The endangered list

It's a raft of special editions from Wicklow Wolf today, beginning with numbers 31 and 32 in their Endangered Species series which landed late in the summer.

I like the concept of the first one, except for the slightly cringey name. It's a pilsner with Sorachi Ace hops, which is good, but this apparently makes it an Italian-style pilsner and earns it the moniker Toto Sorachi. It's a football thing. 4.9% ABV is more than adequate for a pils but it still looks a little anaemic in the glass. And then... It's not what I expected. Sorachi Ace has a very distinctive flavour: coconut foremost, pith, maybe plastic -- this has none of that. The confounding of expectation is the only disappointment, however, because what you get instead is gorgeous: a fresh and juicy melon and lychee affair seasoned with white pepper which is sinkable and thirst-quenching but fascinating too. Did they come up with the name and then swap out the Sorachi for Mosaic and/or Strata at the last minute? Regardless, this is a hit, being a proper high-end pilsner that also has fun with non-typical hop flavours. Not every brewery gets this right when they try it.

Onwards and upwards to Decipher purporting to be a tropical double IPA, though at a mere 7% ABV. Yeast vendor WHC Labs gets a shout-out on the label, but maybe their yeast isn't as hard working as one would like. The beer is a standard hazy orange and smells nicely dank with some fresh-squeezed orange vibes. The flavour has a certain sweetness up front but reverts to the west coast quite quickly: grapefruit, lime and a little unpleasantly acrid burnt plastic. Once again we're looking at false advertising: while this is mostly fine, it's not really appropriate to make "tropical" the headline descriptor. It's citric and bitter, and nicely crisp and clean. "West Coast" would also not quite be honest but it exists in a happy place somewhere between the two.

Then September brought number 34 and, praise be, it's a black IPA. They've called it Sirius, and it's 6% ABV. It passes the blackness test, which not every BIPA does, though the aroma is a little quiet for my liking. The roast and citrus are there, but you have to inhale hard to get the benefit. It seemed a little thin, too, not feeling like it's above session strength. But session it I could: the flavour is mostly quite subtle, though very tasty, emphasising the chocolatey dark malt, plus a jolt of espresso, and definitely spiked with red cabbage and grapefruit in the way that good black IPA ought to be. Sirius is built for the pint, tasting great but not so strongly as to be loud or annoying. While stonkingly punchy will always be my preference for these, there's no harm in having a less sippable, more drinkable one too. This recipe might warrant promotion from endangered to core, if there's a vacancy.

Not a candidate for core-dom is Locavore Autumn 2022, a 10.5% ABV barley wine made with all Wicklow ingredients, though aged in sherry barrels which presumably came from somewhere else. A deep red-brown colour, it's as dense as one might expect, forming a thick head as it poured, but very very slowly. It tastes great, the cherry-jam sweetness countered by liquorice laces and a dry oaky char. It has a lot in common with style leader Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, which is impressive by itself, but that the hops are Irish grown makes it doubly so. I'm not sure the barrel adds much positive to it. It doesn't taste of sherry, and the wood does kind of get in the way of the precious malt and hops. If they're considering something similar next autumn, a non-barrelled edition would be welcomed by me.

It's a while since we had a new hacked version of Apex. The latest is Apex Death By Chocolate, and as ever I'm sceptical of the merits of pastrifying a very decent serious oatmeal stout. I think they've got away with it here, though, with a beer that's very enjoyable on two different levels. The rich, full and dead classy base stout is still there, smooth with a dry grain-husk finish and even a certain hop tang. The chocolate isn't fatal, and the sweetness it adds doesn't interfere with the fundamentals. Instead, it brings a warming hot-chocolate effect: comforting and classy, not a tacked-on gimmick. This is great stuff and I can see why they did it: chocolate stout as it should be.

That was Endangered Species 35, followed by 36: Black Castle. Here it's not the ingredients that were locally grown, but the oak which made the barrel in which it's been aged. It's an imperial stout at 9.5% ABV, and very dark. I didn't even notice that the head was foaming up and overflowing as I poured, so deep is the colour. The oak is very loud in the aroma, making it smell like a big Gran Reserva Rioja wine, down to the cork and the raisins.  I was worried it would be overpoweringly vanilla'd, or dry and splintery, but the density of the stout comes to the rescue and ensures that there's more going on. Yes, it's very very oaky, but before that kicks off there's a luxurious seam of dark chocolate and a plenty of toasted grains. The raisins I noticed in the aroma are full-on red grapes here and I don't know how that's done but it's lovely. All told, this is a class act; multifaceted, interesting and very tasty.

Wicklow Wolf is a brewery that tends to have everything dialled in right. Here, the quality is impeccable but the naming in occasional need of intervention from the Quality Assurance team.

Clock this

This may be unique: a one-brewery, three-beer blog post talking about sequential releases, none of them related to each other as far as I'm aware, and all of them stouts. Lineman really is the brewery that keeps on giving. In keeping with the general engineering theme, all of the names are references to horology.

First we have a mere Extra Stout, 5.8% ABV and brewed at the behest of the mighty Craic Beer Community hivemind. The visuals of Pulse are spot on: proper black with a bubbly pancake-batter head. The aroma is sweet first, suggesting milk chocolate and hazelnut, but with a drier edge behind it. It's pretty dry to taste, the nut side becoming husky and almost harsh on the palate. Not that it's thin, there's plenty of body, but it's strange to encounter something feeling so creamy but tasting so dry. To liven it up there's a dusting of Christmas cake spicing before we're back to Serious Old Man stout. As a Serious Old Man I rather liked it, Lineman once again providing a high-quality antidote to fashion.

From there we go imperial, and Killing Time, 10.8% ABV and on tap in UnderDog, because winter. This is quite a sweet example, and I wouldn't have been surprised to discover that an added sweetener or two had been added, though that doesn't appear to be the case. The flavour is a mostly straightforward offer of coffee and chocolate, in keeping with the Lineman philosophy of not over-complicating things. The thickness and warmth, too, deliver what's required without going overboard. A hint of hazelnut, again, is its one distinguishing feature. I enjoyed it but I think I would have liked something more to be happening in it; a spike of bitterness, for example, would have been welcome. Chocolate, however, seems to be the brewery's way with imperial stout, given what follows. 

I expected the strength to increase from there but our bourbon-barrelled finished one is a mere 9.2% ABV. Like Clockwork comes with a suggestion that, while it's fine to drink now, it will age well. I usually take that as a warning to expect something harsh and a little unfinished. Not here, though. The bourbon is barely-there, which is just how bourbon should behave. There's a slight splintery dryness from the oak, but nothing severe. The underlying beer is magnificent: a symphony in dark, milk and even white chocolate, soft and creamy but not too sweet. It's not boozy or hot, though a spark of spirituousness adds a liqueur filling to the chocolate. As the ABV tells you, this isn't a powerful winter sipper but works very nicely by the pint. Age it? Some chance. I'll kvetch about one thing and that's the €13 price tag. Good and all as it is, and I understand that 18 months of maturation is a lot and far from cost-neutral, that price is still a tad spicy.

If you like your stout to taste of chocolate and hazelnuts, Lineman has it all for you.

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.