Big in Nuremberg

Last month's bimble through Bavaria began in Nuremberg. The Dublin-Munich flight arrives nice and early, so you can be in the Franconian capital in time for a late lunch.

The big local brewery is Tucher, an outpost of the enormous Dr Oetker food and drink company, yet the brand is nowhere near as all-pervading as I expected. In fact, in the corner of the medieval city where I stayed, two of the pubs were flying the flag for Augustiner of Munich and the rest were non-aligned, offering a variety of Franconian beers. The railway station, on the journey back south, was the only place where I found Tucher to drink. Tucher Helles is appropriately smooth for the style but smelled powerfully of sweet apples, and there was even an appley aspect to the otherwise bland flavour. Weird, and not what I was expecting from the big boys. Tucher Pilsener was less flawed, though also fairly boring, with lots of heavy breadiness in the aroma followed by golden syrup in the flavour, but none of the livening hops I'd expect when switching from helles to pils. And it's the same story again with Tucher Urfrankische Dunkel: a hint of roasted malts, but otherwise a very plain cola-red lager. On this showing I was very glad not to have Tucher in my face at every turn.


The preferred outlet for any ticker arriving in Nuremberg is Hütt'n: a pub and restaurant unusual not only for being free of tie to any brewery, but also for having a separate bar for drinking in. The guilt I often feel in central Europe for taking up valuable dining space with my paltry pints is thus neatly avoided. There is a range of house-branded beers, presumably re-badges of something local. Hütt'n Hausbräu Helles is cloudy like a witbier (Ratebeer suggests it's normally sold as a Zwickl) and is deliciously lemony fresh, with perhaps some peach overtones. It's served cold as a thirst-quencher and fills the role perfectly. Hütt'n Hausbräu Dunkel is rather pale for the purported style, more orange than brown, with lots of weissbier-like fruit esters in the aroma alongside sharper green apple notes, and a taste profile that's low on roast but big on lip-smacking orange sherbet. A fun beer though not for dunkel purists. No style worries when it comes to Hütt'n Das Pils: this is the pure green-gold of classic German pils and kicks off with an invigorating bitterness, all crunchy cabbage leaf and fresh spinach. Its brashness is tempered only slightly by soft honey malt flavours, but that's enough to bring the whole thing into balance, albeit a very noble-hop-forward sort of balance.

We did a fair bit of  random picking from the selection at Nuremberg's pubs. This turned up Friedmann Hell from Gräfenberg, a lovely spicy, grassy example of the style, like a smoother more honeyish version of Pilsner Urquell. On the dark side there was the same brewery's Ritter von Wirnt dunkel which featured lots of lovely rich chocolate and toffee, plus a slight smoky bite, while also staying perfectly clean and smooth; and Simon Spezial, a chestnut brown "vollbier" offering a delicate blend of burnt caramel and mixed herbs. I've often seen vollbier misleadingly translated as "stout", but it sort-of works for this one.

And speaking of stout/dunkel crossover, Herrngiersdorf's Publiner had to be tried, if only for the weirdness of its blurb. But for all the proclaimed "Irish character" it's actually a very straightforward dunkel, red-brown in colour with lots of caramel in the aroma and a sweet liquorice-allsorts flavour. The carbonation was very low which I think might make it a bit difficult to drink in any quantity, and while it was fun for one, there were plenty of much better examples of the same style on the menu.

What really drew my eye to the Hütt'n beerlist -- before I left Dublin, truth be told -- was Rittmayer's Smokey George. Barry had written about this peated dark lager six years ago, though I never thought I'd get to try it. Poured from the keg it arrived an innocent amber-gold colour but the aroma immediately brings to mind heavily peated Scotch whisky. Unsurprisingly that continues on tasting in a big big way: a one-dimensional turf explosion, enhanced rather than balanced by a generous dose of brown sugar sweetness, and with an aftertaste that goes on for 500 miles and then 500 more. Yet despite this at no point does it get cloying: the base beer is a clean and simple lager and this stands to the finished product's drinkability. As long as you're OK with the big peaty flavours you'll have no trouble sinking a half litre of this 5%-er. There's probably not much point in drinking anything else for a while after it, mind.

We'll find out what else is brewing in Nuremberg in the next post.

Just for the one

My guilty final post covers all the exhibitors at the Irish Craft Beer and Cider Festival from whom I only took the time to try one beer, even though all had plenty on offer.

An exciting new beer from the excitingly relocated Galway Hooker Brewery first. Bán is another special created for Tigh Neachtain in Galway City. A 4% ABV wheat beer doesn't sound terribly exciting, but this was one of my festival highlights. I reckon celery; Steve reckoned asparagus, but either way there's a gorgeous fresh and crunchy vegetable thing going on here that I loved. A touch of pepper and it would be perfection.

Staying pale and interesting, Kinnegar had a new saison, called Swingletree. The aroma is powerfully, deliciously, cider-like, and while it's definitely beer on sipping it has a similar cleanness to a certain type of pale cider. It's one of those palate-reset beers so important to have at a festival like this.

Whitewater were showing off a new lager: St Donard. Bit of a butterscotch bomb here and not in the same league as their Cloughmore Granite at all. I had better luck with Barrelhead Blonde, a modest 4.5% ABV but single-hopped very generously with Centennial. The aroma is worth the price of admission alone: billows of floral meadowy perfume. There's more of that on tasting, as well as a cheeky squirt of lemon zest, for balance of a sort. A classic, and hopefully we'll be seeing more of it.

Brasserie Castelain had a footprint at the festival as a prospective importer tested the water. I missed the chance to drink my favourite-named beer of the weekend: their pomegranate-infused Jade Grenade, but did get to try plain Jade, a 4.5% ABV blonde ale which wasn't very impressive, showing bursts of butter and nail varnish remover. Some fruit would definitely have improved it. Or an actual grenade.

We'll go out on a stout, and Connemara's Independent Brewing had one of the very few barrel-aged stouts on offer. Remember when they were all the rage? Independent Whiskey Stout has been aged in Bushmills ex-Madeira casks but still retains a luscious chocolate and coffee stout flavour. Pleasingly there's loads of whiskey to it as well: honeyish, plus the sweet boozy fruit traces left behind by the fortified wine. A beer to sip while wandering off into the night at the end of another successful festival.

Cheers to Bruce, Seamus, Carly, Andrew and all the volunteers who put the whole thing together, and the brewers and their crews for giving us a reason to be there. Every year the question is asked "how will it continue?"

Never mind. It will continue. It has to. See you next September!

Hops in the house

It goes without saying that there were pale ales aplenty at the Irish Craft Beer and Cider and Whiskey and Whatever You're Having Yourself Festival at the RDS last month. It's still the backbone of the Irish craft beer market and even firms with plenty of pale 'n' hoppy in the portfolio already were showing up with additional ones.

Mountain Man's Crazy Horse is their third beer and the third pale ale, this time a "San Diego IPA" at 7.5% ABV. It's certainly a reminder of how American IPAs came to world prominence: that massive citrus balanced against a huge and chewy caramel malt base. It tastes almost old-fashioned now, given the choice of ingredients generally available to small-scale brewers: charmingly retro, perhaps.  It should still turn a few heads down Ballyvourney way.

And staying in Ballyvourney, I got my first proper taste of 9 White Deer Stag Bán pale ale. It's a magnificent refresher, bursting with pilsnerish grass notes plus mild lemony zest, all set on a dry and crisp hazy pale body. A beautifully put-together 4.5% ABV session beer. Stone Barrel are in similar territory with their new seasonal Day Trippin', though ramping the alcohol and the malt character a little higher, and turning up the bitterness too, to give it an invigorating sharp bite.

Trouble Brewing's latest IPA is called Chasing the Dragon: 8% ABV and very big on the golden syrup and oaty biscuit malt flavours. There's a decent bit of grapefruit and lemon pith from the hops, but they're more a seasoning than the core of the flavour. Lower strength, but similarly biscuity, was Black's of Kinsale's Rocketship IPA. This one's 100% Galaxy hops and shows a little of the mandarin juice and jaffa zest I associate most with the variety but it's sandwiched between lots of sweet grain, conjuring up the Jacob's Club Orange bars of my childhood.

Two festival specials were on offer from Bo Bristle: a 7% ABV Imperial Red, crisp with lots of melanoidin malt for a rich cleanness of flavour, enhanced by a gorgeous fresh and grassy hop aroma. The 7.7% ABV Double IPA was a single-hop Citra effort, remarkably light and drinkable at that strength.

Metalman used the festival to garner feedback on a couple of possible recipes for their upcoming canned range. Can Prototype #1 was the only one I got to try: a 5.6% ABV amber ale, with its roots in regular seasonal Windjammer, but utilising American rather than New Zealand hops. It's decent but unspectacular: some lovely chocolate notes but no hop fireworks. I found myself surprised to be enjoying Rubus more, a raspberry-infused blonde ale which manages to taste powerfully of the fruit without being either too tart or too sweet.

Finally for now, I didn't get much of a chance to explore the Canadian beers on offer, but did manage a slurp each of Side Launch Pale Ale and Great Lakes Canuck Pale Ale, both just under the 5.5% ABV mark, both hazy and somewhere on the yellow-gold colour spectrum. The Side Launch is lemony and tannic so wins on refreshment power, though I found the Canuck more interesting: piling spices and grass on a sauvignon dryness. I'd be perfectly happy with either, mind.

Just a bit of mopping up to do before we leave the RDS for another year.

Last month's news

September was a bit of a busy one for me: three countries, two beer festivals, and lots of new beers. So you'll forgive me, I hope, if this blog is a little bit behind on what's been happening in Irish brewing of late.

The month kicked off with Irish beer's headline event at the RDS in Dublin. 33 Irish beer companies made an appearance, plus foreign beers, cider and spirits. The number of new companies and products were an obvious sign of how vibrant Ireland's microbrewing scene is right now.

Of course, the big news was the festival début of Sligo's White Hag brewery and I haven't heard a bad word said about their beer. So I guess it falls upon me to do so. Their witbier, Fionnabhair, was thin, watery and over-attenuated, like slightly wonky homebrew. Joe the brewer agreed. It was his first ever brew on the new kit, he's not happy with it, knows what went wrong, and it'll be fixed in later batches. The beer's still perfectly drinkable however, so bringing it along was definitely the better option than dumping it. I confess I wasn't a massive fan of the heather ale Beann Gulban, finding it rather hot and heavy with lots of marker-pen phenols, but I only had a sip and it was late so I do definitely need to try this one again on a clean palate.

With Tuireann Bán, White Hag set themselves a tough task to beat Ireland's only other white IPA, Eight Degrees Horn8's Nest, but it stands up well to it. It's the appropriate hazy shade of witbier yellow. The first sip delivers a piquant one-two of white pepper and rocket, with an orange sweetie fruit-flavoured stickiness coming in behind and a bitter sting in the finish. It tastes every bit of its 6.2% ABV but is no less enjoyable for that. Not that this is all about Eight Degrees comparisons, but White Hag had an Oktoberfest beer too, called Samhain. I'm inherently suspicious of the dark orange American-style Oktoberfest, but this one is wonderfully crisp with exactly the right amount of rich breadiness without any nasty gloopy stodge.

And then there's Black Boar. I'm not sure I ever had a glass of this to myself. People kept thrusting it at me. It's a 10.2% ABV imperial stout, very thick and unutterably smooth. It tastes sharply of very fresh ground coffee, blending this with bittersweet treacle and more approachable caramel flavours. It's not all that complex, but it doesn't need to be. I look forward to getting a proper handle on it at a later stage.

My first port of call on day one was Rascal's, to try their new lemon saison, based on an award-winning homebrew recipe and given the serious geopolitical name of Kim Jong Lem-Un. The lemon zest comes through on the finish as a tart squirt of Jif. Before that you get a crisp and wheaty saison, full bodied and loaded with invigorating spices. It manages to refresh in three different ways simultaneously and, at only 4% ABV, wasn't done any justice by the festival's half-pint measures.

My pick of the new saisons, however, was Eight Degrees Nelson Sauvin Saison, a very different beast from Mr Kim at 7.4% ABV (and possibly growing -- one set of bottle labels has already been discarded) and a rather darker orange colour. The aroma is peppery while the dry base beer provides a perfect launch point for all that's wonderful about Nelson Sauvin hops. The flinty grape flavour that gave it its name comes through perfectly clear and, though it gets a little bit catty in the finish, the saison crispness stops that from becoming too much. Here I was very glad of the smaller glass because this stuff is incredibly drinkable.

The other new guy at Eight Degrees was Alba Abú, loosely described as a Scotch ale and brewed with Scots pine and heather. Given to me without any of the background I'd be describing it as an American-style amber: all rich candy-coated dank hops, packed full of juicy ripe fruit and an echo of milk chocolate. Oddly, it's single-hopped with Chinook, so I'm guessing that the marvellous complexity is derived at least in part from the added foraged ingredients. Not that it matters: it's a beautiful beer and a worthy substitute for Amber-Ella that weekend.

As one would expect from the festival's anchor tenant, Carlow Brewing had some very interesting specials. I almost missed Hop Heavy, a beer I'd been looking forward to since tasting it from the conditioning tanks back in July. Despite the name, it's a manageable 5.5% ABV and quite simply constructed from marvellously fresh leafy green hop flavours -- grassy, with just a dusting of citrus -- and then some pleasant balancing dark malt sweetness, leaning a little towards chocolate. Another one I'm hoping to see more of.

I had the O'Hara's Dunkelweizen more out of a sense of completeness than anything else. It's a long time since this style of beer thrilled me, but this one was pretty good: brown bananas to an extent, but with an excellent clean crispness that prevents it being too sweet or too dull, which is normally what goes wrong with these. And O'Hara's Blackberry Lager? Why not? It's a reddish-gold colour and does show a lovely dark fruit tartness in the flavour profile. Blueberries next, please.

The headline act at the Carlow bar was Wild Side: their first sour beer. Well... sour-ish. The base is a dark red barley wine and it has been fermented to 9.6% ABV. From the cask, the grain and chocolate from the residual malt sugars are still definitely present, but the souring effect adds a pleasant cherry and damson quality, plus lots of heavy savoury umami. Broadly speaking this is in the Rodenbach end of the sour spectrum, though less sharp, much weightier and with much more biscuit malt. It'll be interesting to see how it ages, if given the chance.

The sour beer I drank most of at the festival was White Gypsy's Scarlet, and that's only partially down to Jamie letting me mind the bar for a few hours on Sunday. This one started life as a bière de garde and is appropriately mid-amber coloured. There's a huge lactic bite right in the middle of it, all sour milk without the milk. Underneath there's a rich layer of summer fruit flavour for a kind of strawberry smoothie effect. At a modest 5% ABV it's nicely moreish and proved very popular with the punters during my time at the taps. This bodes well for sour times in Ireland.

Scarlet is part of a grand experiment at White Gypsy, as is their hop garden, as is Dubháin, the stout they were serving on cask. This is based on a former recipe of Dwan's brewery where Cuilán had brewed before founding White Gypsy. It's 5.2% ABV and very heavy with an aroma rich in coffee and butter. A dry roast finish keeps it drinkable. When Cuilán's plans come together there'll be an Irish stout made from 100% native ingredients, matured in oak as all stouts once were, and given the right amount of the sourness that was formerly the style's hallmark. It's an audacious plan and I hope I get to taste the result at some stage.

That'll do for a warm-up. More wandering around the RDS with an empty glass and a speculative look next.

Down to the River to play

The Pintwell blog is our host for The Session this month and Jeremy has asked us to write about how one's relationship with beer can be changed by making the stuff. As it happens, I visited a brewery recently that's up for doing its part to help that relationship transformation along.

Rye River Brewery is based in the small Co. Kildare town of Kilcock, a short hop by bus or train from Dublin. The site occupies quite a significant proportion of the town and is currently a hive of building activity. When finished it will include a café and merchandise shop as well as the global distribution centre for Rye River's beers. At the end of August, the brewery was the only operating section and owner Niall and brewer Alex showed us around.

Alex is well known on the Irish home brewing scene, winning awards for his amateur beers while dabbling in the professional side as part of the Otterbank and Brewtonic gypsy projects. He's full time at Rye River now and told us how thoroughly enjoyable it is to work in a brewery as it starts to get off the ground: so many new toys to acquire and play with.

Alex and Rosie

While we were there he gave us a taste of one of his creations, a new addition to Rye River's "McGargle's" series of beers. Cousin Rosie's Pale Ale is a modest 4.5% ABV and brewed with Chinook, late Summit and a touch of Amarillo as well -- all the home brewers on the tour nodded along as Alex explained the onionish perils of too much early Summit in the boil. No onions here, however. From the fermenter it exploded onto the palate with loads of bright, clean zingy citrus flavours. It was very cold, which is perhaps why I couldn't detect any balancing malt, but I'm quite prepared to believe it doesn't need any. This sample was followed by a taster of the same beer once it had been filtered and kegged. Oh dear. A lot of the multi-dimensional hop flavour is lost. The elements are all still there, but as little more than echoes. The beer is still perfectly pleasant to drink, but doesn't compare well next to the unfiltered original. There's definitely an argument in favour of compromise-free home brewing here.

Uncle Jim and the pilot kit

Rye River has also got off to an early start with its barrel-ageing experiments and we got to try some Uncle Jim's Stout directly from the Bushmills cask in which it had spent a few short weeks.  There wasn't much of a barrel character yet but the beer was rich and plummy with lots of sweet milk chocolate, so shows promise at least.

But the main reason I've chosen Rye River as the subject for this Session post is their pilot kit, a 1hl yoke on wheels. The brewing team have been running experiments on it but they've made it clear that it's available to all-comers. If any home brewers want to try their hand, and their recipes, with the assistance and equipment of the pros, here's the chance. An opportunity for any home brewer to change their relationship with beer even further and, at the rate at which Ireland's home brewers are currently being professionally recruited, who knows where it might lead?

Cheers to Wayne for organising the trip to Rye River, and to Niall and Alex for the tour. It's an audacious project and promises to be a major asset to Kilcock when the whole thing is finished.

Not set in granite

It was a bit of a nostalgia trip to go back to Aberdeen as a guest of BrewDog in August. At the turn of the millennium I was a student in the city and while it's still the charmingly grey tangle of streets it always was, the beer scene is definitely somewhat different.

BrewDog's own bar, for starters, I remember as being a terrifying out-of-the-way dive that not even the slummiest student pub crawl would dare venture into. Now, of course, it's open and bright and cheery, all trendy bare brick with varnished pine highlights. From the guest beers I just had time to gulp a quick taste of Cool as a Cucumber, the Fyne Ales and Wild Beer collaborative saison. A gulp is all that's needed too, I reckon. It's not the most complex of beers, being all cucumber and not much else: intensely green, in fact, like chewing cucumber skins. It's only 2.9% ABV and there's some mint in it as well, so the refreshment power is considerable, as long as you don't mind being slapped about the chops by a giant cucumber at the same time.

Just across the way from BrewDog Aberdeen is the Aberdeen footprint of Six Degrees North, another local brewery. They've settled on a Belgian theme for their beers, though the bar is far from being a brown café, kitted out starkly in grey concrete and steel. I started with Six Degrees North Bière de Table which arrived an unattractive opaque custardy yellow colour. And, unsurprisingly, the yeast utterly dominates the flavour. Not in a warming fruity Belgian fashion, either: more of an unpleasantly gritty dreggy thing. Yes there are big grapefruit hop notes shouting loudly from inside the flavour, but they're struggling to be heard. It could be I got the tail end of the keg, or it could be that this needs a bit more time in the bright tank. I wasn't impressed either way.

The house pale ale, Hopocrisy, was rather better, if not a whole lot clearer. Though a mere 4.6% ABV there's lots going on in here: sourness at first, followed closely by a big hit of juicy pineapple fruit. When those two settle down a little, there's more of a rustic grain vibe to it, a certain charming roughness around the edges. The big fizz makes it difficult to quaff, and the daft insistence on two-third measures means that doing so wouldn't be any fun anyway, but there are good intentions and brewing skills here. I'd like to have stayed to try the rest of the range.

Dinner at Musa was followed by a trip to Casc: a very swish beer and cigar bar in a basement around the corner. I was heading for 19 hours awake at this stage, with about eleven of those spent drinking beer, so the wobbles were definitely setting in. But not so wobbly that I couldn't identify a beer from my to-drink list on the blackboard, slur out an order for it and scribble together some tasting notes. It's Buxton Jaw Gate IPA, sole sassanach beer of the trip. 5.6% ABV and a dark orange-amber, pouring perfectly clear from the keg. While it looks like it belongs on the heavy and resinous end of the scale I found it quite enlivening, all tart and zesty citrus pith. Much as it revived me I reckoned discretion was the better part of valour and when the Beer O'Clock Show's Steve made a bid for the exit, I wisely followed. Thanks for getting me back to the hotel, Steve: your tactic of navigating there worked so much better than my plan of just staggering about hoping the Hilton would simply hove into view.

But we didn't come to Aberdeen to sleep, so it was back to the bar with Steve, Ian, Wayne and me before 7.30 the next morning. The airport bar, that is. The cask selection was fairly uninspiring, though there was Barley Brown's Black IPA. "That'll do me!" I thought, completely failing to spot that this collaboration was brewed at the Caledonian Brewery. Ugh. Entirely as expected it's a mess of sickly brown sugar: thick, cloying, and definitely not what I'm looking for in a breakfast IPA. Yes, there's a bit of a bitter sharpness, but the beer still doesn't amount to more than Caley 80 with a handful of extra hops. I had to cleanse my palate with a Sweet Action immediately after. If for some reason you want to hear what we talked about around the table that morning, Ian caught it all on his reel-to-reel tape machine and has posted it here. Caveat audiens.

And that's where it all ended. Cheers once again to the BrewDog team for inviting us all to play in their backyard for a day.

Woof!

It's the sense of energy that is my lasting impression from visiting the BrewDog brewery: a relentless dynamism and a restless drive towards change and improvement in all things. I'm used to breweries as being cold and quiet spaces but BrewDog is hot and -- with two simultaneous bottling lines running -- very loud. The brewhouse is enormous but densely packed with brewkit, the fermentation vessels spilling out beyond the walls and roof into the back yard. The plant runs 24 hours a day, five days a week and even though it's mostly dedicated to the production of a single beer, Punk IPA, there is change everywhere. More tanks are on the way; a corner of the warehouse has been set aside for a still; the endless parade on one Punk bottling line was showing the new pale blue livery, the other the tail end of the classic version. Co-founder Martin Dickie brought our group around and everywhere was action, activity, energy. Employees over 40 are thin on the ground.

Adjoining the brewery is DogTap, a recent addition to the complex which includes a bar, giftshop and even a 1000L pilot brewkit, though the whirlwind of change had yet to blow through here and commission it. For a pub situated in a remote Scottish industrial estate, DogTap was doing quite a bit of trade. Normal people too, not like the group of 17 writers the company had invited to its Aberdeenshire locations for the day. And it was a normal people's beer that was my first choice to drink.

Fake Lager is a mainstay in BrewDog's chain of pubs, designed I suspect for the reluctant member of the party who was dragged in by more enthusiastic friends. I held out a little hope that some of the BrewDog magic had been sprinkled over it, but it's really quite average: golden, a little grainy, showing more than a touch of diacetyl butteriness and without any of the high notes that can make good pilsner really stand out. The name is only half joking, I reckon. And of course no sooner than I'd finished my pint, the beer was retired permanently. I haven't tried its replacement -- This. Is. Lager. -- but it talks a good game.

The other new tick on the DogTap bar which I needed to scratch was Magic Stone Dog, a three-brewery collaboration where San Diego meets Huddersfield in Ellon. It's a bright and happy gold and has an approachable 5% ABV. I did zero research into what sort of a beer it is before lifting the glass and was a little surprised to find the estery aromas of a Belgian blonde ale. They say there's some saison pedigree in here but it was all luscious sweet fruits for me: apricots and honeydew melons in particular, making me think of a junior edition of Flying Dog's magnificent Raging Bitch. Lots of fun and very pintable.

We were summoned from the bar back to the meeting and media room in the administrative wing of BrewDog HQ. Here, James and Martin took us through a selection of their beers, beginning with Punk, of course. The newest addition to the brewery's "Headliners" family is Brixton Porter. It's quite a dry offering, even a little ashen, and would have little difficulty passing for an Irish-style stout. The grain bill includes chocolate, brown and amber malts but I was unable to detect much by way of coffee or chocolate flavours in here. A more severe liquorice sharpness is the only real complexity. It's good that there's a dark malt-forward beer in the core line-up, but why couldn't it have been Zeitgeist? That's the downside of running business in a constant state of renewal: old farts like me want stuff you don't make any more.

Presented, oddly, before Brixton was Black Eyed King Imp, an 11.8% ABV imperial stout which started out as a test batch of Cocoa Psycho before getting two years in two different whisky barrels. It's thick and smooth and luscious, as all the best of this sort are. The aroma strongly suggests that some autolysis has been going on: it's a savoury umami air, with a pinch or two of salt. While not tasting of oak per se, there's a slightly tannic red wine edge to it, but the main act is a huge hit of Irish coffee: extra creamy with lots of brown sugar and a billow of boozy fumes up the back of the nose. It tastes a lot stronger than it is, so very much a sipper. When the tasting broke up I mineswept what was left on the tables and session-sipped my way through as much as I could. The autolytic Bovril quality does build as it goes but it's still a magnificent example of how complex recipes and expensive processes can leave wonderful results.

We reassembled down in Aberdeen itself at BrewDog's city bar, standing room only at 6.30 on a Friday evening. I grabbed a very quick Blitz, one of a series of Berliner weisses with added fruit, this time redcurrant. It's a lot cleaner than any Berliner weisse has a right to be with a clear, sharp, puckering acidity singing out and not a trace of wateryness, despite a piffling 2.6% ABV. The currants are more than an afterthought, adding a very distinct summer fruit flavour to the whole. Beautifully refreshing and I could drink a lot.

But a lot wasn't an option. We were off to the third BrewDog establishment of the day, their restaurant Musa. Here we were treated to a fantastic beer-paired tasting menu of pig's cheek, salmon, grouse and whatnot, again with Martin and James doing the intros and musical-chairing around the tables so everyone got spoken with.

New beers in the line-up included Russian Doll IPA, part of a four-pack of sequential brews using the same ingredients but in different quantities to create four different styles of ascending strength. At 6% ABV the IPA is second from the bottom of the pecking order but still gets full value out of its Simcoe, Citra, Cascade and Centennial, particularly the first two. A big grapefruit bitterness opens its account, followed quickly by a rich and funky dankness. I guess it's supposed to be appreciated next to its dollmates but it works perfectly well by itself.

A baltic porter to finish, the new BrewDog / Victory collaboration U-Boat. This black lager is a massive 8.4% ABV but, like its namesake, is very good at concealing the danger. Baltic porters can be a bit severe with their liquorice bitterness and chewy malts but this is a much lighter and sweeter affair with milk chocolate at its centre, plus bitterer cocoa powder at the edges. It's no Black Eyed King Imp but it is a very nicely nuanced dark beer.

A big thanks to James, Martin and the rest of the crew of the BrewDog mothership for letting us get in their way for a day. And a special thanks to Sarah who put in all the hard work organising and herding a ragtag bunch of misfit beer writers. Thanks also to said ragtag bunch of beer writers for adding to the fun and allowing me to tick off a few more entries in my I-Spy Book of Beer Bloggers.