On familiar ground

The trip to Germany was originally planned and booked for April 2020 and I spent the months running up to it fervently hoping that this Covid thing will prove to be a damp squib and we'd all be back to normal by spring. That didn't happen but the plan stayed in place, the refunds were carefully stored and at the end of March 2022 I was finally setting off. One enhancement compared to two years ago is that it's now possible to fly directly from Dublin to Nuremberg, and that's what Dr John and I began with.

The dismal weather didn't encourage much exploring, and I reckoned the best place to begin was the Altstadthof brewery restaurant for a sausage lunch. I'd had their flagship beers on a previous visit, so started on the current seasonal, Ostergold. As the name implies, it's a blonde colour and is 5.3% ABV, hopped with Cascade and Opal. Expecting a fairly plain lager I was surprised first by the spicy banana aroma. The flavour is almost like a weissbier, with hints of nutmeg and clove before it finishes dry, like the lager it presumably is. Into this the Cascade adds more than a hint of dankness, bringing a big old urinal-cake effect to the picture. It's certainly characterful, but a bit busy to be the kick-off beer for an afternoon session.

We went across the street to Hütt'n for the next round. The beer I picked from their diverse range was listed as "3 Kronen Rotes Rauchbier" and I think it's the one actually called Stöffla by Brauerei Drei Kronen in Memmelsdorf. In fairness to the description it is a deep murky red colour, 4.9% ABV, and with a big bacon aroma. The modest strength hides a hefty foretaste full of maple syrup and pork crackling, though it all tails off quickly, with a slightly watery finish. Nevertheless, this successfully delivers the basics of good rauchbier, harnessing the meaty smoke taste just right.

Around the corner on Tiergarten there are a couple of Augustiner-branded pubs and John insisted on stopping in for an Edelstoff at the cleanly-appointed miniature beerhall Zur Schranke. Can't argue with that. I realised that I had never tried Augustiner Dunkel, so that was what I picked. The standard Augustiner approach to precision and quality comes through very clearly in this chestnut brown number, with its subtle flavours of hazelnut and liquorice, expanding to cola nut and weedpatch nettles. Though richly textured it is extremely drinkable and lacks any of the overdone caramel or inappropriate herbal bitterness that plagues second-rate dunkel.

On the way out of town we stopped in at a new (to me) brewpub near the station. Bruderherz is very much in the modern style with bright windows, exposed brick and a penchant for cocktails. Not a brass Stammtisch sign or sprig of dried hops to be seen.

From the brewery in the basement, I began on Mia, the lager. It's a very kellerbier kind of thing: 5.2% ABV and a pale hazy yellow, the flavour bringing celery and asparagus to a grainy unfiltered malt base. Traces of bubblegum esters shoot through in the finish suggesting the lagering time or temperature isn't quite what it should be. It's a rough and ready beer; what I'd expect from traditional German brewpubs, though not so much from somewhere as slick as this operation appears.

But tradition seems to be a concern at Brudderherz, so they have a Nuremberg rotbier on the roster as well. Roter Lui has a lot in common with its stablemate, being the same strength and giving out much the same grass-and-celery noble hop flavours. It is a fairly clear red shade, though there's still that rough and unfinished grain quality too. What it adds uniquely is a caramel angle, and this extra malt complexity is more able to balance the hops than the pale lager does. I think they've made a better fist of the city's native style than the "official" brewers at Altstadthof.

What about the big guys, though? Tucher is the local macro and a couple of days later I had a chance encounter with a rotbier they had made on their pilot brewery. Tucher Rotbier is 5.5% ABV and a murky orange colour. There's a sourness to the aroma which I found offputting at first, until I noticed the similarity to Flanders red. Well that's OK then. The sweetness in the foretaste was surprising, then: a quite jammy strawberry quality laced with almond paste. That threatens to make it difficult, but luckily it's still a Bavarian lager and has a clean grainy finish and even a little noble-hop celery greenness. It took me a while to get my head around it, and I doubt I could drink it in quantity, but it does what does well. I'm up for exploring the style further, if anyone has recommendations.

But back to the journey, and the second venue was Bamberg, for a mix of familiar haunts and new experiences. On the first evening I dropped into Café Abseits, a highlight of my previous visit and somewhere that used to have an excellent menu of new-wave German beers. I guess that didn't catch on because it's all very traditional now. With my schitzel I had a Huppendorfer Vollbier, from a brewery 20km to the east of Bamberg. Though only 5% ABV it's very voll indeed with a clear amber body and a heady waft of brown sugar in the aroma. There's a little balancing red cabbage in the flavour but otherwise it's all about the malt, to the point where it may as well be a dunkel. If you like your lager sweet with a dose of caramel, this will suit you; otherwise it may seem like a sticky mess.

Not far from Abseits is another pub with a varied beer selection, Drei Linden. Here I had the Pils from Brauerei Hönig in Tiefenellern, another of Bamberg's neighbouring towns. This one's 4.8% ABV but again brings plenty of malt weight into the picture, with golden syrup as the centre of the flavour, plus a hint of butterscotch just upsetting things slightly. Luckily there's a lot of hop to balance all this -- rocket and white pepper in particular, for a spicy sort of balance. Although the strength matches that of a Pils, and the hopping is nicely assertive, this feels much more like a Helles to me. It's good either way.

I'll have more on the new developments in Bamberg's brewing scene tomorrow, but The Establishment are still going strong. The local macro here is Kaiserdom and, having never tried their beers or even seen them on tap, I made sure to pick up a bottle of Kaiserdom Pilsner for a later train journey. It's a rather plain, by-the-numbers, affair: 4.9% ABV and pale green-gold in colour. There's little sign of the promised herb and spice, no more than a brush of basil. It could be that, in other parts of Germany, it trades on Bamberg's reputation for beer, but I can see why it's seemingly unloved in its home city. It's a pilsner in need of a proper kick.

Beers from the pilot kit at the Weyermann maltings is one of Bamberg's fun little novelties. A recent addition to that sequence is Isaria 1924, an amber coloured lager which gets its name from a heritage variety of barley they're trying out in it. 5.3% ABV, it has a sweet and bock-like foretaste, though finishes dry. I thought I detected a modicum of smoke in it too, but there's no smoked malt in the recipe so it's either ambient pick-up or my imagination. The hops are an unfamiliar trio of Diamant, Aurum and Tango, but it's not very hop-forward so I can't tell you anything about how they taste. What did strike me was a similarity to beers brewed with the Irish heritage barley Hunter: there's a very familiar rich and wholesome cakey sweetness. Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising. Anyway, this is more interesting than excellent, but I guess that's what these Weyermann carpet-sample beers are supposed to be.

Though I paid visits to several of the classic Bamberg inns, Fässla wasn't among them. It does a good job of getting its beer out and about, though, and I found the dunkel, Zwergla, in the hotel vending machine. The aroma of this 6%-er is a strange mix of porridge and wet grass, causing further confusion by introducing milk chocolate at the beginning of the foretaste. This is followed by grain husk and the high-bitterness of cocoa powder. It's a bit all over the place and exhibits a serious lack of chill, certainly when compared to the Augustiner. It didn't force me to reconsider Fässla's absence from the itinerary.

Top of that itinerary was Keesmann, which had been closed last time I was here. Whereas most of the classic inns, including Mahr's across the street, are dark and rambling, this has a bright and airy dining room, making great use of pale wood to add light. I wasn't familiar with Josephi, Keesmann's bock, so ordered one of those. This is copper-coloured and very heavy; 6.9% ABV and bringing thick sugary caramel seasoned with noble-hop herbs and spices -- fresh spinach and white pepper were detectable in amongst the dense malt. This is another one that tastes darker than it looks. It's good, though, and makes excellent use of the high gravity to drive flavour complexity. Herren Pils remains the brewery's best work, and now I know it doesn't get any more superior when consumed at headquarters.

What prompted the whole trip was the Spring 2022 meeting of the European Beer Consumers Union, hosted by the local chapter in Bamberg. They put together a sizeable sightseeing (ie drinking) programme and I was a little unnerved to see Klosterbräu on it. The beer at Bamberg's oldest brewery-inn was one of the great disappointments of the 2014 visit -- why would we want to go back to that? It turns out that the 2014 Klosterbräu was in terminal decline and its owners sold up three years later. In stepped Daddy Kaiserdom who set about upgrading the onsite brewery, fixing the wonky recipes and adding some new house beers.

Because it's Bamberg, I guess they felt obliged to add a rauchbier to the roster. Klosterbräu Rauchbier is distinguished from the city's more famous examples by being an opaque black colour. This gives it an intense dark-malt richness on which the generous smoke flavour sits. Kippers and chocolate is not a flavour combination I thought would work, but it's what you get in the foretaste and is delicious. While it's fizzy, there's pleasing density, suggesting more than its modest 5.3% ABV. A little herbal mint complexity appears in the middle, and turns more intesely smoky, tarry even, as it warms. I was immediately on board for New Klosterbräu.

That meant I was brave enough to try one of their pre-2017 beers next: the flagship Schwärzla. In 2014 this was dull rather than actively unpleasant. Now I got a masterpiece of complexity, smelling of dark chocolate and dry coffee, proceeding to a herbal liquorice bitterness and rounding out to a plum and raisin wintery fruit effect. It paired beautifully with the snow falling lightly on the street outside. I tend to be a bit of purist about Schwarzbier so I'll deem this one a style by itself rather than an off-kilter example. Regardless, it's delicious, and another reason to put Klosterbräu back in your Bamberg good books.

I love a happy ending, and that's the end of part one. Next, we'll see some more radical changes to Bamberg's beer than just a few recipe tweaks.

Take four

It's rare that one gets to see the inside of 57 the Headline on a Monday. This occasion was a charity tap takeover by Trouble Brewing, bringing a bunch of new releases as well as several old favourites.

Super Hans is in the Kölsch style, an infrequent occurrence in Irish brewing, now that everyone has their temperature control sorted out. I'm a big fan of the real thing but find that clones rarely measure up, too often used as a shorthand for basic lager for unfussy drinkers. This one seemed altogether more conscientiously designed, beginning with the precision crispness and dry mineral bite. The malt base gives it a breadcrust wholesomeness onto which is grafted a sharp and peppery pinch from rocket-like noble hops. It's quite fizzy from the keg so is no substitute for the soft cask variety you get in Cologne, but as a palate-cleansing thirst-quencher, by the pint rather than the stange, it's perfect.

You've got to have a complementary pair in any set like this, and of course you've got to have a mild. Trouble's new mild, their first since 2017 by my reckoning, is Silver Lining. This is only 3.4% ABV so it wasn't surprising to find it a bit thin and fizzy. There's chocolate, light caramel and a tiny, tinny bite of English hops plus some equally understated blackcurrant. It's OK, but very, y'know, mild. I do think this has the potential to be spectacular on cask, however. Hint hint.

The companion piece, as I'm sure you can guess, is called Every Cloud. It's an imperial stout at 9.1% ABV, and it does have chocolate in common with the other, though here it's very dark and bitter. Mwah ha haa! For balance you get a much more cheery red-fruit complexity -- raspberry and strawberry fondant. The strength isn't exactly modest, but there's a light touch on the alcohol heat and it's not as dense as one might expect. A little unexciting by the standards of modern microbrewed imperial stout, perhaps, but think of it as a friendly, neighbourhood, Monday-night sort of version instead.

The inevitable IPA has rye in it. As such ones tend to be, Trick of Light is a hazy carrot colour. The initial impression was a surprising sweet and fluffy effect and it took a moment for the bite to kick in. Two bites, actually: citric lemon and grapefruit and rye's pepper, though not the grass bitterness that often comes with that. The twist here is the use of Azacca, a hop which offsets any bitter excesses by bringing juicy tropical fruit in at the finish. The end result is a lovely interplay of bitter and sweet. You get the assertiveness of rye IPA with a happy ray of softer sunshine alongside. Nice.

All of that leaves me hankering for the days when Trouble was a new-beer-every-month brewery. They're clearly not short of recipe ideas. I hope to see more like these on rotating taps and in cans in the near future.

I learned the truth

The blog's birthday rolls around again. Today I'm marking 17 years of writing about beers, and wondering if this was the plan. Regardless, I haven't yet run out of beers to write about so we continue.

As always, it's an excuse to open something special, and this one is accidentally special, having been stashed away in 2018, wrapped in its LCBO paper bag, and forgotten about. And what a fine bottle too: that lovely ship's decanter look that shrieks class. It's from the fancy brewery in Niagra-on-the-Lake, The Exchange, and is called ∞: Peppercorn Rye Saison, one of a number of variants in the Infinity barrel-aged series. Wine barrels have been employed, though only for two months, and it's 7.2% ABV.

In the glass it's a handsome honey colour, dropped completely bright after almost four years of benevolent neglect, and retains a jolly, jaunty fine white head. The wine is immediately apparent from the aroma, with lots of soft and sweet white grape. I get that it's a dry beer beneath that, but don't get much indication of saison spice or the peppercorns.

White wine forms the bulk of the flavour too, and the high strength adds to an overall Chardonnay effect. A slightly rough dryness pokes through, with an added grass bitterness I'm assigning to the rye. The pepper is... subtle. It adds a very slight piquancy but I think you need to know it's there in order to taste it. I like peppercorns to be a bit more in my face.

Wine-barrel-aged saisons are very much my thing, but this one isn't quite in the top tier. I loved the wine side of the equation -- it's luscious and bubbly and fun -- but there's a lack of complexity which my 17-year trained palate was a little disappointed by. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more if I'd quit this blog years ago.

Darkest Romania

Two strong and dark yokes from Romanian funsters Hop Hooligans today. The brewery was a highlight of my visit to Bucharest a few years back so it was a cheery reunion when they arrived in Dublin.

I enjoyed the Chupacabra spiced imperial stout back then so was well up for Imperial Chupacabra, even if it's only slightly stronger than the original at 9.5% ABV. Empires come cheap these days. Chocolate is still the main feature, occupying all of the aroma and a good portion of the foretaste. It's a tiny bit thin on that, given the strength: I would have liked some more heat from what must be a substantial malt base. Heat arrives a little later via the added chilli. This sparks late in the flavour, flaming the palate a little before setting the belly aglow after swallowing. It's a tingle more than a full burn and works beautifully with the dark malt characteristics. I like an assertive chilli stout and this hits the sweet spot just right. 

Chilli is easy; beetroot is hard. The next beer is called Bloody Koschei, and check out that head! It's properly dramatic, being a deep blood red colour on top of the dense black body. The beer is an imperial stout at 11% ABV. It smells broadly vegetal, the sweetness all about those wintery roots. Sweetness of the malt kind dominates the flavour, all Parma Violets and caramel chews with a shot of espresso in the finish. The beetroot is nothing more than a savoury buzz running in parallel. While the previous beer was subtle about the alcohol, this one wears it loud and proud: it is hot, and gets a bit cloying as a result. Sticky chocolate sauce and real deep-purple beetroot bitterness team up in the flavour that's briefly fun but gets a little difficult before you're a few sips in. This doesn't have the cleansing sharpness of the previous beer. I deem it OK, but not brilliant and not fun. Damn you, beetroot!

It looks like Hop Hooligans are still as creative and quality-focused as ever. And if any other brewer wants to increase the variety of chilli stouts on the Irish market, I'll be very happy to assist in consuming them.

Where you been?

It's almost three months since I last did a pale ale roundup, and with an even ten candidates in the backlog it's time to get a new one published. Here's what a selection of the busiest Irish brewers having been doing in this space.

The session begins, appropriately, with the latest from Kinnegar: Brewers At Play 22: Hazy Session IPA. There's a look of table beer about this one -- an anaemic yellow colour -- though it's the full 4.5% ABV so if anything on the strong side for the style. It smells sweet and chewy, channelling the fluffy candy vibes of big New England IPA, with a hint of pithy bitterness in the background. That pith, or maybe rind, is the main feature of the flavour, wasting no time in delivering a bitter happyslap to the palate. This settles after a second to a calmer meringue-pie tart sweetness with some interesting garlic and herb savoury notes. The finish brings us back to table beer with a dry and gritty rawness. There's a lot going on in this small package, and it won't be for everyone, but I think it works. They've clearly charged it heftily with an indecent amount of hops. 

Dublin airport's on-again off-again relationship with decent beer reached a new high point with the opening of Tap + Brew in Terminal 1 airside, a spacious bar where The White Hag is the principal beer supplier. Five of their beers are on tap, including an exclusive pale ale called Altitude. Though only 4.8% ABV it's quite weighty looking, a deep shade of amber. The flavour is a very straightforward mandarin-segment juiciness, finishing quickly and plainly with a carbonic bite. There are similarities with Little Fawn in the accessible fruitiness and the hops doing one thing and doing it well. Either is excellently suited as a gulp-and-go airport beer.

The O'Hara's Hop Adventure series, running since 2015, rumbles on. The latest variety getting the treatment is Talus. As usual it's 5% ABV and a pale golden in colour with a medium haze. It smells a little sickly: a hard-candy or cordial sort of sweetness. Worrying. Luckily the flavour is much cleaner, with a crisp fizz clearing away any sugar or resin excesses. The central character is delightfully pithy, the cordial calmed into more of a posh squash, tasting of real oranges and lemons. I think this shows off the hop very well, but perhaps more importantly it's wonderfully refreshing, arriving just in time for the warm weather.

Just like Hope's Summer Seasonal 2022. They've gone back to American pale ale like in 2020, except they've upped the ABV to 5.5% and cut the bitterness down to a paltry 17.6 IBUs. Behind the number there's a stated intent of making it juicy with El Dorado, Azacca and Idaho 7, with a bit of Citra because why not? The result is a darker amber than easy-going summer beer would normally be, and quite weightily textured. I didn't think it juicy as such, but it's very sweet, with dominant notes of strawberry and vanilla. It's almost cloying, though a mineral rasp in the finish offsets the sweetness a bit. Regardless, I'm not at all sure that this would be suitably refreshing on a hot day. It could substitute for an ice cream though, so there's that.

You'll Pay With Your Souls intones O Brother. No, I'll pay with my debit card: €5.25 for a 5.3% ABV Simcoe pale ale, which is a bit steep to be honest. It's a wan and hazy yellow and smells lightly lemony; pleasant, but not over-a-fiver pleasant. The flavour has some happier extra dimensions: dank resins, candied lemons, dill, rosemary and tumeric. That's a lot going on for a single-hopper. It's a bit of a time-tunnel beer, bringing me right back to when Simcoe was the cutting edge of hopping. I didn't like it then, finding it harsh and threatening. Now this old grizzled palate is much more able to deal, and it seems charming and retro. Retro really doesn't take long in the IPA world. On balance this is fun and enjoyable, and nowhere near as serious as the daft name implies.

Supermarket own-brand beers aren't known for getting the detail of higher-end styles right, but Dundalk Bay seems to have managed it with their new one for Aldi: Sailor Sam's Hazy IPA. It's the proper shade of pale custard yellow and smells of vanilla and garlic: not pleasant, but exactly what the €7-a-can mob do too. Fair play. The texture is a little thinner than the super-premium stuff, but then it is only 5.5% ABV. Flavourwise, the garlic is pervasive, laced with a slightly harsh butane note, though there's a happier tropical mango in the mix as well, plus the vanilla sweetness. All told it didn't really suit me: it's one of those beers that has everything I don't like about hazy IPA. But I respect the hustle, and somebody out there will appreciate it.

Next, as I hope will become a tradition for these posts, there's a black IPA. Lineman claims that Nagelbett is a "cold" BIPA, jumping on board the cold IPA bandwagon, although it's not actually cold fermented. Shenanigans! The description/confession is on the brewery website here. Photographing it in direct sunlight I discovered that it's more a dark brown than actual black. The tarry roast of good black IPA is present in the aroma, though I also get a definite sense of the dry burnt toast found in schwarzbier, so maybe the "cold" description isn't pure fakery after all. Against that, the texture is rich and creamy -- definitely more ale than lager -- while the flavour is subtle. Bitter dark chocolate smooshes into boiled veg. I waited for the fun peppery spice that normally arrives next, but it's missing, and with it goes one of the joys of black IPA. The finish is clean and quite quick, being another point where the "cold" epithet is earned, but this isn't black IPA as I like it. I'm especially concerned at how it's a substantial 6.4% ABV but doesn't have the depth, warmth or complexity that should come with it. It's fine, and new black IPA is always welcome. This one does get the basics right. However, the novelty factor that the brewery has aimed for didn't really pay off, I reckon.

Stronger still is Krush Groove, an IPA from Rascals, collaboratively brewed with Yeastie Boys. It's an IPA at 7% ABV, promising both New Zealand hops and tropical and citrus flavours. In the glass it's a medium hazy orange colour and smells of sweet cordial with an edge of harder diesel fumes, suggesting Nelson Sauvin is in the house. Both of those are present in the flavour, but on top of them is a hard bitterness, pithy and grassy, making it a clean-edged and uncompromising IPA. The words "west coast" spring to mind, but naww, this shouldn't be reduced to a sub-genre; this is what IPA once was, in its entirety, back when terminology mattered (2011). There's enough fruit fun on offer for this one to stay entertaining, but there's an old-fashioned roughness too, which doesn't pull punches and doesn't care if you enjoy it or not. I did.

"Oat cream IPA" continues to insist it's a thing, and the latest is Lough Gill's I'll Be Late, a powerful iteration at 7.2% ABV. It's pale for all that; an innocent sunny yellow emulsion. Citra, Galaxy and Idaho 7 are the hops, and I think it's the Fanta sweetness of Galaxy that I get most of in the aroma. Sweetness is a built-in feature, of course, and the lactose gives the flavour a definite milkshake stickiness without actually bulking out the body. The hop bitterness -- Citra in force -- clashes with this, the resins bringing an unwelcome second stickiness. I don't get it. The hopping here belongs in a clean and bright IPA and gains nothing from being rendered creamy. I'm all for innovation, but this has been tried before and it's not an improvement on the basics of IPA. Clean it up. Thank you.

We climb aboard the DIPA train, finally, with a new one from Third Barrel: And Dance The Blues. It's a mucky looking one, an unattractive earwax beige, with bonus points for a soupy unevenness of colour. The aroma is cleaner, though, with a strong and uncompromising vegetal, savoury bang of hops, all cabbage and pepper. You get more of that on tasting, in with some gritty, earthy murk notes. Yes: it's one of those, aimed at the more masochistic sort of haze purist. On the plus side, it conceals its 8% ABV well, so there's no nasty burn, a considerable compensation. Overall it's not my sort of thing though just like with Sailor Sam's above, I'm sure it will have fans, all of whom have tasted this sort of thing before and know what they like.

The rate at which new IPAs are being turned out by Irish brewers may indeed be slowing, but there's still plenty of choice on offer.

Play to your strengths

Wicklow Wolf has got right into gear for 2022 with a bunch of new releases: permanent, seasonal and one-offs. The full-spectrum craft beer experience is what we come to them for.

First up is a new core range beer, hazy and hoppy, called Tundra. It's badged as a "tropical" IPA, though the label doesn't tell us what hops they've used, only that they're "tropical". Since it's joining the core range I guess they want to be able to swap those tropicals as and when they need to. I got a significant kick of alcohol heat from the aroma, more than I would have thought for 5.6% ABV. The flavour is much more accessible, however, with a light orangeade sweet side beefed up by dank and resinous hopping. Tropical not so much. There's an altogether more serious savoury element, some fun peppery spice and a pinch of proper citric bittering. In combination that's quite enjoyable, but I think "tropical" is overstating it a little, given some of the roaring juice-bombs currently on the market.

This is, I guess, what qualifies as mainstream these days: built to be repeatable and cost effective, unlike some of the uneconomical art-piece special editions you get. As such, and what with the blue can, it puts itself squarely in the same category as Trouble Ambush, and I don't think it quite measures up, needing more softness and sweet fruit. But if you like Ambush and aren't fervently loyal to it, here's something else to try.

Latest in the Endangered Species series is an IPA hopped with New Zealand varieties Nelson Sauvin and Moteuka. This sort of thing has been around for yonks but that's no reason to stop brewing them. Far Far Away is 6% ABV and a standard hazy orange. There must be an IPA template these guys are working from. I get nothing especially kiwi from the aroma, smelling much more American, with citrus dominant. Nelson's diesel mineral side is apparent from the foretaste in a most enjoyable way, softened by orange pith and juice. I get a little herbal grass from the Motueka but it's mostly restrained. In fact, that's true for the beer in general: although it's heavily bodied and built for sipping, the hops aren't very loud and it's up to you whether that's a point in favour or not. I would have preferred a bit more welly, especially in a one-off, but couldn't help enjoying the balance. If it really is built around an IPA template, it's one that works. 

Their new stout is a 6.6% ABV export-style job called After Midnight. Taking a sip without bothering to read the label I thought "Oh, they've done another coconut stout. Fair enough." They haven't, though. This uses an experimental variety (HBC 472), a close relative of Sabro. And boy is it Sabro-like, with an even realer dry coconut-husk rasp. It takes moment before any further complexities emerge. That takes the form of a plum and raisin fruit side and an old-fashioned green-cabbage hop bite. That last bit is a reminder that beyond the cutting-edge experimentation, this is really a very traditional stout, of the kind mainstream brewers have long since stopped making. It's dense and smooth, pure black and topped with a beige head. The texture is silky enough to have me seeking oats in the ingredients, but there aren't any. Yes, I would prefer this sort of thing without the experimental element, but I don't resent it either: the stout's intrinsic quality shines through.

As the brewery's new pattern of Locavore single-estate beers settles into an annual cycle, I detect an intensification of the process. This time last year, the spring Locavore was garnet coloured and 9.8% ABV. For Locavore Spring 2022 we're looking at something jet black and all of 11.9% ABV. Approach with caution. Officially it's still a barrel aged farmhouse ale with Brettanomyces, and like last year's it pours quite flat. The aroma suggests autolysis: that sweet/savoury point where melty chocolate meets soy sauce. The flavour veers away from the savoury, with raisins, quince and sage all featuring. There's a general medieval vibe, of spiced wine and roasted meat. I like it. While it's not hot as such, you know you're drinking something strong. Approach with caution, but enjoy: there's a lot to have fun with here.

I'm sure I've said this before, but Wicklow Wolf is building a very decent reputation for itself as a stout brewer. There's enough hazy IPA coming out of the Garden County already so I wouldn't object if this became even more of a specialism for them.

There's no IPA in team

It's fun how several Irish microbreweries have now adopted local League of Ireland football clubs. Galway Bay is the latest, pulling on the jersey of second-division strivers Galway United. The tie-in beer is a Czech-style pils, punningly called Triból. 4.5% ABV makes it a 10° lager in Czech terms, designed for easy quaffing. And it works for that -- nothing challenging or upsetting is to be found in here, and absolutely no off flavours. That's not to say it's boring. Peppery Mittelfrüh hops sit on a full malt base, one which suggests decoction to me. Textbook stuff, then. I was about to say that Galway Bay's streak of great lagers continues, but it's not a streak, it's just how they make them.

The next one isn't a football tie-in, but given Hope's Dutch connections, the orange livery had me thinking it might be. This is Amber Lager: number 26 in their series of limited editions. It's very amber indeed, a dark shade of honey, and there's a density that goes with that, reflected in the 5.5% ABV. They're up front about the decoction mashing, and it shows. The flavour starts sweet, with strawberries and red liquorice, the latter growing in influence, bringing a herbal bitterness for balance. That doesn't last long and the finish is quick and dry with no lingering traces of the fruit or herbs. This one is decent though unexciting. It doesn't push my buttons the same way as the pils does. The observation here, I guess, is that lager doesn't necessarily become more characterful when brewed darker.

1-0 to the pale stuff, then.