In the big smoke now

It's was great to welcome breweries to Alltech Brews & Food of whom we see little in Dublin: a chance to find out what the rest of the country are drinking; or at least the 3% of them drinking independent beer.

Festivals are literally the only places to find Bridewell beers here, and I like how Harry and Barbara-Anne always have a new one for each event. This time there were two: a contrasting pair created to commemorate the centenary of Alcock and Brown's transatlantic flight which landed not far from the brewery in Clifden, Co. Galway. Both are purportedly American-inspired, using American hops, though not necessarily American-style. That's certainly true of the blonde ale Pilot. My first impression on tasting this 4.9%-er was of a classic English golden ale, all biscuits and bubblegum with a grassy bitter finish and a soft smooth texture. It's very easy going but with enough complexity to be actively interesting. The companion is a brown ale called Navigator. This lacked the sweetness I look for in the style, going instead for dry roast, with an underlying blackberry and banana fruitiness. It's OK, but I'm a tough crowd when it comes to brown ale, and this didn't do it for me.

Kildare Brewing Company is only out the way, but you still have to go to Kildare to find their beer. The range has just had an overhaul with a series of new flagships. There's a 4.5% ABV pale ale called Soldier's Island, brewed with Amarillo and Cascade. It's very straightforward and pintable, almost like a pleasant pale English bitter. I got subtle summery notes of watermelon and peach, with a mild bite of lime rind at the end. Nothing strange or startling, just nice.

The highlight of the three I tried was called Fifty Three & Six, named after the headline digits of the brewery's coordinates. It's a clear golden colour and shows a spritzy, zesty lemon freshness first, followed by a more serious resinous dank. Mosaic is the dry hop and it's doing what it does best. Most impressively it has a properly full body for an ABV of just 3.7%. The pale ale was thoroughly upstaged.

Finally a Coffee Milk Stout, featuring cold brew from local roasters PS. This is pretty straightforward again; a modest 4.5% ABV with sweet mocha roast and a big dollop of cream. Everything a coffee milk stout should be, really.

I got a good chat with Alex from Loudons Brewery in Co. Clare about their ambitions. They're modest ones, and we're not about to see a plethora of Loudons taps around Dublin or the rest of the country. But if we did, they might have their two new beers on them. I began by tasting Loudons Pilsner, an incredibly soft-textured version of the style. A remark about that led on to a discussion of how the brewery uses 100% rainwater as its supply. The wet grass notes of Saaz add just the right amount of bitter seasoning and the whole thing is extremely sinkable at just 4% ABV.

Loudons Irish Stout is at the same strength, and it's rare for one of these to be that low. There's a light roastiness, a fair bit of sweet chocolate and then a tangy bitterness on the end. It's plain and easy-going, though a little too sharp for me.

I thought they had a superior example of the same sort of thing down at Ballykilcavan. Their Blackwell stout was launched late last year. It's a more typical strength at 4.4% ABV and has more of most of the classic Irish stout components. The flavour shows lots of early roast, while the balanced bitterness presents itself in both the finish and, pleasingly, the aroma. Perhaps my favourite feature, however, was the creaminess. That's a bit of a stout cliché, and not something I normally value in them, but it really added to the classic feel here. I think I could happily drink a few of these in succession.

Elsewhere on the bar there was a variety of specials. I thought Line Blocker pale ale was named as a dig the the big breweries' aggressive sales tactics but it's something much more innocent: the obstruction in the brewhouse caused by the excessive hopping employed here. It's a daring attempt at the modern murky pale ale style, going big on the tropical with a juicy aroma and a flavour in which I picked out pineapple, mango and guava. It does suffer a few of the typical flaws, namely yeast bite and a cloying gumminess, and I definitely don't think I could manage pint after pint of this, despite a mere 5.1% ABV. A small glass was pleasant, though, and shows the brewery has a definite daring streak among the safer alternatives.

You can't get safer than a 3.8% ABV lager, like Ballykilcavan's Lager Unlaois'd. Though brewed with Magnum and Saaz it's not terribly hop forward, showing a dry, rye-cracker aroma and lots of sweetish grain in the flavour. I found this quite bland and a little disappointing. Perhaps Ballykilcavan could swap a few notes with Loudons on the makings of lager and stout.

Now Dead Centre we do get in Dublin, though more canned than draught in recent times. There were two new releases on tap at their bar, first on being Wizard of the Sonic double IPA. This is a full 8% ABV and quite a dark copper colour. The malt which caused that also adds a toffeeish flavour. This is set next to an onslaught of resinous US hops: Columbus, Citra and Mosaic doing the heavy lifting. It's a bit loud, in keeping with the name, I guess. Good though.

Bringing up the rear on the Dead Centre range was Sham Maths, an American-style amber ale. It's another big one for the style, at 6.2% ABV. And it's another serious-tasting recipe. There's a heavy hop funk to this in both flavour and aroma. On the malt side it manages to be both dry and caramel-infused, and there's a raspberry flavour I associate much more with Irish red ale than American amber. While I liked the serious bitterness, a little more gentle hop flavour -- some citrus or tropicals -- would have improved it immensely.

The last festival bar for today was actually pouring a Dublin brand, albeit brewed in Co. Limerick and quite limited in its locations around town, namely Persistence. I was disappointed to learn, first off, that the excellent P42 pilsner they did has been discontinued. Damn you, Irish drinkers of poor taste in lager. Replacing it is P45 Lager which is a much sweeter and less hop-forward affair. It's fine, if shading a little to the sickly side. I hope all you haters of proper pils will love it.

Also new to me was P50, described no more explicitly than "session ale". It's a dark amber colour so I thought I was getting something toffeeish. It turned out to be be incredibly dry; full-on astringent, in fact. There's a little blackcurrant fruit in the flavour, and then loads of super-strong stewed builders' tea. I'm really not sure I could do a session on this.

An interesting mix of beers here, and plenty of examples where safe styles don't at all mean bland or low quality. Tomorrow, however, we take all the safeties off.

And you're back in the room

The run-up to St. Patrick's Day saw Alltech taking over the Convention Centre for their seventh annual celebration of beer, spirits, food and allied pleasures. There was a lot of beer to try down on the main floor, but proceedings began for me with a tasting event in the media room on the Thursday evening. Three brewers had been selected to present new-release beers to us.

Rascals came first, bringing a freshly canned milkshake pale ale called Froots & The Maytals. They've added mango and passionfruit to this, and I found it interesting that the latter doesn't completely dominate the taste the way it tends to in most beers. Behind the lactose thickness there's a proper citric bitterness, grapefruit and lime rather than anything tropical, and a slightly salty tang as well. There's a pleasant green resin note from the hops too. Despite the far-out branding, this is a serious beer, and a well-made one. It tastes just silly enough to be fun, without being outright stupid.

James from Alltech talks beer

Cementing its reputation for being ahead of the curve in beer trends, Black's of Kinsale had a new IPA called OG Kush. The rise of cannabis-derived products in the leisure beverage industry hasn't passed them by, and this one uses a THC-free extract to bring extra terpenes to the party, complementing the ones contributed by cannabis-cousin, hops. The result is genuinely skunky, but in a good way: the weighty resinousness of marijuana plus the spices and grapefruit of the C-hops. Yes it's gimmicky, but like the previous beer it offers a genuinely interesting new flavour perspective.

And of course we got some Alltech beers too. The latest sub-brand from Station Works in Dundalk is Clocked Out, a series of small-batch runs on the pilot kit, created by the brewing team after hours. Clocked Out had a bar of its own at the gig, and its wares will be popping up in pubs over the coming months.

First to be demonstrated was a Kveik IPA. This 8.5%-er had been brewed six days previously, fermented at 36°C. It smelled and tasted oddly jammy: a sweet red fruit and sugar quality which I can't pin on the Citra and Yellow Sub hops, so I'm guessing must have been the work of the kveik. There's even a dry crunch of raspberry seeds in with the sweetness. A heavy texture made it tough going to drink, but it was much better than one might expect from the turbo-charged fermentation process. It fits entirely into the US DIPA genre, even if it's not a brilliant example.

I spent a fair bit of time down at the Clocked Out bar, exploring the other options. I rarely pass a new Black IPA, and made no exception for theirs. It's 5.5% ABV and designed to have no roasted flavour at all. In this it succeeds, but there's also a lack of hop punch; a pinch of liquorice being as bitter as it gets. I found it almost mild-like, showing a dusting of autumn fruits on a light texture. Decent, but very unexciting.

Yes Dave, that's the number
 of beers mixed in here

Possibly the most talked-about beer of the festival, in my hearing anyway, was the Clocked Out Latte Stout. This was blended from two taps, neither of which Dave would let me taste separately: the New England pale ale is too sweet and the coffee stout too acrid. Combined, however, the effect was wonderful. The texture was every bit as creamy as the name demands, and the flavour has as much chocolate as it does coffee, with the evaporated-milk sweetness of a Milky Bar or Caramac. It might get a bit sickly if consumed in quantity, but a half was delicious.

There was what was described as a Micro IPA on the bar too. My notes say it was 3.8% ABV, which isn't very micro. The texture was odd: big and creamy at first, but tailing away to water very soon after. There's a soft vanilla and lemon curd flavour, lacking in bitterness for my tastes. My sample was probably too small to give it a proper shake; let's just say it wasn't strikingly brilliant and leave it there.

Just time for one more Clocked Out beer; one I nearly passed by. This was brewed at Alltech's US brewery in Lexington, as their flagship Bourbon Barrel Ale. I've never been much of a fan of this heavy, sticky beast, and didn't reckon that turning it into Brett Bourbon Barrel Ale would make much of a difference. It did though. The first impression is of a very clean and zingy Flanders red: that ripe summer fruit and quite an intense sourness. The bruiser of a base beer didn't succumb without a fight, and there's a residual dark mix of toffee, biscuits and builder's tea, as well as a dangerous ABV of 8.2%. As an expression of what Brettanomyces can do, it's fantastic. There's no real farmyard funkiness, per se, which I found a little confusing; but the clear and clean sourness provided plenty of complexity in its place.

Lots of other breweries were making return visits to the festival. I stopped by Kinnegar early on to try Phlegmish Phunk, this one a stated attempt at the Flemish red style, Bretted, though not wood-aged. It offers an enticing white wine aroma, which isn't funky at all. You have to wait to taste for the funk to arrive. Here there's the almost-wrong-tasting leathery tannic twang of old scrumpy cider, but it's clean behind that. The funkiness reminds me of that found in a well-aged bottle of Orval, with all the hops and most of the carbonation gone, leaving vinous richness behind. This may not have the beatings of that Clocked Out one, nor answer exactly what I'd like in this style, but it is very good.

Still Kinnegar, still sour, but a little less involved, there's Behemoth, a Berliner weisse with added basil and lime. Easy to review: it tastes like a margarita. It's tangy, it's sour; the citrus is quite concentrated, almost oily. Though 5% ABV it tastes like less, so maybe a more childish analogue would be appropriate: a Calippo, or a Loop-the-Loop. This is cold and refreshing fun, definitely not a beer to take seriously.

There's a grand tradition of larger-than-life Rye River bars at Alltech, kept alive in 2019 too. It was slightly surreal to see a wide selection of the brewery's many many beers on display together in one place. Specials and rarities were confined to a single tap, which was pouring Hop Colossus when first I went to check it. Of course this is an IPA, 6.5% ABV and murky as you like. Quite possibly murkier, actually. That brought with it an amazing freshness, the American hops absolutely popping with aromatic oils. I didn't even bother writing down what it tasted like, just that it was absolutely delicious, and an excellent illustration of why cloudiness gets treated as a virtue in IPAs these days. If only more of them tasted as good.

When that ran out it was replaced by Fobby's Oakily Smokily, a quirky name for a very straight-up grodziskie. It's a little strong for the style at 4.6% ABV but that had no detrimental effect on it. From the right shade of pale custardy yellow to the huge burnt-rubber smoke foretaste, to the quick and quenching finish, there were no surprises lurking in here. As long as you knew you ordered an oak-smoked wheat beer, that's what you got served.

Rye River has a couple of new cans on the go and one of them -- Daragh's Grapefruit Session IPA -- picked up a gold medal in the festival competition for best IPA. Not best fruited or speciality IPA; the best IPA in the entire field of entries. It is, I assume, simply the brewery's regular session IPA with added grapefruit syrup. It's the same 3.8% ABV anyway. The fruit has had a big effect on it, making it taste like a Club Orange or Orangina: mineral fizz overlaid with pithy pulp. It's juicy without being sticky and retains a mild bitterness. I couldn't shake the feeling it's more of a shandy than an IPA. Another one for the summer.

Also present and correct as usual was Galway Hooker. The new one on their stall was Galway Gold, a 4.5% ABV golden ale that tends to get rebadged as a house beer out in the wild. The badge here claimed it was an IPA. I'm not sure about that. It's appropriately gold and shows a clean and simple lager-like profile: dry and crisp with a touch of peach and a pinch of celery. Very much a conversation beer for venues where beer isn't the centre of the offer, but a well-made one too. Since it's not often seen around these parts I was pleased to get the chance to try it, and in tomorrow's post I'll be exploring the beers from breweries which don't have much presence here in the capital.

Tetley Ležák

Beer shopping in Armagh, never a wonderland of quality and choice, took a turn for the worse on my most recent attempt. The most interesting things I could find were today's pair of warmed-up Tetley beers. The brand has been owned by Carlsberg for decades but as far as I know these revived beers have been brewed at its spiritual successor, the Leeds Brewery.

Tetley's Golden Ale first, a 4%-er. It smelled a bit skunky, which wasn't a good start. The flavour was very decent, however: a mostly sweet and slightly spicy mix of golden syrup and Earl Grey tea, providing sugar, tannin and bergamot. It's fizzy, but not thin with it. Consumed ice cold it's very refreshing, and just complex enough to be worthwhile. Not a million miles from a quality Czech lager, actually. Yes it tastes very similar to plenty of other English golden ales, but then that's not something I drink very often. I was on board for the sequel.

That would be No. 3 Pale Ale. Pale ale trumps golden, right? Wrong. While this is similarly coloured, and only a little bit stronger, it's horribly dry, to the point of acrid. It's crackers: spun wheat or rye crackers, topped with sesame seeds and possibly sawdust. There's an even harsher finish, all musty and dusty, and even a little sour. Three sentences later I have to remind myself that they've called this a pale ale. There's no hop character, and no malt kindness either. A cruel beer, in short, and I doubt any dispense variant would save it.

Georgian Yorkshire, then, is a land of contrasts. Top notch golden ales and execrable pale ones. Tread carefully.

A tickle of zwickl

Since they arrived almost two years ago, the Stiegl beers haven't exactly been making waves in local beer geek circles. Importer Carlow Brewing has carved out a mainstream niche for Goldbräu lager, and the excellent Radler was a welcome feature on rotation taps last summer, but other than that it's been quite quiet. I paid attention, then, when Paracelsus appeared out of the blue at UnderDog last year.

It's described as a "bio-zwickl", so an organic unfiltered lager, then. The ABV is 5.2% and it's a hazy shade of orange. I got a surprising amount of juice from the aroma; a zesty hit of freshly-squeezed orange. The more typical grain husk is also there, and that's what leads the flavour: dry biscuit at first, building in sweetness to the level of golden syrup, reminding me a little of Budvar. The juice has vanished, strangely, and in its place stands a noble hop bitterness: raw green veg; assertive, verging on harsh to my sensitive palate. The texture is noteworthy too: deliciously soft and chewy.

Overall this is very good at what it does. It's a wholesome and flavourful Mitteleuropa lager of the sort we don't see much of in these parts. I know from the launch event that Stiegl has some very interesting items in its repertoire. It would be great to see more of them around.

Rare as a Yeti

Great Divide is back! The Colorado brewer hasn't been seen on these shores in around ten years but it has returned -- via Grand Cru Beers, of course -- with a couple of the classics and a bunch more recent releases. Predictably, I acquired cans in Stephen Street News.

I begin with Hibernation, described as an English-style Old Ale and a sizeable 8.7% ABV. Pouring was a bit of a chore, lots of foam piling up with each tip of the properly fridge-cold can. It's a dark red colour under that; a clear shade of garnet. I guess English bitter is the beer style at the base as it tastes of that sort of caramel and green cabbage. "Old ale" implies a certain richness but this doesn't have that. It's sharply boozy, throwing in a mix of strong tea, cheap sherry and rancid veg. Old in the sense of dusty, musty and dry. I'm not a fan of this. Dry and strong bitter is fine but this one just pushes things too far. Americans.

On a much more modern note there's Heyday IPA, because those crazy kids love hazy. It's only slightly clouded, still letting plenty of light through. There's a delicious spice on the nose, all mandarin rind and a kick of coconut. The flavour brings more coconut plus a mix of satsuma, grapefruit and red cabbage. A sticky passionfruit tang lasts long into the finish. This is very much its own thing, not chasing a juicy trend yet still full-on tropical goodness. I don't know that there's anything to answer the real fashion for murk, but plenty of punters will be convinced they're on-trend and drinking the latest thing. Fair play to them all.

I look forward to seeing what else Great Divide has been up to, as well as quietly revisiting some old favourites.

Friday, bro

Our week in Irish beer concludes with a pair from the busiest outfit of 2019 thus far: O Brother. Their current arty series continues with Time Waits For No One, a saison at 6.1% ABV. As usual, UnderDog was the first place I spotted it. The first sip told me this was going to be the fruity sort of saison, all tropical juice on a soft texture. But just as I was settling in to that, along came a dry and dusty bite of yeast. This turned out to be two beers from a single pour: the fun juicy one and an acridly bitter dreggy mess. It's the very definition of a curate's egg in beer form, flashing with moments of brilliance alongside literal bitter disappointment. I found myself too discomfited by the contrasting tastes to enjoy it and deemed it actively unpleasant. The unrealised potential here saddens me a little; it could have been wonderful.

Onwards to Networking, this one a brut IPA. Whereas the previous beer had too much going on it, this was simpler and more integrated. It's lightly dry with a spritzy orange flavour; minerally, like Orangina. A stronger, more tangy, grapefruit juice element arrives late but doesn't make the taste too dramatic. I don't know that balance is supposed to be a feature of brut IPA, but at the same time I don't see why not: they don't have to be enamel-strippers. This is just dry enough to qualify as true to style and makes really good use of the hops' fruit notes. I would certainly take this sort of thing over a murky vanilla-and-garlic hop soup.

And with that, it's into the long weekend. Those of you who'll be at Alltech today or tomorrow, have a fabulous time. Otherwise, celebrate St Patrick's Day in whatever way works for you (or don't) and I'll be back on Monday with more of the usual.

All stations

Today's the day. The Alltech Craft Brews & Food Fair opens at the Convention Centre in Dublin at 5pm and runs through to Saturday night. In today's post I'm catching up with the host's brewery, Station Works in Dundalk, and for a change I'm looking at their own brands rather than the ones they brew for supermarket chains. All were bought in chain supermarkets, though: that's just how this segment works.

Foxes Rock has long been the signature brand. I'm revisiting the very first in the series, Foxes Rock Pale Ale. I first reviewed this off the back of the 2015 Fair, and pronounced it lousy. A new brewery and a new brewer later and I thought it deserving of a second look, although I couldn't find it in its snazzy new green livery. It poured a murky shade of orange and smelled artificially fruity, like a boiled sweet. Bracing myself for a malt-bomb, I was pleased by the sharp zing of citrus -- classically American and very refreshing. That lasts all the way through, too: I expected the hops would fade at some point to let sweet biscuity malt in, but it doesn't; it's juice all the way. If anything it gets bitterer, the satsuma and kumquat intensifying to grapefruit and lime by the finish. This beer has come a long way. I'm glad I gave it another go.

Foxes Rock Red Ale was entirely new to me. It proved a very much down-the-line interpretation of the style, the ghosts of Macardle and Moore passing the baton to Cambrickville's new incumbents, perhaps. So. You get a deep red glassful and an ABV of 4.5%. Summer fruit and spiced roasted grains mix in the aroma, though the flavour is somewhat less complex. Toffee first, creating a very sweet foretaste on a surprisingly light body; and then a somewhat harsh bitterness: vegetal and metallic, like the more severe kind of brown English bitter. The roasted spice from the aroma returns to add a little complexity in the finish. Nothing is overdone or off-kilter about this, and there are no creative bells and whistles. The lad who likes his large bottle of Macardles will find this familiar, if rather more full-on.

The latest in the line-up is Foxes Rock Session IPA, 4.1% of sessionability. It's quite dark by the standards of the style, a hazy ochre, almost brown. There's a strong bitterness in the aroma, all punchy lime-shred marmalade. And that's all it really does in the flavour too. Good session IPAs (thinking of you, Little Fawn) have a rounded and juicy fruit quality to balance the bitterness. This skips that bit, ending up simple to the point of cheap-tasting. There's a savoury bite too, which I'm guessing is from that residual yeast, and it doesn't go well next to the extreme hops. It's far from offensive, and in no way a return to the bad Foxes Rock beers of yore. It's just not very good as a session IPA either.

Before there was even Foxes Rock, Station Works produced a pilsner called Finn. That's still around, and has been joined by two new brandmates. I don't know what it means that these were priced about a third cheaper than the Foxes Rock. Perhaps I shouldn't get my hopes up.

Finn Pale Ale is 4.3% ABV and quite dark. There's a haze which, on close inspection, proved to be a solid curtain of suspended lumps. The aroma is a mix of eye-watering citrus pith and caramelised malt. It tastes sweeter than I expected: lots of malt candy right at the front. The hops bring fruit -- juicy citrus, leaning almost to tropical -- but no real bitterness, beyond a familiar and vaguely metallic tang in the finish. I think this would be recognisable blind as a new-wave Station Works beer, certainly to anyone who has tasted the Foxes Rock Pale Ale above. It's fun, simple and easy going. I see no reason why you would trade up to the more expensive flagship.

We conclude with Finn Stout, This looked very handsome in the glass, its heading looking almost nitro-creamy, and lasting for the whole pint. Flavourwise it's absolutely classic in the Irish dry style. There's a solid roast-grain backbone balanced with hints of chocolate and finishing with a bite of what I'm guessing are English hops: tangy and earthy. No single part of the flavour jumps out particularly: all is calm and harmonious. Its best feature is the texture, tiny bubbles giving it a beautiful smoothness and making it very easy drinking. This is very much a beer for sessioning, perfectly fitting for 4.3% ABV and €1.99 a bottle.

To say Station Works has come on in leaps and bounds since the bad old days is an understatement. I'll be front and centre to see what they've brought to the Convention Centre later.