Hopping off

For the third year running my summer finished on the high note that is the Borefts Beer Festival, hosted by the De Molen brewery in Bodegraven. It changes shape every year and for 2013 left the confines of the trademark windmill altogether, in favour of the main brewery premises and yard, and the car park of a former garden centre across the road. It was a big site and the brewery bars were well spaced out, as well as a massively expanded catering area serving meaty and cheesy delights.

As always, the festival had a theme, issued to the invited brewers in advance. This year it was old-style brewing with seemingly an emphasis on unhopped beers and braggots. Braggot -- hopped mead, sometimes using malt too -- is a new experience for me and I'm not entirely sure it fits within the remit of this blog, but it would have been rude not to try a couple. Alvinne's was called Honey-B and is a pale orange colour with quite a sour aroma. Honey is at the centre of the flavour, of course, spiced up with some mild herbal notes. Its overwhelming feature, however, was its dryness, almost resembling the more intense breed of sauvignon blanc. Interesting, but I wasn't much of a fan.

In proper swaggering style, Mikkeller's offering was called Bragging Braggot, this one is the hazy shade of a hopped-up IPA. It smells quite citric, hinting at high-alpha hops, and there's a urinal-cake sickliness to the flavour which bears this theory out. They've tried to balance the hops with honey and the result is super sweet and soupily textured. "Interesting" say my notes again, but just too weird to be enjoyable.

The last hope for braggot redemption was Skogsmölska by Närke. This is described as a "gruit braggot", so herbs instead of hops then, I guess. It's a clear dark amber with huge honey aromas and a rich, warming dark honey flavour. There's just a light carbonation which works to keep it from getting too cloying. I liked this one, but on the balance of these offerings there's little danger of my becoming a braggot blogger any time soon.

Much more my sort of things were the unhopped beers, though they were a bit of a mixed bunch too. My starter was Fyne Ales Wee Jaggy: 3.8% ABV and a beautiful clear golden colour. Amazingly for a gruit it's 100% properly bitter, only not in a hoppy way. Whatever they've used to flavour this they've used a lot, and I approve. A gorgeous white pepper spiciness finishes it off.

I expected big things from the established masters of medieval beer styles, Jopen. They had a special edition Frans Hals Kuit, brewed to celebrate the artist and further highlight Dutch brewing heritage. It's 6% ABV and made with about 50% oats in the grist, pouring a cheery bright lemon yellow. There's a gentle, old-fashioned spiciness which reminds me a lot of Belgian witbier. All very drinkable but not as different, I suppose, as I'd like it to be. Jopen's other unhopped beer was Gouds Gruit, a black one and a little stronger at 7% ABV. It's quite heavy and sticky with some mild chocolate and black cherry flavours, plus lots of gloopy caramel. Both of these lacked the fun and interesting herbs I enjoy in gruit ales and neither had the beatings of Jopen's regular unhopped Koyt for me.

The same cannot be said for Toccalmatto's Sir Dagonet, which has an aroma like inhaling a spice rack: masses of peppery, meadowy, sweet and fresh green smells. It's a bit of a let-down on tasting: watery at its core and the herbs intensify into a slightly unpleasant incense clang, but that aroma excuses all. Give it to me as a nosebag.

Possibly the dullest of the series was Naparbier Gruit. It proved very watery with a kind of herb and rusk flavour: sausages minus the pork. Easy drinking at 5% ABV, but not really worth it. At the opposite end of the alcohol scale was Brewfist Gruit: 10% ABV, and appropriately dark and heavy. More sweet summer meadow in the aroma and a flavour dominated by malt sweetness accompanied by cloves and violets. The resinous texture makes this a fireside sort of gruit ale.

My overall prize for unhopped beer of Borefts 2013, however, goes to The Kernel for their Festival Special. Not only did they not bother hopping it, they skipped the boil phase altogether, and added raspberries. The result is a bright blushing pink beer at 4.3% ABV, quenchingly dry and with all the fruity tartness of a proper unsweetened framboise. Not a trace of herbs mind, but I'll forgive that.

And if an additional palate cleanser is needed after that oddness, our hosts had produced Ginger Shot for the occasion, 4.2% ABV and promising masses of ginger. That's not what it delivered, however. While there's a hint of ginger biscuits in the aroma the main element I got from the flavour was the hops: the heavy dank funk of Simcoe or similar. The ginger sits in the background: raw, unprocessed and unconcentrated and doing little to counteract the hopping which was not part of the deal.

The odd blip aside, I loved the theme and the way the breweries played with it. We move to more usual fare tomorrow. Maybe...

Rebalancing

It's very much a topic-of-the-moment for The Session this month. Derek is hosting at It's Not Just the Alcohol Talking, and he asks "Is Craft Beer A Bubble?" I can't really speak for anywhere beyond my own doorstep, and I'm guessing wildly even there, but for me the answer is no. The recent growth in Irish microbrewing -- and the bubbling potential which occasionally spills over into an actual real new brewery -- is a re-normalisation of sorts, a return to the days of local breweries and local beer which aren't really that far outside living memory.

And, as before, it's likely that the new smaller brands will exist alongside the big national and multinational ones: at the upper ends of the craft sector we're already seeing a certain porousness in the boundaries between craft and macro. Conversely, not everything is rosy for the start-ups: there are brands and breweries that I'm sure won't be around when times get harder and the modest fashion for craft beer begins to wane, which it will. But just as with wine thirty years ago and coffee ten years ago, it's hard to imagine Irish beer going back to where it was in the late 20th century. I believe there has been a small but significant change in the taste of enough drinkers to keep the craft niche alive, supplied and with still plenty of growth space.

Don't ask me to predict what the Irish beer scene will look like a few years down the line, however. At the moment all roads lead to Dublin and most breweries send their beers this way sooner or later. White Gypsy were the first to pull all their draught taps back to the local area -- a hugely encouraging move, if a little inconvenient for me. And as demand for craft beer spreads slowly from the urban centres, I doubt they'll be the last to do it. What the styles will look like is another mystery: against all the odds, red ale shows no signs of dying out, though American-style pale ale is now a standard feature of Irish brewing, and since Diageo jumped on that bandwagon I'd be very surprised if a taste for hops proved to be a mere trend. The rate at which the small breweries are turning out short-run special editions is ever increasing and it remains to be seen whether this will ever settle into a regular calendar of seasonals. I don't seen any reason why it should.

New in that vein from Waterford's Metalman is Smokescreen, presented with no further information than it's a "smoked beer" and 4.5% ABV, so I rocked up to the Bull & Castle bar armed only with the prejudice that smoked beers from Irish breweries are often not very good. The first thing that surprised me about Smokescreen is that it's black, or at least dark brown, and murky reddish around the edges. That was a relief: dark smoked beers suffer much less from kipperiness than amber ones. The second big surprise was the hopping: fresh tangerines lead the flavour, finishing slightly metallic. I'm suddenly reminded of Moonbeam, Metalman's not-a-black-IPA-honest. The smoke element is there, but is little more than a seasoning, contributing a roasty dryness which enhances the beer's stout-like quality, as well as adding a certain pipey sweetness to the finish. Overall I found it quite understated and sessionable, and a beer I'd like to see more of.

More, and more different: that's my hope for Irish brewing, and I'm going to keep buying the limited editions from out-of-town breweries for as long as the market allows.

Spotty Dalmatians

I hope y'all like consonants, 'cos I'm just back from the Balkans and there's nothing them fellas like more than squeezing a whole load of hard pointy letters into tiny spaces. Except possibly for shitty lagers. They like them too. Let's get started, shall we?

My introduction to Croatian beer was in the breathtaking surrounds of Dubrovnik's old port on a balmy September's evening. As in most of Europe, each establishment is contracted to sell one of the national brands of beer and variations from this model are rare. This particular place offered Favorit, brewed in Istria by a subsidiary of Dutch brewery Bavaria. It's a 5% ABV pale lager and smells of copper. The flavour is the sweet tanginess of cheaply made lager with some metal and some lactic sourness. A smorgasbord of awful not at all helped by the rather warm serving temperature. I didn't give it a second go in the hope of a cooler experience: Favorit-branded awnings and umbrellas meant a bar that didn't get my custom for the rest of the week.

The biggest national brand is Ožujsko, owned by MolsonCoors, brewed in Zagreb, and associated everywhere with the national football team. Though the same strength as Favorit, it's paler in colour, arrived cooler, and is mercifully more boring to taste. It's still a bit heavy, though I'll take that as an acceptable alternative to watery, and shares a certain tanginess, except this time I think I can detect the light presence of hops being involved here, rather than just a brewing flaw. While it wasn't a beer I'd ever go running to, I was at least content that there was drinkable beer in Croatia.

Beer three was the hot country lager I had been holding out for: Karlovačko. This is Heineken's local offering and is once again leaning to the sweet side of the house, but does it subtly -- nearly akin to the way a Munich helles works. Simple and refreshing, it did exactly what I needed from a holiday beer.

That just leaves Carlsberg in this corner of Europe's macrobrewing tug-of-war, and their representative is Pan. Not a very Croatian-sounding name, but since one rarely needs to order a beer by brand name there's no real consumer advantage to its easily graspable handle. Plain Pan is 4.8% ABV and there's that metal again, this time accompanied by a kind of aspirinish mineral soda quality. There's some saccharine and apple in the mix too. It's effectively an advertisement for trading up to the posher Pan Zlatini, an ironically-named 5%-er which isn't gold at all but an almost amber colour. I wish I'd spotted the cans before I bought my bottle of it because it was badly skunked, but at least this indicated the presence of hops. Hops are indeed quite a big part of the flavour: sage and grass come through in particular, balanced less by the taste of the malt as the weight it brings: this is heavy drinking.

I'm not sure if it's a trade up or down from Zlatini, but the beer I probably drank most of in Croatia was Pan Hajdučko. There are some lovely dark grain flavours in this medium-gold beer; almost roasty. The middle is hollow and watery, but we can skip past that to the gentle grassy finish. Definitely not as strongly flavoured as Pan Zlatini, but a more pleasant overall drinking experience, I thought.

Most of the breweries have a dark lager in their line-up you'll be glad to hear, though getting hold of them in the on-trade was very nearly impossible. Even in off licences they were relegated to the lower shelves and backs of fridges. Karlovačko Crno is a healthy 6% ABV and all about the liquorice: mildly sour with some light chocolate and coffee at the centre, then finishing with yet more liquorice. MolsonCoors takes it up a notch with their Tomislav at 7.3% ABV. It's a less complex offering for all that, though: a bit of liquorice but mostly big heavy molasses making it difficult drinking and showing the aspects of Baltic-ish porter that I don't especially like.

That's it for Croatian beer, but the neighbours get a bit of a look-in too, former Yugoslavia being not quite as broken up as events of the early 1990s might have suggested. Slovenian Laško Zlatorog is quite commonplace around Dubrovnik: a mix of skunkiness and melted plastic. Laško Dark is far better, being 5.9% ABV and mixing in sweet chocolate and metallic molasses with some smooth and creamy milk stout lactic qualities. There's even a touch of coffee too. Still a bit heavy going, but the best dessert beer I found.

An excursion into Bosnia-Herzegovina brought Sarajevsko to the table, a very pale 4.9% ABV lager with major apple off-flavours dominating the taste. Beneath this there are some pleasantly bitter herbal notes -- fennel and sage -- but nothing that really makes it worth drinking. Down in Montenegro, meanwhile, they drink Nikšićko, and maybe it was the beautiful surrounds of Kotor or the €2 price tag, but I really enjoyed this. It's a medium gold and the hop oils in the foam are immediately apparent in its aroma. Beneath that it's a little sweet, saccharine perhaps, but not at all outwith the bounds of decent pilsner. There's a growing floral quality to the taste and a satisfying bitter finish.

My bottom line for Dubrovnik, if you're going, is The Gaffe Irish Pub in the Old Town. It does O'Hara's Stout and Red on draught, for less than a fiver a pop in the early evening: a life-saver in a city otherwise saturated by medium-to-poor lagers.

Coal porter

I've had a bit of an on-again-off-again relationship with Belgian stout over the years. The much-loved Hercule was tough going for me, while Leroy ranks among the worst beers I've ever had the misfortune to have put in front of me. De La Senne's Stouterik is an excellent exception, but only achieves this by de-Belging itself, being light, simple and clean. So I wasn't sure which way the dice would fall when it came to De Dochter van de Korenaar's Charbon: at 7% ABV, smoked, and including vanilla, clean and simple were definitely not on the agenda.

It pours densely black with a rocky ivory head which dissipates quickly. The first thing that struck me is the intensely creamy texture, full and silky, with barely a prickle from the carbonation. Picking out the separate elements, the smoke is dry and a little burnt tasting. The vanilla is barely discernible, a mild wisp of it which could pass for the effect of understated barrel aging. The overall impression is of a well integrated, approachable extra stout with a spot-on roasty aroma and the appropriate level of vegetal bitterness. The smoky vanilla bells and whistles are near enough an irrelevance.

Not particularly Belgian, but in stout that may be a good thing.

Pottstown steelers

What really seems to have got people talking about the Sly Fox Helles is its pull-off top, removing the whole top surface, presumably to create a better experience for those who opt to drink straight from the container. I couldn't help but do a bit of sensory testing and took a couple of swigs before I'd poured it all out. While the aroma definitely does manage to get through, the sensation is still an unpleasant one: cold metal and the rough edge of the can lip which itself is awkwardly sunk below the rim. Awkward and uncomfortable. Stick with glasses, kids.

The beer itself is a beautiful clear gold so they must be expecting at least some people to look at it. It's a little hoppier than your typical Bavarian helles, though the hops are definitely of the right genre: mown grass and fresh leafy spinach dominate. The texture is appropriately soft and there's a nice smooth breadiness from the lager malt. Not full marks for accuracy for me, but it's still very tasty.

Pikeland Pils is the same strength: 4.9% ABV, and pretty much the same colour too, though throwing a little bit of a haze. The aroma is fruitier: tart berries and possibly a touch of sherbet. On the first sip the near absence of fizz surprised me, and the flavour beneath is very interesting too: waxy and sharp with a palate-coating resin. Bitter enough to be stimulating and refreshing without becoming harsh. Simple, tasty and I'm rather surprised I like it.

Moving to the warm fermented styles we start with Royal Weisse. It takes a bit of swirling to get the lees out of the can and the end result is an orange glassful with a head which subsides quickly. They've made good use of the weissbier yeast with lots of sumptuous banana esters and some other higher-alcohol by-products: diesel and sulphur. There's a proper wheaty dry grain layer under what the yeast is doing and overall it's a fairly accurate, if workmanlike, recreation of the style.

So let's see how Sly Fox do with styles from closer to home. Phoenix is the pale ale, hefty enough at 5.1% ABV. Light on aroma but I get some bitter jaffa if I get my beak right down into it. There's a lovely buzz from the hops here, an uncompromising metallic clang softened by some cedar spicing and grapefruit spritz. Some higher floral notes and a brown sugar sweetness add some tickle to the slap. It's a beer I could settle into, there's plenty here to keep me entertained, but I have an IPA to finish on.

113 is dense and dark: orange amber and an off-white head. Again they've spared the aroma hops in favour of big bitterness. It reminds me a lot of the lagers: that waxy green acidic quality which shouldn't really be surprising since they wear their use of German hops with pride on the label, the only 7% ABV American IPA that I know of to do that. There's some pleasant toffee but no real US-style fruity high notes, just bitterness all the way. With all due respect to the old world credentials I can't say I'm a fan of this hybrid. What works at 5.1% ABV doesn't necessarily fly at 7%.

A bit of of a mixed bag here, but still it's great to see more American beer arriving in these lightweight, durable, stackable, quick-chilling, easy-open, lightproof containers.

Scorch and screech

Two from Peterborough's finest today. Oakham Inferno first and, despite the bluster of the name, it pours a sickly pale yellow, looking for all the world like a cheap adjunct lager. The aroma comes quickly to the rescue, however, pushing out a peach and mango scent that beckons the drinker in. The carbonation is a little high and the texture a little thin, even at 4.4% ABV, but the flavour more than makes up for it: a fruit explosion of pineapple and mandarin to begin with, then taking a sharp turn into spiky grapefruit and lemon bitterness. Zing by the bagful. The malt contributes as little to the flavour as it does to the colour, with just a very slight sweetness under the hops, adding a touch of orange barley sweets. Maybe a little bit on the bitter side for me to drink a lot of it but it's a wonderful wake-up call to tired tastebuds.

So Scarlet Macaw has a tough act to follow. A smidge more welly at 4.8% ABV and it's darker too: orange, shading to amber. No fireworks in the aroma this time and the flavour is definitely softer and more nuanced, a gentle jaffa orange fruitiness, though once again it gets increasingly pithy after the first few seconds. A base of digestive biscuits hovers in the background and the body is nicely full.

These two aren't actually all that different from each other, and they're both first rate hop-forward session ales. Choosing one over the other is a question of mood: the lively Inferno when you want to quaff something stimulating and the Macaw when you fancy something a bit mellower but still pretty full-on.

Still got it

The last in my series of posts on the Irish Craft Beer and Cider Festival, which ran at the RDS in Dublin a couple of weeks ago, moves away from the new young and thrusting breweries of the burgeoning independent Irish beer scene to look at the stalwarts: the veterans of the dark 20th century, all established and churning out safe, approachable, mortgage-paying beers, with one eye on the pension fund.

Are they hell.

Franciscan Well Coffee Porter has been knocking around for a while in a limited bottle run but showed up on cask at the festival. It's 7.5% ABV and they've added just the right amount of coffee, which is to say all the coffee they could possibly stuff in. The aroma delivers the invigorating bang of walking into a roastery and the only beery compromise is the chocolate flavour imparted by the dark malt producing a kind of mocha effect. The rich texture and heavy sweetness add cream and brown sugar to the cup and the end result, in Reuben's words, is "more coffee than beer". Not for everyone, but I loved it. After that, the Franciscan Well IPA was a bit of a let down. 7.5% ABV again and with some nice herbal notes in the aroma but the flavour is mostly smooth sweet toffee with no proper bitterness or fruit, just a mild jasmine spicing from the hops.

The Porterhouse have suddenly decided to make September their IPA themed month, though oddly eschewed Hop Head in favour of a new 4.6% ABV cask ale called Pale Face. There's a nice kick of marmalade in here, and some mild sandalwood, putting it on the same spectrum as good old Harvey's Best. Simple but flavoursome.

Whitewater's new one is Bullrush, a straightforward clean amber lager, dark gold with a fascinating smoky aroma. It's only 4% ABV and represents very light easy drinking. The corny grain character puts me in mind of the cream ale style. One for quaffing, not sitting over, anyway. And they've returned to the log books to resurrect Bee's Endeavour, a honey ale of years gone by. It's a beautiful liquid gold colour with a bohemian golden syrup quality to the taste. The honey hovers subtly in the background.

For a bigger honey kick the one to go for was Belgian Connection, produced at JW Sweetman in collaboration with Carlow Brewing. It's intended as a dubbel and is appropriately dark brown, though is a little light on its feet at 6.3% ABV. The banana esters loom large in the aroma and though the texture is as thin for a dubbel as the ABV might suggest, there's no lacking of complexity or intensity in the flavour: massive honey, for one thing; some incense spicing and a powerful sweetness that triggered pineapple syrup in my flavour analogy bank. Strange and unique, but quite delicious. Carlow also had O'Hara's Barley Wine on the bar, packing a bit more heft at 7.2% ABV. I guess we're spoiled by American barley wines these days because this is a perfectly good beer which left me asking where the hops are. Wheaty grains are the centre of it with a little bit of roast, but otherwise it's simple, malt-forward and warming. Retro barley wine, if you will.

All of which brings us down to the elder statesman in the house: Hilden Brewing. It was great to see Seamus himself at the pumps for a while. New to the range is a keg session stout, well put together with loads of super sweet chocolate and a very slight sour lactic finish. I suspect this may be the final one of the College Green range to be incorporated into the main Hilden brand: a rebadge of Molly's Chocolate Stout. Still, it would be no harm to see it out and about a bit more. Meanwhile on the cask engines, the newbie offered nothing more of a description than Hilden Number 4. It's a dark amber ale of 4.4% ABV and fantastically smooth. There's a big hit of chocolate and lots of sweet nutty marzipan too, combining into a kind of mozartkugel effect. I loved it, its moreish sweet dark malts reminding me of the first time I met Clotworthy Dobbin. Hilden Number 4 takes the prize for my beer of the festival weekend.

And after that my liver and my feet took a well-earned break, but normal service will resume here on Monday.