A long way from summer

Summer 2022 saw festivals return to these parts. One that I didn't get to attend was The Big Grill in Dublin. The Porterhouse, unusually for them, had two special edition beers made for outdoor warm-weather drinking. The leftovers went on tap at their Temple Bar pub afterwards, where I missed the passionfruit IPA, but I did get to have a pint of Porterhouse Lime Lager.

"What is it," I asked. 
"It's a lime lager," the barman's reply. Fair enough.

I figured they had simply whacked some syrup into one of the house pale lagers, and maybe they did, but the result was much better than expected. The soft texture is that of a very good Helles, while the crisp cracker base flavour is quality pilsner. Except, instead of grassy noble hops on top, there's a subtle and real-tasting essence of lime. It works wonderfully to boost the beer's refreshment power, which I'm sure was the point in the first place. I bet it went down a storm in Herbert Park last August.

And so we tear pages off the calendar and go Around the Clock. The Porterhouse's huge annual winter stout is in its fourth iteration in 2022. I haven't enjoyed any of them as much as the first one, but maybe this is the year they nail it again.

AtC4 is the usual 12% ABV and of course the brewery's sister distillery, Dingle, provides the ex-bourbon barrels. There's not much beyond sweet bourbon-y vanilla in the aroma, and the flavour certainly puts that front and centre, including a big dose of raw wood. There's some nice complexity alongside it, however, bringing black pepper, dark chocolate, vegetal hops and a certain savoury soy-sauce umami. It works, overall, but as in previous recent years it still tastes a bit raw and unfinished. I'll be picking up another to see how it mellows.

The brewery doesn't have the busiest of turnover as regards new beers, but it does seem that careful consideration goes into what they design and release.

Whatever you're into

I have a real fondness for how Galway Bay Brewery, a big player in this country's independent beer scene, tends to follow the interests of its head brewer in its output. I guess it's because the core range, vertically integrated into its pub chain, is the main part of the business, whereas the stuff I buy and review is a tiny fraction. Regardless, it's charming. So we get lots of lagers and today it's nods towards Belgium and American IPA back when it was good.

We begin with Beers That Nobody Asked For, a Boundary name on a Boundary collaboration. It's a petite saison: golden, hazy and 3.8% ABV. The aroma is a mix of sweetly fruity bubblegum and savoury herbal spice. The latter is, I assume, down to the lemongrass advertised on the label. Seems like it might be a bit busy but the flavour is altogether more restrained, presenting a dry pithy note: a little grapefruit and a little straw. The strength is apparent from the mouthfeel but it's not unpleasantly thin, being instead light and drinkable in the table beer fashion. There's not much by way of complexity on offer here -- it's made for quenching thirst more than offering bloggers something to analyse. But analyse I have and it's too late to change that now.

Continuing the Belgian theme, this bottle of The Bots Are Back In Town was a kind gift from the brewery on the first night of the revamped Against the Grain when it refused to come out of the shiny new taps. It's described as a Belgian pale ale and the packaging format is intended to hold in considerable carbonation. I poured carefully and sure enough a stiff mass of froth formed quickly over the subtly hazy straw-coloured body. A light and fresh aroma of peach, pineapple and pepper tells us we're definitely in Belgium, via Oranmore. There's more of a citrus tang in the flavour, but in the old-world fashion of big jaffa oranges and grapefruit marmalade. Beside it is a funky farmy spice with more than an echo of fine saison about it. Pleasingly, the fizz doesn't get in the way of any of this -- the texture is soft and the whole thing very approachable. It doesn't have the flavour intensity of, say, De Ranke XX Bitter or Taras Boulba, but it's still very good: both 4.5% ABV and built to savour slowly.

Oregon Grown is back for a fourth round, this time with Columbus, Centennial, Chinook and Cascade. It's an old-fashioned combination but it wears it well, ensuring first of all that there's a steady malt base in place. That gives it an amber colour, retro-clear, and a pinch of toffee sweetness. You don't get much time to appreciate the malt, however, because those hops get very busy very quickly. It's insanely resinous, jam packed full of marijuana, pine and grapefruit zest, opening bright and fresh then finishing on a hard damp-grass bitterness. It's not subtle, nor meant to be I'm sure, but there's a subtle fruity nuance of strawberry and blackcurrant. While the general west coast revival has shown a tendency to fudge things on matters of clarity and bitterness, this one is all-in authentic-tasting.

But of course they couldn't leave it there, and added a companion fifth Oregon Grown: Idaho 7, El Dorado & Azacca. More importantly than the hop list, this one is hazy, and properly so. It's every bit as New Englandy as the previous one is western. The mouthfeel is full-on creamy and the flavour blends sweet and juicy mandarin with a touch of pithy bitterness and a kick of dank resins on the end. 6% ABV means it's light enough for by-the-pint drinking, and none of the flavour elements builds on the palate enough to make it difficult. I don't know if this pair is where the series ends, but they're an educational set, reminding drinkers respectively how American-style IPA should be, and how it actually is now.

When the ex-head brewer of Galway Bay, Chris, was back in Ireland over the summer they had him help with an IPA, allowing it to be badged as a collaboration with his current employer Fuerst Wiacek in Berlin. The result is PDA, a hazy sunset-coloured one, 6.8% ABV and hopped with Idaho 7, Citra, Mosaic and Nelson Sauvin. It smells simultaneously juicy and pithy, which isn't all that surprising given the combination. The flavour goes bitterer than I expected from that: the Nelson swings in with its hard grassy minerality, teaming up with Citra's oily lime peel. There's room for a sweeter tropical side but it doesn't materialise, finishing tangy and acidic instead. Despite appearances, this isn't really for haze fans. Although the soft mouthfeel leaves it far from the west coast style, the flavour profile is very much in that direction. I wasn't wowed, but I liked what it does. A higher proportion of Nelson might have brought us somewhere a little more interesting but I can't really complain: all four hops have their say.

End-to-end quality product, and now the wonderful smoked Märzen is back too. Happy Christmas to me!

Semper Fi

The Fidelity beer festival in July meant that a lot of Whiplash's international brewing buddies were in Dublin for a few days. That gave them an opportunity to get some collaborations in the tanks, which I got to drink a few months later.

We'll begin on a couple of lagers, and for the collaboration with Donzoko they decided to tackle light lager for some reason. Only When I Sleep is 4.2% ABV and certainly light coloured: a flawless shade of white gold. Instead of bland fizz or a metallic tang, the flavour instead is soft and tropical, with exotic notes of lychee, jasmine and rosewater. It's not at all what I expected. I guess they've taken the uninspiring specs and done something worthwhile with them. This is a proper easy-drinking thirst quencher, and the flavour complexity is dialled back enough if you just want to sink it. There's much more enjoyment to be gained from sipping it, however.

New York's Finback collaborated on Witness, a dry-hopped pils, and a strong one at 5.5% ABV. It's a beautiful warm golden colour and smells quite spicy and herbal, with incense shading towards weed. The can doesn't tell us which hops were used, but I suspect something Kiwi from the mix of grass, minerals and soft fruit in the flavour. The high strength means a full body and it's lacking the crispness of pilsner as a result. Nevertheless it's very tasty, offering lager cleanness with a fun multifaceted new-world hop complexity.

Wylam is a regular partner-in-crime for Whiplash, and their latest joint is an IPA called Word With Yourself. It's very hazy, of course, and 6.3% ABV. So far nothing out of the ordinary. Something odd happens in the flavour, however. I figured they used an unusual combination of hops giving it a strange mix of sweet and savoury -- clove rock and nutmeg pastry spicing meeting a raw red onion intensity. Now, they may have used unusual hops but it turns out that the gimmick is an absence of barley. Without any further details I decided they must have used sorghum, and even detected a similarity with the Nigerian version of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, also sorghum based. But it's not that: the grist is just plain old wheat and oats. Regardless, it's an interesting effect, noticeably different from normal IPA and, being honest, not in a good way.

Moving on to recent solo efforts, the latest in the Fruit Salad Days series is Passion Fruit. As usual it's 3.8% ABV and in the Berliner weisse style. It's hazy and orange, and smells strongly of passionfruit, unsurprisingly. That one-note tropical thing continues in the flavour but I think it has an edge on most other passionfruit sour beers. Here, it's concentrated, into almost a butane heat. It's the very essence of passionfruit, not merely a flavour. The sourness is low key and provides no more than a clean base for the tropical fruit. The end result is bright and extremely sunny, taking the grainy base of Berliner weisse and building Carmen Miranda's hat on top of it. Fair play. 

A new export-strength stout is always a cause for celebration so I broke out the party streamers for the arrival of The Wake. This is 7% ABV and a dense black colour with a tan head, so full style marks for appearance. Cocoa is the main act in both the flavour and aroma: dry and powdery, crying out for a balancing milky sweetness but you're not getting that. I love the bitterness, and I'm not sure if it comes from the grains or hops, but it's exactly the sort you get in high-quality dark chocolate. There's a lightness of touch in the texture, making this a perfect stouty antidote to all the facile sticky kiddie pastry desserts which pass for strong stout these days. The balance and poise which are Whiplash hallmarks are stamped firmly on this. 

We finish with another collaboration, this time it's Cerebral from Denver and a double IPA. This is called At Dusk and is a little stronger than the standard Whiplash DIPA at 8.3% ABV. It smells as tropical as the Fruit Salad Days with oodles of passionfruit and mango, all derived from the hops. The flavour is not overly hot, but it is another dense one, with a feel of fruit-flavoured custard about the unctuous texture and vanilla taste. Beside this sits a strange grassy bitterness, adding an unwelcome savoury element to what is otherwise a dessert beer. It's OK, but I didn't think it up to Whiplash's standards when they make beers like this on their own.

And as of this month, Fidelity's legacy goes beyond a few collaboration beers. It's the name Whiplash and The Big Romance have chosen for their new joint venture, a pub on Queen Street in Dublin. Expect the same level of attention to detail that The Big Romance brought to their original venue and which can be found in every Whiplash beer.

Taking to the hills

The erasure of "Bitter" as a category of English beer is to be regretted, and I'm reminded of it every time I see something that's obviously in the bitter or pale ale category badged with phrases such as "Hoppy Amber Ale". Like this one from Hobsons: Shropshire Hills. Not least of my issues is that "amber ale" is a style with a meaning, and while this is the colour of actual amber and the middle traffic light, it's not an amber ale.

Apart from anything else, the hops are to the fore in it and it is, you know, bitter. There's a classically English floral aroma with a hint of more new-world lemon, a result of English Cascade hops, mixed here with Challenger. The malt base is crisp, clean and cracker-like, its simple dryness allowing the hops to take the lead. The flavour is sterner than the aroma, flowers turning to a hard grapefruit pith and shred-filled marmalade. But, it being Hobsons, it's all expertly balanced and the finishing note of lightly tannic not-too-strong black tea means it's exceedingly refreshing and drinkable.

I don't complain about Hobsons much. They've been one of my favourite English breweries consistently for years. But this "hoppy amber ale" business is unconvincing, a distraction, and ought to be dropped.

All angles

I mentioned yesterday that the EBCU was in town last month. The weekend involved considerably more beers than at Open Gate.

Hosting Friday's meeting was Rascals, and afterwards I just had time to grab one new offering from them: Pilot 69: Sour IPA. This is a light 4.4% ABV and a hazy pale yellow. The haze brings a certain chalky dryness which I didn't appreciate, but there's plenty of tart fruity fun also; just puckering enough, with overtones of lemon meringue pie. Beers like this aren't meant to be masterpieces of complexity or understatement and this one is exactly as casually tasty as they should be.

At lunch, the guests brought some beers for tasting from their home countries. The newly-elected chairman, André Brunnsberg, provided one he had collaborated on with a brewery in his native Finland. Tuomas is described as an American-style porter and comes from the Laitilan Wirvoitusjuomatehdas brewery in the south-west, not far from Turku. My first question was whether it's cool-fermented (it's not) because there's a fabulous clean crispness right from the start and throughout. A seam of liquorice adds to the Baltic porter effect, and then it finishes dry with just the right amount of roast. I'd have thought it would have a bit more hop poke to justify the "American" label, but I didn't miss it either. This is delicious easy drinking and only slightly overclocked at 5.5% ABV.

The Poles brought a Grodziskie, which shouldn't be surprising except they picked the weirdest example they could find. It's from Trzech Kumpli and the full name is Piwo w Stylu Grodziskie z Grillowanymi Cytrynami i Czerwonym Pieprzem, so "Grodziskie Style Beer with Grilled Lemons and Red Pepper". Yum. Despite the daft recipe it does manage to retain the essential characteristics of Poland's native smoked wheat beer. It's still only 2.9% ABV, for one thing, and pale and hazy. There's lots of smoke which turns a little rubbery on the end, but not excessively so. I couldn't see where the lemons went, but the peppers are present, seasoning the smoke but not interfering with the basics. I'm not sure I would recommend this beer, exactly, but I got a laugh from it.

The same brewery also has a much more prosaic IPA, called Pan IPAni. Not that it's bland or boring, just that 6% ABV hazy IPAs with wheat are brewed by other people. This has all the features of the genre that you love/hate dialled up high. It's very hazy, for one, and there's lots of sweet vanilla plus enough of a concentrated garlic effect to scorch the palate slightly. Not easy drinking, then, but one of those beers where I found the sheer audacious bigness of the taste makes it worthwhile.

From Rascals we went on a picturesque excursion along the Luas Red Line, to Urban Brewing. They had their Oktoberfest lagers back on -- Festbier and Märzen -- plus a couple of new things, including Club Pale Ale. I never got an explanation for the name so you'll have to use your imagination. It's 4.4% ABV and single-hopped with Mosaic. Maybe it's a reference to the brand of orangeade, because it's quite sweet and tastes of orange peel more than anything else. While it's quite simple, and no showcase for the delights of Mosaic, it offers decent casual refreshment.

The next one is a bit more involved: Dunkel Roggen. I expected heavy from this dark rye beer but wasn't prepared for quite how sweet it is. Brown banana is the principal flavour and that's not something one can drink a lot of in one go. There's a mild touch of dry roast in the finish but not enough to balance it. The big surprise is it's only 4% ABV. For such a weakling it made me work hard.

Finally, a collaboration. Urban had Hopfully in to create a Mango Sour. I don't doubt that it was made with what it claims to be made with, but I got a lot more coconut and pineapple from the flavour than mango. While not sour exactly, it is at least fairly dry, with a slightly gritty floury texture. The only off-putting bit was an unsettling whiff of cheese in the aroma, surely not hop-derived because it wouldn't have enough hops for that. Some weird effect of fermenting fruit purée, I guess. I quite liked this, though if they'd badged it as a piña colada beer in the first place I would have been even more on board.

That's quite a decently wide selection for a day's international drinking with international friends, and I didn't even mention the sahti.

Move fast and brew things

I made three trips to The Guinness Open Gate Brewery over the autumn, the first in September, taking further advantage of their new walk-ins policy.

My on-arrival sample was Open Gate Festbier, a little bit of a lightweight at 5.5% ABV. Still there's a richness to both the deep golden colour and the malt-driven aroma, smelling almost sticky with honey and treacle. The flavour continues in that vein, and while it stays in the Bavarian zone, there's a touch of those awful orange-coloured things the Americans call Oktoberfest beer. Here, the lower gravity comes to its aid and it finishes quickly before turning nasty. It's decent and characterful, representing the style adequately. I wasn't tempted into ordering a bigger measure however.

My first actual choice was Open Gate Smoked Porter. This looks properly Guinnessy: black with a cream-coloured head, and its 4.8% ABV offers a reminder that Guinness calling its 4.2% ABV flagship a "stout" is a bit silly. Anyway, the aroma shows the standard roast and mild sourness of regular Guinness, and the texture is similar too. I expected the smoke to jump out in the taste, but it's subtle to the point of non-existent. Instead, the dominant flavour is chocolate, and that's what echoes long in the aftertaste. There's a bit of a dry bite which could be the smoke, but if you like your smoked beers smokey, as I do, this isn't the one. Another candidate for the "passable" file. If they hadn't advertised the smoke I might have enjoyed it more.

Open Gate IPAs are rarely stellar so I wasn't expecting much from Hook Line & Sinker, a staff brewing competition winner. It's mostly clear and amber coloured, smelling faintly of orange peel. We're definitely on the west coast here (6.8% ABV, 70 IBUs) as the flavour proceeds to pine resin and good old fashioned grapefruit. As tends to happen with these -- and I blame the Guinness yeast for this -- the malt side mutes the hops somewhat; an attempt to bring balance to a style that doesn't suit it. So the brightly bitter citrus becomes prosaic marmalade, and the fresh pine shades to overconcentrated floor cleaner. That sounds worse than it is. Once again, this beer is fine, but it depressingly typical of Open Gate IPA. I wonder is this what the brewer intended it to be.

I left the most interesting-sounding one to the end: Jerk Spiced Brown Ale. This is the second time Open Gate has done one of these, but 2022's has been substantially beefed up from 2019's, to 8% ABV. It's just about possible to see through the very dark brown body and it's nitrogenated which probably holds the aroma back. The flavour, however, goes all in on those herbs and spices. I don't know what's in it but I get black peppercorns, nutmeg and cardamom on a perfect brown ale base of toffee and milk chocolate. My only issue with this one is that it doesn't taste anything like the ABV: it's light-bodied and even thirst-quenching in a way that beer of this strength shouldn't be. The nitrogen alone should have given it more body than it has. Go figure. Anyway, it's lovely but I'm not sure I'd want to drink it again out of fear of how quickly I could down it.

Early last month I was back, as Open Gate hosted a segment of the autumn 2022 European Beer Consumers Union meeting. On the flight this time was another new IPA, called Hoppy McHoppface. Again it's a very typical OGB IPA, presenting headless, dark and murky, and tasting sweet first, then resinous and finishing on a hard tacked-on bitterness. None of the elements meld together properly, nor is there any standout headline feature. The end result is a mulchy estery mess, the opposite of the bright cleanness which should be a hallmark of this sort of thing.

The brewery is trotting out a series of fruited beers fermented with Brettanomyces, and to the right of the pictured IPA there is one of those: Nitro Passion Fruit Brett. It's a very strange beast, starting on the clean tropical sorbet effect that I usually get from passionfruit, but continuing into a strange smoky spice, like there's chipotle peppers in it. That shouldn't work, and perhaps terms like "work" aren't appropriate for something like this. Let's go with weird-but-fun, which is what I like to see Open Gate doing.

A swift half before finishing: Nut's [sic] About Stout, described as a peanut stout with no peanuts. Happening across brewer Peter Simpson at the bar, he explained that it uses a distillate of peanut which provides the flavour but takes out the bit that kills people. Which is nice. The beer itself is another highly contrasting one, 5.8% ABV and a dry stout at its base. The peanut isn't oily but comes through as more of a dried peanut shell effect: husky and almost acrid. To balance things there's a big dollop of caramel in the middle, making the whole thing taste like a Snickers bar. If that's what you want from a stout, then here it is. Again, I enjoyed the silliness.

The brewery has begun a series of tutored tastings of new beers, running on one evening every month. I was invited along to the first one (thanks Reuben) and there were four new items on the roster.

I was particularly interested to see a California common, rare as they are. This one, Friends In Common, is on the strong side at 6.1% ABV. It uses that well to boost the flavour intensity, the clear red-gold beer beginning with a wholesome brown breadcrust foretaste before adding soft damp grass from what I'm guessing are Germanic hops. It's seasoned also with some black pepper spicing, giving it a slightly wild air, a little like a saison. All of this is set on a hefty smooth body and makes for satisfying drinking. Maybe there would be more California commons if they were all this tasty.

And while that was saison-like, it sat next to an actual saison called 'Tis The Saison. This is another strong one at 6% ABV, and allegedly brewed using crystal malt, though presumably not much of it because it's extremely pale, barely golden and totally clear. Not that it's bland: the saisonosity is dialled right up making it dry and very spicy, with a taste like the husk of a pink peppercorn, the Belgian yeast no doubt aided by the inclusion of rye in the grist to create the effect. Less welcome notes of banana and a touch of apple skin creep in as it warms, but it's still a very good effort overall.

There has to be another IPA, sadly, and the most interesting thing about African Haze is that it was collaboratively brewed by the team from the upcoming Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Nairobi. Still, it's just another one of those Open Gate IPAs where the hops are killed off by the yeast byproducts and the result is buttery esters reaching an almost cheese-like intensity. They say they made it more bitter than hazy IPA usually is, and that just makes it taste like there's a shot of lime cordial in it. Unimpressed, I moved on.

A lovely palate-cleansing tripel finishes us off. Just A Tripel is 10% ABV and a striking clear deep golden colour. The esters are a huge part of this, but more appropriate to a tripel than the above IPAs. There's lot of banana aroma, while the flavour is clove rock in particular. There's a little white pepper but nowhere near as much spice as I like in a tripel. The best feature is the booze, delivering as it does a pleasant warming fuzziness, perfect for a miserable evening in mid-November. Overall, it's fine, but not exactly high end, to my palate anyway.

With the Gin Botanical Lager being the highlight from the last session, maybe novelty beer is a particular Open Gate strong point. I'm on board with that.

Fleeting Hopes

Three beers from Hope today, beginning with numbers 27 and 28 in their limited edition series.

The first is a style I'm sure they've tackled before: Munich Helles. It's a high-spec one too, amber rather than golden and a smidge over standard strength at 5.3% ABV. The extra gravity is apparent in the texture: it's thick almost to the point of being syrupy. Syrup is also what's served in the flavour, a much intensified version of the light spongecake that Helles usually shows. It doesn't dispense with lager pleasantries completely -- it's still nicely crisp despite the density -- but it's no casual easy-drinker either. 440ml was enough to chomp through.

28 is a Double Rye IPA and 8.5% ABV. It's a deep amber colour and smells fresh and spritzy, all clean west-coast grapefruit and pine. The flavour is clean too, but in a very different way, packed into a thick and sticky malt bomb. This is double IPA as it used to be, a decade or more ago, where doubling down on everything was the key, resulting in big and heavy bodies with accompanying chewy malt flavours while also packing in intensely citric and dank hops. In short, it's mostly subtle as a foghorn, though the rye adds its own thing, bringing a relatively understated grassy bite. If you're in the mood for something daftly 2010, then here's the entertainment. On its own merits it's rather fun and delivers everything it promises.

Roll forward a couple of months and deckchair guy is back, with this year's winter seasonal: Dublin Porter, a 6% ABV job using smoked malt. It's quite a dense black, with the requisite topping of ivory foam. There's a faint twang of phenols in the aroma, though nothing too severe. In the flavour that represents as a mild acridity, sharply dry to begin. It mellows quickly, however, rounding out into an almost creamy texture with notes of charred oak, burnt sugar, dark chocolate and well-done toast. It's nothing fancy but very nicely done. There's just enough weight for it to be satisfying and just enough smoke for it to be interesting. Neither of those elements interfere with the easy-going drinkability, however, and it still shows all the essential characteristics of daycent porter. A sequel is promised, and I look forward to it.

I don't know if Hope deliberately keeps track of the styles it puts out in limited runs and seeks to keep them varied, but if they do, it's appreciated.