension, or perhaps they're aiming for the whole red wine / white wine duality. The cork cage was of a sort I've never seen before: there's something a little BDSM about it. I was definitely expecting another fizz bomb. There was a loud pop and oodles of foam, this time disappearing completely after a minute. However, the beer underneath is much smoother than the blonde.

First things first: it's definitely not ruby red. More murky brown. Garnet, if one were feeling charitable. The taste is deliciously off kilter. It has all the balsamic vinegar richness and spice of a full-on Flemish red, except... without the vinegar. It's really quite sweet, shading towards the dubbel end of the spectrum, but the complexities are pure Rodenbach. It went great with the hot chocolate fondant I felt immediately compelled to zap in the microwave and consume alongside it, and which brought out a wonderful strawberry fruitiness.

So there so have it: two bottles you can plonk down in the middle of a table and get some excited ooohs before the diners realise that it's only beer.

On the road

It sounds interesting, this one: a brown ale -- that steadfastly old-fashioned style -- brewed to a very non-traditional (or at least somewhat unorthodox) 6% ABV and single hopped with Citra, the American powerhouse hop more commonly found in high-octane IPAs. Anchor Breckle's had me intrigued from the start.

It pours more of a ruby shade than brown, topped by a thick and rocky off-white head. While it's as sweet as one would expect a brown ale to be, with just a touch of roastiness at the back, the hops are at the centre of the flavour giving a major fruity dimension to it. Not the fresh and fleshy mangos and peaches that's characteristic of West Coast hops, but a more artificial-tasting Opal Fruit vibe. That sounds bad, but it's not meant to be. This is a fun and frivolous ale, a conversation beer rather than one to sit over and think about.

From San Francisco we head north up Route 101 to Ukiah and the Butte Creek brewery, to try their Porter. It's a deep dark shade of red with quite a busy sparkle, relatively thin of body for 6.1% ABV.

There's a definite stickiness to the aroma: full of treacle and burnt sugar. The slightly charred notes are at the front of the flavour with sweeter caramel and a little bit of mild coffee coming in behind it. I got an unfortunate tang of cardboardy oxidation which somewhat spoiled an otherwise plain but pleasant beer.

A u-turn and back to San Fran, so.

Howls of derision

I really enjoyed my afternoon of quality drinking at The Salt House in Galway city a few weeks back. They kindly agreed to host the Beoir AGM, and laid on some very decent beer and tasty food. I had to split horribly early for the last train back to Dublin (6.05pm: why, Irish Rail, why?) but on my way out manager Taram charitably thrust a bottle of BrewDog Bitch Please and a pint glass at me.

This barrel-aged barley wine was produced in association with Three Floyds and is all of 11.5% ABV. It smells it, with a serious boozy waft coming off the light beige head that sits thickly over the dark copper liquid. After the alcohol there's a blast of oak and then some peaty phenols: all this before even the first sip. The taste is as loud as one might expect, all blaring peatiness and alcoholic heat. The only vaguely subtle bit is a teeny hint of oxidised wet cardboard at the back, but that fades quickly. A mouth-coating viscosity means that at least you get good value for each mouthful: the flavours stay with you for quite a while. Like 5am Saint, this is perhaps a beer to finish a session on.

Overall I found Bitch Please quite brash and unsophisticated, but it did last almost the whole way back across to the right-hand coast.

Back in the familiar confines of the Bull & Castle I find a new English beer on the beer engine: Wychwood's Dog's Bollocks. I am hounded by poorly-named canine-themed British beer, it would seem. It arrived a rather hazy pale orange but there was not a thing wrong with it: beautifully cool and sparkling busily. The zingy aroma leaped out and the first sip delivered a bitter citric smack around the chops followed by softer orange sherbet notes and a little bit of incense spice in the finish. For something that seems designed as a hoppy pick-me-up it's decently full-bodied, and though nowhere near as long-legged as the barley wine above it does leave a pleasant waxy bitterness in its wake.

I hope to see it again on the Bull & Castle's cask rotation, though obviously I won't be ordering it by name.

Second watch

There's been a bit of a revamp over at the Bay Brewery, based at the Oslo brewpub in Galway. The makeover sees the name changed to "Galway Bay Brewery" and the dropping of their (pretty decent, IMO) amber lager. The so-so red ale is staying and there are two new additions to the range. I caught up with them in the brewery's Dublin tied house Against The Grain recently.

Stormy Port first, a porter. The lack of nitrogenation was a pleasant surprise, and I think it really helps the flavours shine. Well, flavour, singular: Stormy Port is a grade-A chocolate bomb with bucketloads of sweet candy and not a whole lot else. It's served far too cold and the thin fizzy body doesn't allow the chocolate have any warming or filling properties, unfortunately.

To the best of my knowledge, the house yeast at Galway Bay is Danstar Nottingham, a neutral strain, and this may well be the reason this beer is so one-dimensional. Mr Billings opined that a more interesting estery ale yeast might help give it a little more depth and complexity. In the meantime, I'm happy to drink it, as long as it's left to warm up a little. You can't have too many porters, say I.

The second beer is similarly cold and kegged. It goes by the disquieting name of Strange Brew -- when a brewer chooses to label a beer so it's time to worry. I don't remember seeing a style designation on the tap badge, but I've heard second-hand that they're calling it an IPA. From the amber body there's no aroma to speak of and the flavour is very much malt-driven: slightly sticky, with a small hop bang at the end but loads of carbonic bite. All-in-all it's quite inoffensive, reminding me lots of several passable, forgettable, English bitters I've had, only without the smoothness and flavour subtleties that cask-conditioning provides. Served from Against The Grain's beer engine, this could be really interesting. And, of course, it never hurts to do a bit of dry-hopping as well.

No doubt these first editions of the beers will be subject to change as the brewer tweaks the recipes. There's a lot of promise here and it would be great to see Galway Bay pulling out something really original, though the standard in Ireland is quite high at the moment.

Ankers aweigh

These two German lads have been sitting in Messrs Maguire all year. I guess with competition from the house beers and macros they never really sold, since they were being flogged at a knock-down rate when I picked them up to take away. Both are from Ankerbräu in Nördlingen. An odd choice of name for a brewery in thoroughly landlocked Bavaria.

The lager first: Daniel-Trunk Kellerbier. It's naturtrüb, as the label makes clear: very cloudy, rendered yet murkier by the dark brown colouring. My kellerbier experience is limited, but I thought they tended to be paler than this. Daniel's keller needs a lightswitch. A hit of malteser on the nose is scant preparation for the massive ovaltine flavour. The sweetness is somewhat offset by a tang which I think is down to the age of the beer: I'm drinking it a good two months after the best-before, and it's a style I'm sure isn't meant for aging. Though what it's like when all that residual sugar is in full-flow doesn't bear thinking about.

At the finish up there's just enough of a hop-bite present to prevent anyone mistaking it for alcoholic porridge-water, though it's still hard to shake the sensation of supping some kind of breakfast cereal or nutritious dietary supplement for invalids.

When the sugar buzz wore off I turned to Rieser Dunkles Weizen: another dark one, at the same strength (5.2% ABV) but this time a wheat beer. It's a bit more orthodox: nicely balanced between mild banana tempered by caramel. Smooth and light enough to be drinkable. And although it's several weeks older than the brewer would like, there's no trace of staleness or any off flavours.

For a cold winter's evening it's really quite comforting, but it's a beer I could see working as a summer's day quencher just as easily.

One interestingly odd and the other solidly enjoyable: catch them if you still can at Messrs Maguire.

Barley's ghost

Mind! I don't mean to say I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the similie; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.

The first page of A Christmas Carol is my favourite thing ever written. I wouldn't be Mr Dickens's biggest fan -- I'd hazard that few of us who struggled through Great Expectations at A-Level count ourselves so -- but those first paragraphs are so beautifully crafted. The story eventually drowns in sentimentality, but for the opening sequence alone it deserves its classic status.

The opportunity to pay tribute to my fav bit of prose comes by way of Phil at Beersay, host of the December 2011 Session, who picked the story as his theme. In keeping with it I have unchained three spirits from my beer fridge to examine for signs of yuletide cheer.

The Beer of Christmas Past
Old Dickens had gone to join Jacob Marley some years before 4th August 1893, the date on which Fuller's of Chiswick brewed a Double Stout which they've more recently brought back from the grave with the assistance of European beer's necromancer-in-chief Ron Pattinson.

At 7.4% ABV, Fuller's Double Stout is normal strength for a pre-1917 stout recipe, and a reminder for Irish drinkers that plain old Guinness used to be up in these high reaches too (you can watch the gravities plummet on the table in this post from Ron's blog a few years ago). From the beige head I get an immediate treacle aroma. I'm guessing the finishing gravity was quite high as there's a huge and quite sticky body. That said, it remains wonderfully drinkable: smooth and not too sweet, exuding warming boozy heat and finishing with just a small carbonic bite.

Interestingly I also get a waft of smoke from it and, coupled with the smoothness, I'm immediately reminded of Franciscan Well's Shandon Century, another understated powerhouse of a stout. It's hard to beat this style of beer when it's time to batten down the hatches for winter.

The Beer of Christmas Present
Kids today, with their double-imperial this and their barrel-aged that, chasing the latest in hop highs and extreme methodologies. One beer I happened across recently combined all of this in one neat bottle: Great Divide Rumble, a barrel-aged IPA. It's an unusual proposition for the Denver brewer, since like so many of its contemporaries it values big fresh hop flavours in its IPAs. Stick them in oak and the only way is down, isn't it?

Well no, not necessarily. Rumble pulls off the feat of combining the best bits of all. It starts with a sherry-like nose, all enticing wood and alcohol with none of the oxidised warning signs this aroma often elicits.  The malt jumps out first on tasting: a big toffee hit, given momentum by 7.1% ABV. A fresh hop-burst follows quickly: mellow soft fruit tempered with a sharp bitterness when the beer is cold, but mellowing even further as it warms. There's no mistaking that the hops here are bang up-to-the-minute fresh ones losing none of their flavour power under the influence of the oak which finishes the beer off.

There's a slight vanilla tang and a little bit of sappiness meeting the pine hop bitterness, but it's mostly present as a subtle complexity, an encore to the hops' big number. I imagine that achieving this delicate level of woodiness in a strong beer is incredibly difficult to do and is perhaps the reason we don't see more barrel-aged IPAs around. But perhaps we'll see more of them in the future.

The Beer of Christmas Yet-To-Come

The future. The future, in Ireland at least, is local. I'm finding it quite difficult these days to schedule in all the new Irish beers available on the Dublin market and I'm already several beers in arrears. I imagine this problem is only going to get worse as more new breweries come on stream in 2012, and those already established turn out more seasonals and specials. It's a wonderful problem to have.

To mark this rising tide of beery variety I have the first seasonal from Mitchelstown's 8 Degrees brewery, a two-man operation that has been turning out beers for a mere eight months now. A Winter's Ale is 7.5% ABV and a dark red-brown colour: not as black as the Phantom in our story, but not far off. I met it at the Taste of Christmas show last weekend where there was an excellent showing by the Irish craft breweries, both as part of The Beer Club bar and at stalls of their own. Last year, apparently, it was wall-to-wall Beck's Vier and nothing else. ¡Viva la Revolución!

For the brewing of A Winter's Ale a blend of ten mulling spices has been provided by local spicery Green Saffron, which includes cinnamon, cloves and star anise in no uncertain quantities. They give the beer an oddly sour nose which I found a little off-putting at first, but they really get to work properly on tasting. First you get a wonderful warming sweetness and then the spices come in on top: a bittersweet oriental confection that puts a keen edge on what might otherwise be a rather one-dimensional strong porter. At the end there's a lingering banana ester flavour peeping out from under the spices. The texture is smooth, the carbonation gentle and on the whole it's very drinkable, despite the busy spicing. Hot on the heels of Metalman's Alternator and Trouble's Pumpkin Ór I'd love to see even more of these seasonals with seasoning.


All that remains for us now is to wake, send a passing boy off to the poulterer, share a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop with young Cratchit, and finish on a phrase so hackneyed I can't bring myself to repeat it. Just go and read the story.