Some big IPAs from Hopfully today, beginning with ThreeLeaves, their new St Patrick's Day special. This is a cold IPA of 6.3% ABV and brewed in collaboration with Milan's Birrificio WAR. It's a near-perfect clear golden colour and smells sharp and spicy, of pine resin and raw red onion. I'm happy to say that, for once with a cold IPA, the onion does not come through to the flavour. Instead it's all very west-coast, offering lemon zest, grapefruit rind, and then a harder pine resin in the finish. The clean, presumably lagered, base gives the hops a wonderfully clear platform to work their ..read more

I've been a fan of the work of Romanian brewery Hop Hooligans in the past, so picked up these three new ones when they passed my way. Elder Gods is an interesting proposition, being a sour ale of 5% ABV with added elderflower, honey and lemon. That suggests summer drinking to me, and it is a sunny opaque yellow colour in the glass. Neither the aroma nor flavour are especially strong, indicating that real fruit and flowers have been used here, rather than concentrate or syrup. There's a bright and zesty lemon character, and then a bonus sweetness which is just about recognisable as elderf ..read more

Dublin's Asian supermarkets aren't a brilliant source for new and exotic beers to tick, but they're worth checking every once in a while. On a recent visit to Asia Market on Drury Street I uncovered this pair of unfamiliar Korean beers. We start with Kloud Draft, a pale lager of 4.5% ABV, and about six weeks past its expiry date by the time I opened it. No matter. It's a bog standard eurolager, and has nothing to which a month or two either side of the best-before will make a difference. There are a number of cheap mass-production lager's tropes in evidence, including a syrupy body, a pl ..read more

Outlandish concoctions, and specifically a lime and elderflower flavoured Berliner weisse, are what first brought Swedish brewer Brewski to my attention, in 2015. When a bunch of their arty cans containing strange beers arrived into Dublin recently, I picked up a set. It was hard to decide a drinking order for the first three. They're all 4.7% ABV and are those contemporary interpretations of old sour German styles which bear little resemblance to the originals. Salty Lemon seemed like an innocent enough proposition, so that's where I started. I thought it would be a gose but the label s ..read more

Today it's one of my occasional check-ins with Co. Antrim brewery Lacada, beginning with Shallows, a 4.5% ABV sour ale with cherry and raspberry. No surprise from the pinkness, nor from the minimal amount of sourness on display. That's no more than a grainy cereal husk dryness, overlaid with heavily seeded raspberry jam. Nothing about it says cherry, though it's far from unusual for raspberry in a fruit beer to drown out everything else. I mean, it's a tough set of specs to do something impressive with. There are enough high-strength lactose milkshake wannabes and mixed-fermentation sippers on ..read more

It was the first sunny day on the patio this year, and in the absence of any actual pils, my utepils for 2024 were two other kinds of German lager.  Schneider is a weissbier brewery, the top tier, in fact. Everybody knows that. So what happens when they turn their attention to new-fangled lager? Schneider's Bayrisch Hell has apparently been around since 1928, and has a retro-designed label to convince you of this. 4.9% strikes me as a very modern ABV for Helles, however. Is it just me or was over the 5% standard until recently? In the glass it's the proper shade of yellow, thou ..read more

Easter weekend saw the return of Ireland's longest-running beer festival, at Franciscan Well in Cork. Having missed last year's due to transport issues, this was the first I'd been to at actual Easter since 2019. It seemed rather more subdued than in the years of the Irish craft beer boom, with just ten visiting breweries plus the venue's own Original 7. Wicklow Wolf had two unfamiliar beers for me, including a new draft-only Helles, called Hideaway. It's lighter than one would see in Germany, at 4.5% ABV, and has a bit of haze going on. When first poured in the chilly back yard it didn't tas ..read more

Two more new draught releases from Galway Bay, via the taps at The Black Sheep. The more exciting one, at least on paper, is Kimigayo, a gose created in collaboration with Exale Brewing in London, containing yuzu and seaweed. It's a clear amber colour and headless after a few seconds. The aroma is sweet and lemony, more like a lemonade than a beer, even a soured fruit one. In fact the sourness doesn't show up for work at all. The citrus gets more concentrated on tasting. I've never eaten a yuzu, but here it tastes like lime, being sharp and a little oily too. The blurb promises umami and smok ..read more

Family business brought me to Bournemouth the other week. I knew nothing about the place and arrived with a single recommendation in my pocket, for what I was told is the English seaside town's one decent pub: The Goat & Tricycle. It is indeed very decent, spacious but with cosy corners, a very friendly welcome and it certainly seems popular with the locals. It's a Butcombe house, so on the two occasions I visited, I drank beer from Butcombe and its sibling/parent, Liberation. They're a fiercely traditional set, leaning heavily into bitter. The house beer is called The Hair of the Goat&n ..read more

Last October I provided a rundown of a selection of craft-ish beers from Canadian lager giant Moosehead. Turns out there were more. To catch you up: Small Batch Hoppy Light Lager tells you exactly what it thinks it is, although it's a rich amber colour, not the wan yellow of industrial light lager. 3.8% ABV is inarguably light. The flavour description is ambitious, proferring "tropical - citrus - pine". That translates in reality to a soft stonefruit flavour, so the pine is the first casualty and I'm not sure there's really a whole lot of citrus either. But I will grant it tropical, in t ..read more