Cherchez la fée

The final beer out of my French haul from last summer, Dauphine Dorée à l'Absinthe, was chosen solely for the novelty value, made as it is with wormwood. So I confess I was a little disappointed when it didn't come out green. Instead it's a blonde, 6.5% ABV and brewed by Brasserie Artisanale du Val d'Ainan, "sur une idée de hors-norm" adds the label, in case you think such things are normal down their neck of les bois.

So what's in the package then? I was a bit worried by the fizz as it poured but it settles quickly and is smooth and rather heavy, heavier than the ABV might suggest. Dominating the aroma, and the flavour as well, is an unfortunate malt-sack mustiness. It took me a while to get past this, and thankfully the effect lessened as the beer warmed. Deeper in the profile there's a herbal element but I need the power of suggestion to get any aniseed from it; it could just as easily be eucalyptus, turmeric or peppermint.

Not the fun novelty I was expecting, then, but not the artificially flavoured mess I feared either. It's a mildly interesting warming ale, the sort you wouldn't send a postcard home from Belgium about, but warrants a pat on the back for France.

Pacifically unspecific

Some summery beer from the Craft Brewers Alliance today, this time from their pseudo-Hawaiian Kona range.

To start, after one afternoon's hard gardening graft I kicked back with a Longboard lager. A pretty label but a cavalier approach to Irish consumer law on the part of the importer as there's no ABV given. It's a very pale yellow and perfectly clear, and on tasting comes through as very slightly dry with a hint of grain. Soft of texture and with a whisper of some vegetal hops on the nose, it did the job, but really this could be any one of a thousand hot country lagers which all do the same job. Not suited to considered analysis, but as a lawnmower beer it's as good as any other. It didn't last long.

Second up is Big Wave golden ale. Again, no idea of the strength, so I optimistically shoved it into a Duvel glass. As I did so there was a wonderful waft of peach and melon. It settled quite a dark gold, almost heading towards amber. There's little by way of head and the carbonation, like the lager, is pleasantly low. That peach and melon thing continues in the flavour and really it doesn't do much else. The peach notes begin quite concentrated on first sip, almost dank, and then they level off into a very pleasant sweet juicy sensation. The finish is a kind of mineral tang which the less charitable might say is watery but I like it. It's a simple summer beer, light and sessionable but far from characterless.

Third in the set is the pale ale, Fire Rock, and a very dark shade of pale it is too. The all-important freshness check shows the bottle is only a smidge over two months out of the brewery, which is within the acceptable zone. Worryingly, the aroma was less apparent than with the golden ale: I got a bit of golden syrup, but not not very much of it. The flavour is rather muted as well: it finishes quite bitter but there's no run up, just a very slight spicy perfume flavour but no fruit or herbs or, well, hops. The slight caramel from the malt is OK as it goes, but what we have here is something much more like an English brown bitter than an American pale ale. Disappointing.

Lastly it's Koko Brown, a brown ale brewed with toasted coconut and "natural flavor added" -- yum. It's a clear chestnut brown colour with a definite bang of Bounty bars off it, dark chocolate ones, specifically. Thankfully it's not a sugar bomb, but the coconut is inescapable and there's not much coming through from the beer underneath. Maybe some of the sweetness is malt-derived, and there's a dryness which could be dark toasted grain as easily as toasted coconut, but really this has been put together to make people say "Wow: it's a beer that tastes of coconut!" That's what it is and that's what it does; don't look for anything else.

Simplicity seems to be what the Kona range are about if these are anything to go by. Big Wave was the only one that impressed me, and even it didn't really operate on more than one level. If you're looking for dependable American beers that mostly do what they say, these are for you.

Sais who?

I had quite inadvertantly amassed a bit of a collection of saisons in the beer fridge. Never one to pass up the opportunity for a blind taste test I put them all out side-by-side one evening. I knew nothing much about any of these and therefore had no preconceived ideas of what ones might be better than others. It was just a question of diving in, then.

Unusually for a horizontal tasting like this, none of the beers leaped out as being different -- usually there's at least one outlier. Perhaps I should have chosen a saison from a non-Belgian brewery, but that would have involved planning. All were appropriately golden coloured and generally dry, with the differences being in how they mixed up the secondary fruit, spice and herb characteristics.

My least favourite was Saison de Dottignies which I found harshly dry, accentuated by the full-on carbonation. The only flavour complication is a kind of barky wood effect which I didn't enjoy much.

The most unusual of them was Urthel's Saisonnière which blends in a distinctly meaty aroma with surprisingly sweet herbal flavours. Notes of bubblegum even creep in during proceedings. Probably a long way from the saison purist's ideal, but I quite liked it for what it was.

Palest of the lot was Struise's Catso and I didn't think this was going to work to begin with as there's an unpleasant soapiness to the nose. Thankfully that more-or-less fades on tasting and instead there's an alluring blend of spicy perfume: jasmine and caraway both feature in my notes. I'm a big fan of Scandinavian aquavit and this has a lot of that sort of thing going on.

Top of the line for me, however, was Saison Voisin from Brasserie des Gèants in north-west Wallonia. It's the deep orange colour of a pale ale and has a fantastic spiky spicy aroma. The flavour is a lenticular delight, flipping effortlessly between thirst-quenching crispness and juicy fresh mandarin flesh. Interesting, refreshing and extremely easy to drink.

A couple of months ago I was a bit sniffy about non-Belgian saisons. If this random sample is any way representative I think such sniffiness may be at least a little justified.

On the right tracks

Compulsion! That's the topic for this month's Session, hosted by Glen of Beer Is Your Friend. Hoarding is one of the aspects up for discussion and, while I'm certainly guilty of that, I've elected to discuss another beery compulsion of mine: sequences.

I can't resist matching pairs, numerical series, colour-coded sets: anything that sets up a relationship between one beer and another, and another, sparks my ticking circuits in a big way. The more closely related the beers are the more I'm inclined to buy them all and try them in a single sitting.

A recent case in point arose a couple of weeks ago when I was heading up north and brought some beers to keep me company on the train. I don't know what the story is with the Sanda pair from Fyne Ales: two matching IPAs in 33cl bottles rather than the usual half litre, yet a mere 5.5% ABV each. Maybe they knew I was going to chug them together. Whatever. Two hours and two sibling beers: time to get stuck in.

Just out of Connolly, I opened the Sanda Blonde first. Well, it's blonde all right, resembling nothing so much as a pale lager: clear gold with a generous frothy head. I didn't get much of an aroma from my plastic receptacle, just a vague and slightly worrying acid sharpness. The beer really opened out on tasting, however: a massive jolt of Nelson Sauvin, reminding me of why I used to love this hop. It's dominated by a dry, flinty sauvignon character with just a trickle of soft-fruit juiciness at the finish. The bitterness burns in a way that suggests a much higher strength. Best of all: no trace of any cat wee. It's quite a while since I enjoyed a strongly-Nelsoned beer as much as this one.

My new-found love of Nelson Sauvin was timely since we weren't yet at Dundalk when it was time to open the Sanda Black. Totally black, this one, and once again there's lots of foam. This smells rather stouty, with roasted notes and a bit of caramel. Perhaps my palate was still recovering from the previous assault, but this isn't nearly as full-on as the Blonde. Yes, there's still a similar flinty sharpness but buried, no, muted, by the darker malts. Their own contribution is subtle: a barely discernible sweet dark chocolate finishing on a meaty ferric tang. It's only after this that the hops come out to play and while they're unmistakably present, they're just not as loud as in the Blonde. Still, it's a damn decent fist of a black IPA and I'd happily drink much more than a small bottle of it.

Despite the matching branding and matching hops, these are quite different beers. I like the conceit of black IPA tasting exactly the same as a pale one, but very few commercial breweries aim to achieve this and Fyne evidently isn't one of them. Nevertheless, their ability to take hops and do fun things with them just can't be argued with.

That wasn't someone smoking weed on the platform at Portadown, by the way; that was my burps.

Dogwhistle beer

I don't think I'd ever seen a local buzz quite like it. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, Ireland's hop-chasers were all talking about Dangerously Close To Stupid by To Øl. The advantage this double IPA has over its new world contemporaries is that it's more, well, contemporary, having travelled a mere sidestep from Proef in Belgium, birthplace of so many great "Danish" beers. Having tired of reading about how amazingly fresh it was I wandered over to DrinkStore a couple of weeks ago and shelled out the €5.50 they were asking for a 33cl bottle.

Well, you know what comes next. I just didn't get the hype. I mean, it's quite nice, the highlight being a massive fresh mandarin aroma, and there's no doubting its hop credentials, laying on a thick and heavy dankness from the Citra and Centennial. But it suffers a little from the boozy heat of all that alcohol, though this is cleaned up somewhat by a sharply bitter aftertaste.

To be brutally honest this doesn't seem all that superior a beer compared to, say, BrewDog Hardcore, which is a little over half the price. Perhaps I just don't get the nuances in this most unsubtle of beer styles and would be better off leaving it to those who appreciate it more.

As the crow hops

I just had time for a swift half of Blindfold the last time I was in The Brew Dock. It was one of three Sierra Nevada beers on and is a black IPA of 7.3% ABV. As is usual with this style, I started by checking its credentials and figuring out which sub-category it fits into.

It's certainly black, just showing brown at the edges. The first pull revealed a beautifully smooth beer with lots of dark sweet molasses flavours. Ah, so we're in hoppy stout territory rather than sleight-of-hand looks-dark/tastes-pale. It takes a few seconds for the hops to kick in, but kick in they do, delivering some lovely powerful grass and earth flavours. Not what I'd expect from a Californian, but it turns out that German Magnum hops played a big part in the recipe so perhaps that has something to do with it. The inevitable citrus grapefruit (there's Cascade and Chinook too) offers a little bit of light relief, unusually. The flavours fade leaving a tangy and lasting bitterness on the palate.

Even though it lacked the fresh soft fruit I enjoy most in black IPAs, this is a seriously good beer with something for everyone in its profile.

Don't have a cow

After a wait of six months, and plenty of pan-European brewing activity evidenced on Twitter, the second beer from the Brown Paper Bag Project landed last week. Oxman is a 5.8% ABV brown ale and was launched in parallel with a re-brewed, re-designed Dr Rudi, the second batch of which, I think, was brewed at Proef in Belgium.

Actually, they're not great on the whole provenance thing, the Baggers. Not only does Oxman not say where it comes from (Dancing Duck in Derbyshire, I'm told), it doesn't even say where the Project itself is based, which puts it in breach of Irish labelling laws. And while I'm throwing the book at them, the promised best before date wasn't on the shoulder of my bottle either, not that that one matters to me particularly.

It's definitely bottle-conditioned, as a layer of sediment shows clearly at the base of the bottle. That's something that tends to niggle me with medium-strength beers in 33cl bottles but this one is strong enough and dark enough for it not to be a problem. A mahogany coloured body is topped by a thin ivory head from which a wholesome oatmeal and raisin aroma rises. The texture is a beautiful sheer silk, one that bottle conditioned beers so rarely have, and the lead flavours are milk chocolate finishing on a crisp green bitterness fading to slightly metallic tangy notes. What separates it from your run of the mill brown ale is that extra ABV, spreading warmth and good vibes on the palate and down the hatch. There is a school of thought which says this sort of beer is only suited to winter but you won't find me at assembly there.

It's not a knock-you-out-of-your-chair-with-amazement beer. I've yet to find a brown ale that is. But it is a very well-balanced yet assertive, moreish ale. There's a limited supply on cask at WJ Kavanagh's and I strongly recommend taking the opportunity of getting stuck in to a proper pint or two if you can.