Get bent

The wild yeast wizards of Denver are today's subject, with a couple of cans from Crooked Stave.

Can one is the pastel-styled Sour Rosé, a light 4.5%-er, oak-aged and brewed with raspberries and blueberries. No single one of those dominates the flavour. Yes there are berries -- a definite fruity sweetness -- but I'm not sure I would have picked the varieties used. Raspberry is normally very obvious yet here it melds with the mellower blueberry creating something more floral, like lavender or rose petals. There's a properly tart buzz balanced with an almost creamy smoothness, while the oak makes little explicit contribution. I've no doubt it plays a role, however, rounding the whole thing out and bringing an element of spice to the acidity. This may be presented as some kind of girly frivolity but it's every inch a well-thought-out and expertly formulated mixed fermentation beer.

Which sets up St Bretta nicely. This one is subtitled a citrus saison, sub-sub-titled "artisan ale brewed with citrus, lemongrass and coriander". Phew. It's a slightly hazy gold and smells like a typically fruity and spicy saison. Balance is again the watchword when it comes to tasting. A tight lemony bitterness is first, then gummy peachy Brett notes. Sourness isn't advertised but there's a definite bite there on the end. Despite the convoluted recipe and higher strength (5.2%) this isn't as complex as the other one. It's still very enjoyable though, if not madly Bretty.

Lovely flavours aside, I'm particularly pleased that these two (and the Wild Sage one) come in cost-effective cans rather than lambic-style half-champagne bottle at twice the price. Accessible, high-grade, mixed fermentation beers is a genre I'm very much here for.

Barcelager

The Barcelona Beer Company's range has been quietly chugging along on the shelves in these parts for a couple of years now. On a recent trip to Stephen Street News I noticed that there was one in the line-up I'd never had before so I used it to fill out a 4-for-€10 basket.

Santa Rita is a lager. I was expecting sunny Mediterranean refreshment so was surprised to find it pouring hazy, with almost a witbier-like yellow cast to it. That theme continues in the flavour: there's a spritzy lemon taste, a yeast-derived spice and some odd, but pleasant, tea-like tannins.

It's quite tasty, but not the crisp and clean lager I was prepared for. I'd say it still works as a summery thirst-quencher, however. The tannins give it the feel of a dry English bitter, a perfectly acceptable alternative on a warm day.

Thorny thorny thorny

Three beer beers from Derbyshire's Thornbridge today. The brewery is probably tired by now of being told that they said they'd never can their beer and then they canned their beer. My first experience of metal-clad Thornbridge came, unexpectedly, via Tesco in Portadown. Both of these are available in Dublin now too, however.

Florida Weisse attracted my attention with the words "bracingly tart" on the blurb. This is a raspberry Berliner weisse of 4.5% ABV and it's certainly bracingly pink, its rosé head quickly crackling away to nothing. It tastes... authentic, in that it tastes like the pre-raspberried Berliner Kindl Weisse: artificially sweet, like candy or ice cream sauce with a very simplistic yoghurt sourness in the background. I guess the name is meant to suggest frivolous summer fun, which this does offer, but I was hoping for something more punchy, more interesting.

From the same shelf came Thornbridge's "Vermont Session IPA", named with a certain literalness Green Mountain and a mere 4.3% ABV. It's appropriately hazy topped by a pile of white foam this time. The flavour is odd. There's orangey juice, an almost margarita-like lime bitterness and then a very strange twang in the finish which begins as fried onion but grows more intense, turning to burnt plastic and acrid smoke. This last part really takes the shine off what should be a jolly and easy-going pale ale. I don't know if it's all down to the intense hops or if something more nefarious has happened, or if it's just me. Anyway, I kept wanting this to be softer and fruitier and it let me down all the way through.

Collaboration beers are ten-a-penny these days (not literally; they're often very expensive) but it's relatively unusual to see two breweries combine the recipes, and names, of their flagship beers. That's what we have here with Jai JAI from Cigar City and Thornbridge, their Jai Alai and Jaipur respectively. The ABV is exactly half way between the two at 6.7% and it's a clear golden colour, the first sign that Jaipur is the dominant partner. I get Jaipur's waxy green dryness in the aroma too. The flavour definitely has two sides: chalk and asparagus at the front, turning sharp and lime-like at the end; and also a sweet lemonade and Juicy Fruit gum sugariness running all the way through. Balance is preserved, and a smooth body ensures it's easy drinking. There's nothing special or different or outré about this collaboration, but no harm. It's a very tasty fruit-forward American-style IPA, refreshing, quenching and satisfying with no novelty factor at all. A real best-of-both-worlds job.

And then a lovely mixed box of Thornbridge bottles came my way as a Christmas gift. There were three new ticks in there, including Melba, a peach-infused IPA. It poured clear and headless, smelling powerfully of peachy syrup and tasting of it too. The texture is light to the point of thinness, which does at least mean it's easy drinking and doesn't get cloying. There's no real indication that it's an IPA, however. Pour peach cordial into vodka, prosecco, fizzy water, and you'll get the same effect. This is quite pleasant drinking but it doesn't particularly inspire or impress me. I'd file it along side those Lindeman's fruit concoctions, and Pêcheresse in particular.

I hoped for better crack from Crackendale, at the same strength and described on the label as a Citra pale ale. Turns out it's very pale indeed, and slightly hazy with it. It suffers a little from the same lack of substance as Melba, but again that serves to help the drinkability. There's a gently spritzy carbonation, propelling a light lime and pine flavour, with some bitter herbal notes tailing behind. I was hoping for a little more punch; maybe some sticky hop resins, but instead it goes for the lighter, more accessible aspect of American C-hops, and I can't fault it for that. I'm guessing this works better as a cask beer than bottled, but what I got was a very passable refresher.

Last up is Coco Cocoa, in the popular style of chocolate and coconut porter. Coconut is all the aroma has to offer, in a pleasingly bitter format. The flavour is mellower, presenting moist and chewy coconut flesh, a subtle dry roast and some sweet milk chocolate, but not too much. It's very well balanced overall, picking the best from its novelty elements without overusing them. This is another I could see working very well by the pint, especially with the ABV at just 5.5%.

So, on the balance of this lot, Thornbridge's best beers are still the bottled ones? Maybe this guy was right.

The Art

A new raft of beers from Tipperary start-up Canvas arrived in DrinkStore late in 2018. I picked a handful to try over the quieter days of the Christmas vacation.

First up was Sweet Gale Ale, just as the name implies, and 4.6% ABV. I poured carefully, as advised on the label, leaving a few centimetres in the bottle. The resulting blonde glassful was then only slightly hazy, with a fine lasting white foam on top. It smells sweetly herbal, of basil, rosemary and the like, though there's a mild eye-watering sour tang too, akin to a Flanders red. The flavour is clean and sweet again, the herbs joined by a subtle peppery piquancy. Some esters like you'd find in saison or weissbier add a greasy substance and a hint of banana, but not too much. It's a nifty little number, crisp and clean, and avoiding any extremes of flavour. I'd place it closest to a light saison on the style spectrum, but the sweet gale makes it its own thing. At least, I'm assuming there's real sweet gale in here as it's mentioned on the name but not in the ingredients listing. For divilment I threw the lees from the bottle into the glass at the end. It doesn't affect the flavour. Pour carelessly and with abandon.

Bellagie came next, described as a "Belgian single with elderflower" and coming in at 5.3% ABV. It poured almost completely flat, which wasn't a good start. No carbonation means no aroma, so we skip past that to the flavour which is... fine. I like a good dollop of elderflower in a beer and this has that: meadowy and summerish. The base beer behind it is quite plain, but I think I can discern its Belgian roots in the complementary honey sweetness. I thought that was all that was on offer until the sourness arrived back unexpectedly -- the spicy saltpetre of proper lambic, drying out the sugars and cleaning them off the palate. Just a little more sparkle could turn this into a champagne-like champion, but I still enjoyed the one I had more than I was expecting to from the appearance.

Number three is a barrel-aged amber ale called... [dramatic pause] The Liminal. We're up to 5.6% ABV now, which is still fairly modest. I expect amber ale to be red, but this is paler, more a light shade of copper. The aroma is very roasty; dry with coffee notes, like a stout. What's going on? That roast is still present on tasting, but gentler, about the level you'd expect in the drier sort of Irish red, which is more in keeping with the purported style. Unfortunately that sits next to a curdling vinegar sourness which I'm blaming on the red wine barrel. There's oak for sure, and fruity red grape, but it's all harsh and horrible, clashing badly with the dry coffee grounds effect. Low carbonation yet again, coupled with a thin texture, accentuates the severity of it all. The whole thing is sickly and difficult; the opposite of the good kind of odd.

A dark beer to finish out on. Corylus looked the picture of porter perfection in the glass, deepest brown with an even layer of fine off-white foam. It's not a porter, though, it's a brown ale. There are added hazelnuts but nothing on the label suggests it should be sour, and it is. There's a sweet brown ale in the background somewhere, with chocolate and maybe even those hazelnuts, but up front a balsamic vinegar sourness reigns. It's thin too, all the dark malt richness attenuated away. It's not actively unpleasant, but I don't think it's the beer it's meant to be. At 6.7% ABV it's possibly strong enough to rebrand as a Flemish-style oud bruin, assuming every bottle turned out the same way.

Canvas remains, for me, a brewery of potential. There's no doubting the fantastic creativity, done without following the predictable fashion of contemporary "daring" beer recipes. But there are still clearly quality issues. I hope they can get these sorted out soon.

Bear with me

It was a pleasant surprise to find a couple of beers from Bear Republic joining the line-up at Marks & Spencer. Time was, this was one of the go-to Californian breweries for seekers after those west-coast hop thrills, but I hadn't heard their name mentioned in years. Still, I was well up for a nostalgia trip. The last time I drank Racer 5 IPA was in 2009. It was a little less impressive nine years later, though still with those tasty peach notes on an orange-and-spices base. I guess there are a lot more beers like it around these days.

The new one is a pale ale caled Grand-Am, though still with a substantial ABV of 6%. It's a similar bright red-gold colour with a layer of fine white bubbles. The flavour and aroma are both rather muted, suggesting it may have been a mistake to drink that Racer 5 beforehand. Digging deep, a very similar flavour profile is there, just kind of... further away. A weighty boiled-sweet foundation, on which is set zesty grapefruit and spicy rocket and red cabbage. It's solidly built, if a little lacking in the refreshment qualities I'd like from a pale ale. I'm not complaining, but if you're only picking one of these, go for the turbo-charged Racer 5.

On the turn

The first Irish beer round-up of 2019 is here. I'm clearing up the tail end of last year's new (and new-to-me) releases, and taking a look at the early crop from the past few weeks.

The Swan on Dublin's Aungier Street has a new house beer called Swan Ale. The tap badge says it's from the "St Stephen's Green Brewery" but they've been very coy about where it's actually brewed. Turns out it's a very straightforward red ale, sweet even by the standards of the style with lashings of sticky toffee and caramel. There's no bitterness to speak of, and the carbonation is low, which made it a bit of a chore to chomp through, though a layer of dry tannin prevents it from turning actively difficult. At least it can't be accused of being watery or bland. More from the brand can be found in trad Dublin boozers The Bankers and The Ferryman. I'm sure the information will all come out in the wash eventually.

At the other end of the geek scale, another Vermont-yeast double IPA from Whiplash: Setting Sun. It's pale even by the style's standards, a uniform yellow emulsion. I got quite a lot of alcohol burn from the first sip, which was a little surprising. It takes a while for any hop action to emerge past this. There's savoury yeast first, then some garlic or scallion, and only quite late an emerging, but short-lived, lime bitterness. What little hop character there is fades even further on tasting, allowing more vanilla and cream out. There's no escaping the booze, though. This isn't one of Whiplash's best efforts, the hops just failing to land properly, whether that's because of the strength or the murk or something else entirely.

Having got their seasonal scotch ale and imperial stout releases out of the way early in December, Galway Bay's actual Christmas beer for Christmas week was a helles called, perhaps appropriately, Crispmas Hell. It's 5% ABV and almost completely clear with just a very slight kellerish haze in there. 100% spunded says the blurb, for extra crispness, and while I can't speak to the science it is exceedingly crisp indeed, a cleansing tingling sparkle. This does come at the expense of more typical helles softness but it's no hardship. Malt fans have to wait until it warms a little for a marzipan sweetness to emerge. The noble hops bring a mild sweet-pepper spice and a bitterer bite of fresh-cut grass, lasting long into the aftertaste. The latter element builds as it goes, to the point where my palate's aversion to German hops was kicking in by the end. Between that and the fizz I can't see myself horsing through masses of it (pun intended), but the first pint was bang on.

Just before Christmas, Hope dropped me a couple of bottles of their new nitrogenated Espresso Stout, number 13 in their limited edition series. I didn't have to pour it too violently to get a steady off-white head. The lack of sparkle isn't a problem as it's thick enough to not need it. That's well done with just 7% ABV to play with. Coffee isn't immediately apparent: I got chocolate first, albeit the dark and crumbly kind, then a sweet rose-and-honeysuckle perfumed sweetness. That balances well, and there's a proper green hop kick on the end. The only off-note was a weird oxidised sherry buzz, and I wonder if that was the coffee's fault. If so it's the only effect it had. Overall a very pleasant and drinkable winter stout.

White Gypsy's Woodcock pale ale has been showing up on guest and festival taps sporadically for the last couple of years. I think it's new to bottles, though, which is how I caught up with it. It's an American pale ale of 5.8% ABV, brewed with Citra and Mosaic. White Gypsy isn't exactly known for its hop-forward beers so I was intrigued to find out how this would go. The aroma wasn't a good start: astringent and somewhat sour, like the hops had been squeezed for every last microgramme of lupulin. It's similarly strange to taste, almost lactic in its sourness, but with notes of lime sorbet and vanilla ice cream too. Imagine a Loop the Loop ice lolly in beer form: it's something close to that. I found it hard to like. There are no soft edges; none of the gentle juiciness that Mosaic in particular does well. Instead it's hard edged, hot-tasting and severe. I wouldn't go so far as to say unpleasant, but it's a tough one to have fun with.

Black Donkey's winter release was a barrel-aged saison, quite possibly the first I've ever encountered, called Sergeant Jimmy. It's the clear pale amber of a glass of whiskey, though mostly smells of stonefruit, like the softer sort of saison. There's a definite something-else in the flavour, something distinctly oak-related, but I'd be more inclined to associate it with red wine or fino sherry than whiskey. It's certainly a mature flavour, and it contrasts nicely with the spritzy fresh saison. Pleasingly, the beer stays crisp and clean despite this, and despite the whopping 8% ABV. This is a mellow and gentle affair, not popping with novelty, but making good use of its constituent parts.

Onwards into the new year and O Brother has stolen a march on everyone with three brand new beers so far, all of which I located at UnderDog. Cloak and Stagger is described as a double dry-hopped New Zealand pale ale, just 5.5% ABV and a very hazy yellow. The Kiwi hops give it a certain grassiness over the tropical fruit these normally show, but there's also a sizeable dose of dreggy yeast, and a raw bitter hop burn on the finish, with a rub of garlic. It's not unpleasant, but does nothing particularly different with the hazy pale ale style. If you usually like them, you'll like this.

Presumably the brewery cat named I Killed This For You, a double IPA. It's another hazy orange job, this time thick and oily, tasting and feeling every bit of its 8% ABV. I don't know the exact hop line-up but it's lightly citric, more satsumas than limes. You get a decent wave of juiciness in there, while the finish is cleanly bitter. Again, it's a beer I feel I've tasted before; good at what it does but not doing anything distinctive or special. Could it be, with this pair, that there are just too many hazy hoppy beers out there? I'm sure I'd have been enamoured of both at one time. Now they seem quite run-of-the-mill.

They took a more daring step, fashion-wise, with Liberty, a plain old 4.3% ABV pilsner. Except there's nothing plain about it. Despite the watery appearance it has a filled-out bready malt base to which is added a mix of complex Germanic flavours. Eschewing grass notes, there's instead a rich green tang of crunchy sauerkraut, seasoned with a generous sprinkling of white pepper. While nothing fancy, it's rare for an Irish brewery to include a well-constructed pils as part of its one-off rotations. I'd be very happy to see more of this and its ilk.

Beer one from YellowBelly, released before I wrote it would be along soon, is Endangered Bap, a quirky collaboration with Whiplash. "Amarillo saison" is the description we're given to work with. It's a murky yellow colour and the texture also matches that of a New England IPA: that squidgy softness. From the flavour I got a strong one-two of juicy peach and sweet vanilla, while the saison side of the equation brings a sharp gritty burr. It's quite tasty, even if the Belgian roots are very difficult recognise under all those hops.

Keeping it topical were Two Sides and their Article 50 Brexit Stout, a sequel to summer 2016's Big Mistake IPA. At 6.5% ABV this will take the edge off current events. It's quite easy drinking too: a smooth and chocolatey affair, surprisingly light of body given all the dark malt character. That sits next to a bright floral perfume: rosewater and a little spike of jasmine spice. The fade-out is milk chocolate with some slightly gooey caramel. The floral thing seems like it might make it difficult to drink serially but it works well as a dessert or a nightcap.

The Porterhouse also has a big new stout, this one at 6.3% ABV and another which incorporates coffee into the recipe. I got to try Up & At 'Em on a visit to the brewery a few weeks ago, and it's also in their pubs and available bottled. It's quite dry and crisp, with a balanced roast from the dark malt and a subtle but distinct real coffee flavour. There's nothing extreme going on; instead the coffee is used as a true flavour enhancement rather than a simple gimmick.

We will retreat, strictly temporarily, into dry January with an alcohol-free West Coast IPA from Open Gate. As part of the promo for the Guinness no-alcohol lager, Pure Brew, the company staged a pop-up on South Anne Street the weekend before last. As well as the alcohol-free stout I reviewed last year, there was this 0.5% ABV hop bomb. It might not give you a massive head but it certainly had one, the staff blaming the densely nucleated glasses they were using. It tastes extreme: like raw hop powder or pellets, Cascade and Centennial being the varieties used. This gives it a concentrated citrus flavour and a heavy dankness too. And yet it's not all that bitter, possibly at least in part down to the huge and quite sticky body. Its hop credentials are beyond doubt, but compared to to the real thing, there was just something lacking: the complexity that full fermentation brings to a beer, regardless of how neutral the yeast is. Nevertheless it was pleasant drinking, convincing as a beer, and a genuine alternative for the hop-head on the dry. If Pure Brew lager goes well, the stout and IPA are worth investigating as successors.

And a final addition to the round-up comes in the form of Dark Side, a new nitro stout from Larkin's. I'm guessing this is intended as a core beer, for the customers seeking an alternative to the big brands. It didn't feel quite right to be drinking a pint of it among the fancy craft beers at UnderDog. It's a rock-solid stout: 4.7% ABV with a gentle kiss of sweet milk chocolate but not much else. I would love to try it away from the nitro as I suspect there's some extra complexity buried under there. It should be a cause for celebration in itself that an Irish start-up brewery is ready to go toe-to-toe with the big guys. Any move to disassociate the stout style with one particular brand is welcome.

That's it for now. Fingers crossed for lots of great new Irish beers this weekend at the Franciscan Well Cask Ales & Strange Brews festival. Doesn't it come around fast?

The Out-of-Towners

Post three from Hamburg concerns all the beers not from Hamburg. There's plenty of it about, in various contexts.

The Buddelship bar has lots of guest tap space. Mashee is a Hannover brewery I hadn't heard of and they had a Broyhan on offer. This previously extinct north-German style is an antecedent of modern weissbier and this example really shares a lot in common with the contemporary style. It's cloudy orange in colour, though headless, with a chewy body and lots of banana flavour. I get a small complexity of chocolate and salt, but otherwise it's just a dense, heavy weissbier. I think I expected something more daring. Oh well.

Berlin icon Heidenpieters, a brewery I'd heard lots about but never tried, was well represented on the taps. Their (Choco) Stout is 8.8% ABV and has an interesting herb-forward Jägermeister aroma. The texture is smooth, and that matches the silky chocolate flavour. It's not sweet, however, the flavour bringing in all those herbs again with plenty of dark bitterness. The name suggests it might be a pastrified sugarbomb but it's not.

On a later visit I got to try Heidenpeters Quince Saison. This is 4.8% ABV and a dark gold colour. There's an interesting wine-like aroma, of the sweet and white sort. The flavour, conversely, powers up the hops, turning dank and resinous. The grape juice returns soon after, and then there's another flip on the end where it's dry and raspingly bitter. I like the amazing mix of contrasts here; the twists and turns it takes. It's unusual without being silly, something all too rare in this era of try-hard beers.

Modern German craft isn't the only non-Hamburger beer in Hamburg: there are loads of trad blow-ins. Hofbräu, for example, has a couple of large beerhalls in the city. In the mood for Bavarian jollity, we went to one of them.

Surprisingly, I don't have a review of Hofbräu Dunkel on here, even though I've definitely drank it in the era of the blog. Anyway, it's chestnut red in colour and absolutely lovely. You get an aniseed aroma and then a clean-tasting lager with notes of caramel, roasted grain and mixed bitter herbs. The texture is heavy and bock-like yet it makes for very easy drinking. Well, relatively, easy drinking. A halbe was enjoyable; a full litre would be harder work.

Also of interest on the menu was Hofbräu Kristall Weisse, not a style I'd associate with the brewery, despite it being Bavarian as. This is fully clear; a polished gold. There's a very full-on clove aroma and lots of clove on the flavour too. Lots. I had it in my head that kristall meant a certain amount of flavour has been stripped out by the filtration process, but this manages to retain all the fun of a proper weissbier yet is easier drinking because it lacks the hot gritty bits of a raw weizen. Suddenly I see the point.

I further indulged my new-found interest in mainstream Munich kristallweisse later with a Franziskaner Kristallklar. This was much more what I had been expecting, even though I rather like standard Franziskaner. It tastes like it has been shorn of its wholesome wheaty goodness, and what's left is a sticky, solvent-infused residue. There's all the headachey taste of a weissbier but none of the gentle pillowy fruits or grains. The kristall experiment ended here.

I hoped for better with this new acquaintance from the same stable: Franziskaner Kellerbier. It's explicitly unfiltered and "direkt aus dem Lagerkeller", so is it cool-fermented, then? Unusual for this weissbier brand, if so. My pour in an admittedly narrow glass looked relatively clear and a rich copper-amber colour. After the first sip I could still taste the hot Kristallweisse that preceded it. I needed to drain the glass and start again. Topped up, things weren't much better. It's very dull, with just a vague cereal crunch and a slight metallic hop twang of the sort you find in cheap mass-produced lagers. Which, on reflection, is probably what this is. Zero out of two for AB InBev's Munich operation today.

Last of the weissbiers for now is Herrnbräu, the one they serve in the finely appointed restaurant in the cellar of Hamburg town hall. This cloudy orange number tastes of butane and light clove. It's light-bodied, making for easy drinking, but not thin or watery with a full 5.4% ABV. It gets sweeter as it warms, introducing elements of banana and toffee. Overall it's a fairly middle-of-the-road version of the style, maybe leaning a little to the sweet side, but not by much.

The final Bavarian beer for today is Bayreuther Hell, from Bayreuth, obviously. Textbook to the point of boring, this one: sweet and bready at first, followed by a kick of spicy red cabbage. It's pretty much everything helles is supposed to be and does nothing fancy within the parameters. I liked it, of course, but it's not the sort of beer that gives itself to long screeds of sensory description. Not that there's any reason it should.

East of Bayreuth, hard by the Czech border, is Waldsassen, home of the Stiftland brewery. Altes Mädchen was pouring a beer chalked up simply as Zoigl and it turned out to have come from this place. It arrived an attractive clear gold colour, tasting of soft mineral water with gentle herbs and meadowy flowers. These build as it warms, turning to prominent lavender and violet. This is set on a crisp base of Ryvita crackers: a grain crunch complementing the bready malt base. The different elements blend together well resulting in an understated sort of excellence. I know Zoigl isn't one of those styles that's meant to be shoved into kegs and shipped up the country, but I'd make an exception when they're like this.

Saxon beer Hasseröder, an AB InBev brand, was the last beer of the trip, served at the departure gate in the airport in a handsome heavy handled halbe. It's perfectly clear with a decent head, smooth and fluffy with cakey malt and then celery and basil wafting through. I had noted it down as another well-rounded helles before I discovered the brewery calls it a pilsner. Oh well, never mind. Good lager is good lager. For relaxing airport drinking it's absolutely perfect.

Before that, on our final afternoon, we called in to Beyond Beer, a brightly-lit off licence specialising in local and international beers of the craft sort, with a selection touching on Belgium, the UK, the US and other luminaries of the current scene. There are stools and benches for drinking in, with three taps and a €1 mark-up on anything from the fridge you want to stay and pour.

I picked Vinous by Beavertown, purely on the name. I like the nascent trend for winelike beers, and this sounded interesting: a 4.3% ABV sour beer using grape must in the recipe. It poured a clear and pale red colour with no head really. The flavour was disappointingly sweet and, well, obvious: cherry and eucalyptus shout loudly at the front. Red grape juice arrives later with just a small spike of sourness, while the texture is disappointingly thin. It's OK, all things considered, but what bugged me most is that it's in no way vinous. That's not a word you can just throw around.

I had almost chosen Hollows from New York's LIC Beer Project instead, and on leaving I decided I just had to have it. It's a top-rated top-dollar double IPA of the sort many breweries, including several Irish ones, are trying to copy at the moment. I wanted to find out if the style leaders were doing anything different, a lesson that cost me €10 for 440ml. And while this was definitely a nice beer -- 8.5% ABV with juicy notes of mango and pineapple, not killed by the yeasty off-flavours trying and failing to smother them -- it demonstrated to me that Irish breweries like Whiplash are working at exactly this level. Chasing exotic rarities is fun, but there's no point in doing it when it comes to hazy double IPAs: they're not difficult for any competent brewer to turn out.

I hadn't been expecting to finish my musing on beer in Hamburg with a graffitto'd can of NYC hop juice, but here we are. I think I've shown that the city has plenty to offer the beer-curious, and I'm certain there's much more to see at a time of year when a greater number of the bars and taprooms are actually open. Go then.