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Fruits of revolution
The United States of America will shortly be celebrating 245 years since it achieved independence and I thought I would mark the occasion with some American beers. As it happened, there was something of a theme to what was in my fridge when I went looking for candidates. Another Sierra Nevada brand extension? Hell yeah! This is Mango Little Thing , number eleventy-seven in the hazy IPA series, this time with tropical fruit added. It's a gentle 6% ABV and an innocent sunny yellow colour; hazy but not fully opaque. I do wonder if that's a conscious choice for marketing reasons or a mere consequence of the vast quantities in which the brewery makes its beer. The aroma strikes a syrupy note; artificial and sticky, not like real mango. That becomes even more pronounced in the flavour, where the foretaste is like opening a bag of Skittles and giving each item inside a single lick. It is somewhat redeemed by still being an IPA, not merely an agglomeration of fruit gack. A subdued hop ch
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Blank look
Today's subject is something of a sequel to Victoria Málaga, which featured in a post about Spanish beer last year . Rosa Blanca is also from the Barcelona beer giant Damm, and is sold in a 66cl bottle. That becomes rather less indulgent-seeming at an ABV of only 3.4%. From that I expected it to be pale and sickly looking, but it's quite a rich golden colour in the glass, with a positively handsome German-style head. The aroma shows character too: peachy fruit, suggesting that the label's claim that it's a "hoppy lager" isn't simply an idle marketing boast. The flavour is plainer, certainly, but it's not dull. There's a cereal crispness emphasised by a surprisingly full body for the strength. The hops -- American, I assume -- add a zesty lemon note, building gradually into quite a serious resinous bitterness. The sheen comes off it after a few sips, however, with the introduction of a slightly cloying floral perfume note, and a dry tang of metal: both hallmarks of when big brewer
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Peeved
Work had me in Glasgow for a few days earlier this month, a city I had never been drinking in before, so was pleased to get it some way ticked off, though far from comprehensively, I'm sure. I was based on the western edge of the city centre, where there were a few noteworthy pubs (thanks Rob !) within easy reach. The State, for example, is a pleasant bit of dark wood and brass Victoriana. The five cask ales had nothing of Scottish interest: Almasty's Green Pale Ale was as close as it got, Newcastle being nearly Scotland. It came with a warning of cloudiness, which I waved away, though I wasn't prepared for quite how grey and gritty it was. Still, it tasted fairly clean, with only a hint of dregs. A coconut hop flavour is presumably the result of Ekuanot, in here with Simcoe and Mosaic. There's some woody pine and broad forest vibes, rather than the tropical taste promised by the brewery -- it's not quite clean enough for that. A herbal, medicinal tang, of eucalyptus and aniseed, finis
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Scandi doubles
They like their hops, up in the northern latitudes of Europe. By way of demonstration, today I've got three beers from three different Nordic brewers, all in the double IPA style. The first is by a new brewery to me, Friends Co. of Helsingborg in Sweden. It's called All Citra DDH IPA , expanding on that by telling us there's 20g per litre of the titular American hop. There's also an instruction to "roll and flip the can to mix well before use" (I didn't), so this is a beer unashamed of its cloudiness, and is indeed a quite opaque eggy yellow. It smells nicely zesty, rather than the vanilla-laden sweetness I feared. The flavour does open sweetly, with soft ripe peach and a burst of pineapple juice. A very faint pithy bitterness follows this, though the tropical aspect never quite fades out, and bounces all the way back in the finish. I was on the lookout for grittiness, but there's none, thankfully, and it's quite full and warming, despite its mere 7% ABV. Vanilla custard is late, but a
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The haze code
If hazy IPA is loosening its grip on the independent beer scene, nobody has told Whiplash. They're still churning them out in Ballyfermot, doubtless to a still-appreciative audience. It falls upon your correspondent to pour the requisite scorn, where appropriate. There are two new ones today. The first is Hail the Apocalypse , a collaboration with occasional visitor to these shores, Mont Hardi from north-west France. Although this one sports a dashing tall head of foam, underneath it's rather sickly looking, fully opaque and a kind of greenish-grey. The aroma is more appetising, suggesting fresh and pithy citrus hops to come. The brewery has, unfortunately, got out of the habit of naming the varieties on the label. In the New England fashion, the flavour is sweet, leading on soft lemon curd and candied orange peel. It's light for 6.5% ABV, and doesn't get cloying, but there's something off about the balancing bitterness. While I'm sure hops are involved, it's a dreggy sort of bite, all
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Half time scores
It's three months since the most recent JD Wetherspoon beer festival , and three months to go until the next one. I thought this would be an opportune moment to have a look at what's been new (to me) in the Dublin branches. Moorhouse is a regular at the chain and Pendle Witches Brew is a beer I've certainly heard of, but was surprised to find I'd never drank. "Strong ale" is something of a rare style, although this is down at the bottom end of it — 5.1% ABV — where it could equally be badged as a hefty bitter. The golden brown colour adds to that initial impression of twigginess, likewise its slightly soapy aroma. The flavour is altogether more light and breezy, presenting a fruity mix of currants and cherries, on a medium-dry malt base with a tannic bite. Think tea brack, but with some English hops adding an earthy bitterness to the finish. And while it may not be by-the-numbers strong, it presents a fullness and warmth which makes the description valid. It took me most of the p
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Endurance
Two years ago I had my first encounter with the beers from Tom Crean Brewery in Kenmare, and for the most part I wasn't impressed. Still, they're rare enough in Dublin, so when I recently found a different three in Blackrock Cellar I thought it only fair to give them another shake. I say different, but one of the last set was called Killowen Kölsch, and now there's a beer with identical branding, an identical 4.2% ABV, but it's called Killowen Lager . Optimistically, I thought perhaps the brewery has invested in technology that lets them do cold fermentation properly, though it may simply be that the PGI enforcement squad from Cologne got in touch and made the appropriate threats. Either way, this is a different beer. Gone is the brackish flatness and instead it's a sunny unfiltered sunset yellow with oodles of busy crackling foam on top. The aroma is unsettlingly sweet and apple-like, like Cidona or the similar sugared-up alcopops which pass for mainstream cider in this unfortunate co
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In the Navy
Sierra Nevada's Torpedo IPA took its name from the cylindrical piece of apparatus used to dry hop it. Since it graduated from being a beer to being a whole range of beers (capitalism: yay!), someone in the branding department has decided to militarise it, hence the sonar-style graphics on this latest pair of cans. First up is Rye Torpedo , a whole percentage point weaker than the original, at 6.2% ABV. It's a lovely rich orange colour with a little haze, without being actually hazy. Rye is good for head retention and you really get your money's worth here: a massive mushroom dome of foam forming. I caught it within three months of canning and it still smelled very freshly hopped, of grapefruit zest and lemon jelly. Rye's peppery quality makes a brief appearance in the flavour, but for the most part it's classic west coast IPA -- just what we come to Sierra Nevada for -- mixing the bright citrus with an equal dose of slick pine oil and backed by a marmalade sweet side. There's nothing e
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Summer in the Garden
My reaction to beer with weird stuff in it has evolved from "Wow! This is exciting" to "Ugh! This is stupid" to "Wow! Somebody is still doing this". Today's set is from Zagreb's Garden Brewing, and I drank them in an attempt to recreate the youthful sensation of finding off-kilter beer interesting. I didn't notice until after I bought them that the brewery has put them in sequence, and first of four is Imperial Strawberry & Vanilla Milkshake IPA . It's so long since I've had a milkshake IPA that I was expecting it to pour pink, but it's actually a more orthodox golden shade, and only slightly hazed. It's a brave move to name Magnum, Citra and Mosaic as the hops, yet it does really smell like an IPA, with lots of citrus zest, next to low-key strawberry blancmange pudding. "Super creamy" they say, but the first sensation I got on sipping was clean fizz and quite a light body for 7.4% ABV. The hops have very much taken a back seat, and it tastes like a lurid-pink pre-packaged single-s
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Odds on
The little bit of Barcelona that is forever Ballyfermot makes a comeback today, with three new beers from Oddity, a Catalonian beer brand which has its production done at Whiplash. First up is Go On Fool , described as a "Zested WC-IPA" which doesn't make a lot of sense, beyond invoking Grapefruit Sculpin, a popular fruit-flavoured Californian IPA from the long-ago craft beer era. That was 7% ABV while this is a mere 5.5%, though it does list grapefruit zest on the ingredients, along with Saphir and Motueka hops. It's a foggy orange-yellow colour with a decently thick head and plenty of piquant citrus juice in the aroma. The texture is creamy, in a modern New-England way, lacking the sharp edge of Sculpin's California character. So I don't know what they're doing, calling it "WC" IPA: this is very much in the east coast vernacular. For all that, it's not bad, showing some dank resins alongside the sunnier citrus, and keeping everything fresh, clean and unfussily drinkable. The grapefru
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All right Jack
It's a new brewery for me today. McGill's has been plying its trade down in Waterville for some years now, but I didn't know that it bottled its beer, nor that it was ever shipped outside of Co. Kerry. I found this bottle of Jack Murphy Kerry Lager on the shelves of The Wine Centre in Kilkenny recently, less than two months beyond the hand-written best-before date on the label. They've brewed it to 4.3% ABV and in a rustic fashion, the beer pouring murkily and a greyish amber colour. I made sure to leave at least some of the dregs in the bottom of the bottle. It smells quite sweet, and a little fruity, suggesting lemon sponge and ripe apricot, with a slight herbal hop bitterness to the rear. The flavour is very much built around the malt, tasting heavy and, well, malty , like Ovaltine or Horlicks. There are some warm-fermentation pear esters and a rough grain-husk dry side, all of which gives it a bit of a homebrew vibe. There's no polish to this; no sense of a brewer honing thei
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Who asked for this?
They've gone all creative at Open Gate for the summer, Lord save us. Classic styles can wait; everything is getting an off kilter ingredient or two. But we shouldn't be too cynical before starting to drink them. Exhibit A is Cola Radler . It looks like stout: a dark reddish brown with a fine white head. I suspect stout is the beer base and it tastes immediately roasty, plus I think I detect some Guinness tang in the aroma. Cola sits in the middle of the flavour, tasting a little concentrated, conjuring long-dormant sensory memories of the Soda Stream machine in my childhood kitchen. The cola syrup had a particular smell and taste which is echoed here. And that's it. As we saw on Friday , radler is supposed to be quenching and refreshing, and although this is only 3.5% ABV, the lack of citrus means it doesn't work. The cola is overly sticky and clashes unpleasantly with the stout's bitterness and roast. I noticed towards the end a nearby menu board saying that there is lime in the mix h
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Rad bod
Today, you join me not-live on the patio, on the first properly warm day of the year. Our topic is radler (shandy the German way) and the conditions are excellent for some side-by-side evaluation. We start traditionally, with a thick-walled half-litre bottle of Hofbräuhaus Traunstein Radler , from Bavaria. It's 50% "bier" (lager, presumably), and the other half cloudy lemonade, coming out at 2.4% ABV. With these, I think the choice of lemonade is crucial, and they've picked a good one. It has quite a natural flavour of real lemons, pulped and sweetened, and that's in spite of an ingredients list that shows it's anything but natural, including both lemon extract and citrus-hop-extract as well. The result is big bodied and satisfying; verging on sticky but still perfectly thirst-quenching. And while the lemonade is far and away the main character, there's a slight hint of biscuit lager malt and salad-leaf noble hops, hovering in the background. The contents of my glass did not last long,
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If the Chouffe hits
Obviously I don't do "guilty pleasure" beers, but I do have a fondness for Cherry Chouffe while also recognising it's no great feat of Belgian brewing artistry. So I was perhaps inappropriately delighted to find the fruited gnome series has a second addition: Chouffe Framboise . Raspberry, like cherry, is an established and acceptable Belgian beer fruit. When we start getting Chouffe Mango and Chouffe Banana, I'll worry that they've gone full Floris. This can't be exactly the same beer as Cherry Chouffe with only a different syrup, because it's 7% ABV rather than 8. Maybe that just means they've added more gunk. Anyone who sees the word "Framboise" and thinks immediately of acid tartness, may look elsewhere. This is heavy and dense, a clear claret-red colour in the glass, and is extremely sweet. For those who consider a cone of soft-serve ice cream incomplete without a streak of tachycardia-inducing pink sauce: this is your beer. I am, generally speaking, tolerant of fruity sweet flavo
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Shady happenings
It was a mix of sunshine and showers on the mid-May weekend in Kilkenny, so it's just as well the motorised awnings over the beer garden of Sullivan's Taproom were in good working order. The annual beer festival brought a selection of breweries from around Ireland. I was last here two years ago , and since then a new brewery has sprung up next to the drinking space, though I suspect this is more an expansion of the pilot kit, rather than a full production site for contract-brewed flagships like Maltings red and Black Marble stout -- both fine beers, of course. More Sullivan's small-batch beer is to be welcomed, and the indoor bar had three of them. California Common is one of those styles which made it from a million homebrew kits to a thousand microbreweries as the brewers went professional in the '00s, but which hasn't had much of a permanent impact on the beer scene. It's always nice to see one in the wild, even if they're rarely spectacular. This one certainly wasn't, but get
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Sour season
It seems like only last week I was looking at Ireland's winter beers, but apparently the planet has done that tilting thing again, the weather has turned warmer, and the brewers have had to react appropriately. Refreshing and fruit-laden seems to be how they're achieving it. It's only early summer, though, so just two examples today. Brewers At Play 50: Gose with Lemon Zest, Pink Peppercorns & Thyme is the latest in Kinnegar's limited edition series. The name steals my thunder as regards telling you what it is. I'll add that it's 3.7% ABV and a pale, Golden-Delicious, yellow. The lemon zest hits hard in the aroma, enhanced by a fun mineral tartness. That leaves the flavour for the pepper and herb but I couldn't really taste them. Up front it's lemon again, though less zesty, with a touch of sticky cordial about it. It is at least balanced by a sherbet effervesence, and a degree of salinity, both of which ensure it stays refreshing: arguably the most important aspect. That it'
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Red letter day
When I was an undergraduate, my university offered the option to sit second year exams in March, a term early. A decent grade came with an exemption from the summer exams, and so it was that my housemate Tim and I spent a lot of April and May 1997 in The Porterhouse, drinking their Red ale. I have a very particular memory of the beer, which was smooth and fruity; predominantly sweet, but not excessively so; balanced, and modestly strong, so well suited for an afternoon's drinking before a long evening of Mario Kart duels. In the early 2000s, I got out of the habit of drinking in The Porterhouse, and when I came back a decade later, the Red seemed to me to have changed , with a harsher bitterness and a more stark caramel sweet side. No harm: there were always plenty of enjoyable alternatives. But my experience with the Red of old came back to me recently when I called in to try the beer they've released to mark 30 years of the beer brand and its Temple Bar headquarters*. In a marked con
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Kildare's wins
It's a busy brewing county, Kildare. I guess it benefits from being in the Dublin hinterland but without the constraints of Dublin commercial rents. Today I'm looking at four recent beers from four different Kildare breweries. I'll begin with a lager from Farringtons, though not in the brewery's usual livery. Hells Yeah is a collaboration with Martin's Off Licence and is branded for the shop, having been created for their Advent box last winter. It's a hefty fellow at 5.4% ABV, and the brewer's German vocabulary may need a refresh as it's not very hell at all: a medium-amber colour. It follows that the aroma is more like that of a bock, mixing rich golden syrup malt with a strongly vegetal hop seasoning. The body is unsurprisingly full, and there's a lack of carbonation, detracting from its abilities as a thirst-quencher, which is what I wanted it for. The flavour is full too, however, and enjoyably deep and rounded. There's gooey treacle tart and a surprising blackberry-jam frui
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Two out of Eight ain't bad
Eight Degrees was one of the first Irish brewers to adopt the high-turnover mode of brewing, supplementing a safe core range with a regular train of specials, crossing all the beer style boundaries and involving all manner of ingredients and collaborators. That ended when the brewery was sold to a multinational, and never came back in this changed era, even now that the original founders are in charge once more. So I'm pleased today to be covering two new Eight Degrees beers. They describe Dolcita as a "tropical IPA", and I've voiced my concerns before about the t-word being rarely indicative of actual tropical fruit flavours. So it goes with this one, but that's not a problem. In lieu of mangoes and pineapples, this 5.7% ABV hazy IPA has a bright pithy bitterness, pushing mandarin zest and lime rind. There's an almost earthy tang on the finish, where the bittering compounds concentrate together on the palate. Despite the haze and the claim of tropicality, this tastes like an IPA from
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Creamy how?
When I saw that Galway Bay had named a beer Irish Cream Stout , I assumed that "cream" here was one of those redundant marketing words, like I'd be more likely to buy a "cream stout" than simply a "stout". But no, it's "Irish cream" as in Baileys. This beer is meant to taste like both cream liqueur and stout. I was apprehensive... but intrigued. The head is Baileys-coloured, so that's a good start. Its dark brown body looks a bit muddy, though. The aroma suggests a fairly ordinary sweet stout, showing more toffee than one might expect from the unlikely-sounding added ingredient of "Irish cream natural extract". I'm guessing that's lactose, chocolate, vanilla and hen parties. There's oatmeal too, and that really pays its way in the texture. Though only 5% ABV, it feels like a big and luxurious imperial stout: silk, velvet, and similar cliché textile descriptors. It doesn't taste at all like Baileys. As with the aroma, there's a slightly sticky sweet quality -- caramel and milk chocolate
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Dark deeds
Why do I take so long picking beers when I'm standing in front of the fridges in Redmond's? It's because I'm trying to piece together the theme for a blog post. Something about Thornbridge and dark beers, maybe? Baize is presumably a reference to the brewery's nearest big city, Sheffield, being perennially associated with snooker. The green (three points) and the black (seven points) are respectively represented by mint in a 5.5% ABV stout. Lactose is the only other non-standard ingredient, standing for the cue ball, I guess. The aroma's mint is faint, no more than a waft from a freshly opened bag of mint imperials: processed and sugar-laden, not fresh. Although it's a milk stout really, the dairy sweet side is quite understated, and there's a proper balancing coffee and toast roast. They haven't gone overboard with the mint flavour, which is a pastey smear, like the inside mush of Fry's Peppermint Cream (ask your grandparents) rather than raw herb leaf. I prefer the raw herb lea
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Too far down with the kids
Creative and unexpected moves has always been the stock-in-trade at Rascals Brewery -- the clue is in the name -- but I really wasn't expecting their latest gambit. I'm taking it as an indicator of the ongoing decline of "craft beer" as it was once known. For one thing, the brewery logo is as small as they can make it on the packaging, suggesting not quite disavowal, but certainly a different angle from usual. And secondly, Chido is purportedly a Mexican-style pale lager with added lime zest, sold by the six-pack of 33cl clear glass bottles. For those unfamiliar with how beer is sold in Ireland, the bottled multipack format belongs exclusively to imports, at least since Eight Degrees tried and abandoned it almost two decades ago. But I'm quite prepared to believe that it's something that might work now, as beer transitions away from involved and fancy towards simple and familiar. I began by testing it within its intended context. It was a sunny day and I was thirsty. I dran
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Passing for normal
Hungarian brewery Mad Scientist makes one of its sporadic returns to these pages today, with the two most normal-looking things from the most recent tranche of releases. The question before us is: how do they fare at making beer-flavoured beer? What better test than a central European lager, though that should be the easy setting for a central European brewery. To assist, Mad Scientist has availed of the help of Radim Zvánovec, Budvar's global brand ambassador, who should know his way around the style at this stage. The result, worryingly, is called Bohemian Madness . It's properly golden and with a fine white head, although it's also quite hazy: definitely at the unfiltered end of this style. The aroma is sweet and a little syrupy, where I would have liked a fresh grassy bite also. I had noticed the can was a little squashy, and sure enough, the carbonation is very low here, with a cask-like fine sparkle rather than cleansing lager fizz. The flavour isn't too cleansing either, loading
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Where's your hops at?
Back when new Irish pale ales cascaded onto the market on a near daily basis, I started a programme of reviewing them in big batches, for efficiency. Today, new ones still get collected this way, but it seems to be taking longer and longer to gather enough for a new substantial post. I began drinking today's baker's dozen in early March. First up, it's a brand new brewery for me. Great Eastern Brewing has been running a taproom bar in Wicklow Town for a couple of years now, but this is the first time I've seen their beer canned. It's called simply Citra Pale Ale and is 4.3% ABV. They've gone haze, and quite a deep amber colour with it. The aroma is bright and fresh, all zested oranges with a hint of vanilla. Although it has the proper roundedness of hazy hoppy beer, it stays light, and the flavour is beautifully clean. It's a simple one: just mildly bitter citrus again, and a degree of oily herbal resin. It shows that this was created for a brewpub as it's very sessionable and qu
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