Geuze Bus Tours: The Reboot

Five years! It's hard to believe that it was five years since I last spent a weekend trundling around the breweries of the Pajottenland. The world has changed a lot since then. For one thing, the Toer de Geuze has now shifted to even-numbered years. I didn't do 2022's first post-Covid Toer but was back for both days of this year's. I was particularly interested to see four locations that I'd never been to before and resolved to visit them all. But before we get to them, a handful of return visits.

Day one, brewery one, was Lindemans. They've scaled things back compared to previous years. Gone are the fairground rides and play-along sideshows, and from four bouncy castles they were down to just one (though huge). Stilt-walkers and smoke machines still brought a little of the carnival, but mostly it was just a big hall to drink in. OK then.

In Brussels last year I tried out their just-released Tarot Noir, an 8% ABV fruit lambic that was so horrifically sweet that I couldn't countenance its twin, Tarot D'Or. At Lindemans, that wasn't an option, and I hadn't even reached the main hall before a glass of it had been thrust upon me. There were no surprises here. It's supposed to taste of "exotic" fruit, and that turned out to be a syrupy-sweet mix of nothing identifiable. Mango, maybe, or apricot? Far removed from any notion of real fruit, anyway. And far removed from lambic too, with no sign of the base beer or even a sniff of sourness. Both of the Tarot beers are beautifully packaged and marketed rubbish.

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the brewery had just launched Lindemans Pure, an oude geuze aged for seven years in a single foeder. It's the sort of thing Boon does; Lindemans copying it suggests there's a healthy market for beers like this. It was an eye-watering €7 a glass, and arrived a very mature-looking amber or honey colour. There's honey in the aroma too, all bright and floral. 7% ABV isn't especially excessive, but does make it heavier-set than most beers like this, and it has a warming chewiness, without any of the zesty spritz of younger geuze. The flavour opens on a dark muscovado sweetness, leading into chalky minerals and a tang of zinc on the end. I wouldn't say it's entirely to my taste, and I doubt I'll be paying €20+ for the full bottle, but it does what it sets out to do. There's an enjoyable mature smoothness to it which demonstrates nicely how much effort went into producing it.

Lindemans tends to be where I try the Megablend on each Toer: the one-off oude geuze created by the participating companies. I had been very impressed by recent ones so was looking forward to Megablend 2024. Unfortunately it wasn't up to the stellar standard of 2021. This one is extremely dry and leans in to the mineral side of the flavour profile in a big way. It's a stony, gritty sort of taste, one I associate with De Troch in particular. In its favour there's a fabulous gunpowder spice in the aroma, and overall it does get more interesting as it warms, introducing lemon zest and softer breadcrust. My favourite Megablends were ones which tasted spectacular on day one. I think this year's may benefit from a little cellaring so I took one from the Lindemans shop before leaving, to do just that.

The schedule being the way it was, I ended up back at Lindemans on the Sunday and tried out the straight Lindemans Lambic. I'm not sure if it's regularly for sale, but it should be. I guess the Brettanomyces is strong with this one, because it's powerfully funky, beginning on ripe peach and mango then adding an edge of Camembert. On different sips I got apple skin, raisin and chanterelle mushroom for some weird, earthy, mouldy fun. Having something like this on the wider market could do wonderful things for the brewery's credibility; much more than that Tarot nonsense ever will.

Back to Saturday, and later in the afternoon we rocked up to Oud Beersel. They, too, had altered the format. It still felt like a beer festival, with an array of bars in tents, but it had all been moved off the street in front of the premises and down to the sloping garden at the back, where things were beginning to get a bit muddy. The array of beers was dizzying and, judging from the handwriting in my notebook, I may have overdone things a little.

New on the roster of Oud Beersel's idiosyncratically-flavoured lambics was Cherry Wood Infused Lambic. I've often criticised this series for not making the special ingredient prominent enough. Here, though, there's a massive amount of cherry in the flavour, tasting red rather than the hazy yellow it actually is. The effect is accentuated further by a heavy-set texture, and that's despite the strength being quite a reasonable 6.8% ABV. A harsh bitter finish is the only other thing I had to note on the day, but overall I liked it.

Also new was Lemon Verbena Leaf Lambic, which is exactly as strong but completely different, texture-wise, being clean and crisp, almost resembling a lager. The lemon verbena came through as more of a zesty citrus effect, rather than anything more herbal or perfumey. This, in the more typical Oud Beersel way, hits against the hard and earthy wax-like bitterness of proper lambic doing its thing. The two sides work well together.

Lambic brewers tend to eschew fresh hop flavours, except when they don't, and the third new offering was Nelson Sauvin Dry-Hopped Lambic. It is not my first encounter with this combination: now-defunct Roman brewer Revelation Cat had one at the Copenhagen Beer Festival in 2010. I liked that but I loved this. Again, at heart, it's a typically delicious lambic, with lots of my favourite spicy mineral gunpowder in evidence. This is set next to an utterly luscious fresh and juicy grape flavour, one which makes the beer ill-advisedly sinkable. I need to come back to this on a clean palate and hope I see it again soon.

Released last year, but new to me, was Beersel's Salted Tangerine Infused Lambic. Salted tangerine is an ingredient in Chinese cooking, which was news to my uncultured palate. This is another excellent peppery one, the spice contrasting with a much smoother base beer, along the lines of the Cherry Wood edition, and indeed the same strength. I don't know if I was supposed to taste actual tangerine, but I didn't. Unlike the others, it was poured from a bottle, so should be easier to get hold of for a retest.

Finally, something from the non-lambic range of Oud Beersel. Bersalis Wild doesn't give us any style designation beyond the gauche "session sour". The brewery notes that it's available solely in KeyKeg, implying that it's all meant to be shipped out of Belgium to less civilised countries. Still, they've given it three years of barrel ageing before that happens, and it really pays off in the overall smooth and rounded mature flavour. I got a pinch of pepper and hints of jaffa and lemon, so not a million miles from lambic. There's a full body to go with that full flavour, and while it is only 4.6% ABV I'm not sure a session on it would be appropriate. It deserves more respect than that, even if it's a poor relation of its spontaneously fermented stablemates.

Toer day one, mercifully, ended there. Day two was an hour shorter and altogether more sedate. It finished up at the joker in the pack, my least favourite lambic brewery, De Troch. It was business as usual in the pretty courtyard here: a bar stocked with fridges full of the super-sweet fruit lambic of the Chapeau range. There were two I hadn't tasted before and I drank them to be polite.

Chapeau Mirabelle looked interesting, if only because I don't know what mirabelle plums taste like. I bet they don't taste like this, though: cartoonishly syrupy with nothing I could assign to being real fruit. In its favour, it does have a very diluted version of De Troch's signature cement flavour, though dialled back to the point of being a pleasant mineral note. This is inoffensive, overall, which I'm chalking up as a massive win for this brewery.

The last roll of the dice for today was Chapeau Lemon. Surprisingly, this poured quite a dark amber colour, though it tasted of lemon cordial: sweet, with no actual citrus bittering. Any sourness here appears to come from the citric acid and I could find nothing of the base beer, for good or ill. It's not unpleasant, just very basic and un-beer-like, which is pretty much par for the course with the Chapeaus. The main thing is I survived De Troch without doing or saying anything unmannerly.

In the next post we'll visit the four brewers which I had never been to before.

A foot in both camps

I hadn't seen much from Munich's answer to American-style craft brewing, Camba, in quite a while. Then three arrived at once.

Chiemsee Hopla is where we start. I'm guessing they're actually pitching to the American market now, evidenced by the volume presented in imperial units on the front of the can. It's a pale lager of 5.1% ABV, hopped with Citra, El Dorado and Hallertau Tradition, hoping for the best of both worlds, I guess.

It's on the pale side, given the decent strength, and there's a little haze going on. The aroma is rich and malt-driven, which I wasn't expecting: not much hop in evidence, though the can is less than five months old. That malt aroma doesn't really come through to the flavour, and here the beer is subtly fruity with a tannic dryness, like peach tea, with Citra adding a pinch of barely perceptible piney sharpness to the finish. The body is substantial, meaning it's missing proper lager crispness, which is unfortunate. While it is cleanly flavoured, it could easily pass for an ordinary American-style pale ale. Not a complaint, just an observation. This is fine.

More fireworks were expected from Camba's Imperial IPA, the name evidencing another Americanism. This is 8.9% ABV and hopped with Columbus, Citra and Amarillo to 77 IBUs, suggesting it's going to be hella bitter. It doesn't look great, short on head and the medium amber body full of suspended yeasty clumps. Malt is promised in the description and it certainly smells sweet, with more than a hint of toffee hitting up against funky, ripe-fruit hops.

The two sides works quite harmoniously in the flavour. Yes, it's hopped in a huge way, with a spicy bitterness arriving first on the tongue. Immediately this is softened by the pillowy body and a marmalade and spongecake sweet side, with a zesty fresh mandarin element too. That mutes the bitterness somewhat, so it's not quite a 2010-style overhopped tongue-melter, but rather the balanced sort of extreme beer. I liked how it goes about its business, delivering bigness and boldness but with nuance and balance as well. It's not the first time I've noticed this in a German take on a new-world style, and it's always welcome.

Finally, I thought I was in for something uncharacteristically traditional when I came to Jager Weisse, a weissbier, and presented not in a can but a half litre bottle. That this wasn't going to be by-the-numbers was first indicated by the appearance, which has an almost kristall level of clarity, though that's not mentioned on the label. An aroma of banana? Absolutely not: this smells like an American IPA, of grapefruit and lemon zest. It transpires that Simcoe and Chinook hops have been used here, putting us perhaps in "hopfenweisse" territory, though judging by the aroma it's not one interested in harnessing the traditional weissbier aspects.

There is a sweetness to the flavour, and a tiny hint of clove ester, but that's as close to the profile as it gets. Otherwise the taste is dominated by the C-hops, low-balling the citric bitter side but emphasising candied lemon and lime jelly. As such, it's a rather jolly affair: not especially challenging but bright and spritzy, unserious but characterful, and as precisely constructed as one would expect from a Bavarian brewery. There is much to like here.

They've done a great job of matching American flavours with Bavarian quality. If these beers are landing in the US, I doubt the drinkers there will find anything too unfamiliar in them.

The art of Hope

Deckchair dude, Hope's longest-serving employee, is back for another season on the can of their summer beer. For 2024 it's nothing fancier than a New England IPA with Mosaic, Idaho 7 and Azacca. It has been designed for easy sunny drinking, and is a mere 5.5% ABV.

In the glass it's a little bit hazy, resembling dilute orange cordial, with a big pile of awkward foam. The aroma is pithier than I expected, but far from unpleasant. Hope is one of the few breweries to display their IBUs, and this beer's 8 suggests it should be barely bitter at all, but it is: not quite pithy but certainly much more zest than juice. Satsuma and tangerine dominate, giving a zingy buzz in the opener and lasting right through to a lasting tangy finish.

If the aim was to resemble an orange-flavoured fizzy drink then they've nailed it. This flavour profile, more often than not, contains a savoury pinch of unwelcome onion -- Mosaic's dark side -- but there's none of that here. It's fairly simple all told, but decent and very accessible. That's fine for a summer special.

The bad-AI can art fairy appears to have visited Hope and provided them with the dismal label on their previous special, Brewers Edition. This is a double IPA, a big one at 8.5% ABV, and hopped with Citra and Centennial, ramping up the IBUs to 70.

They claim cutting-edge hop technology has been used, though it looks very old-fashioned, being amber coloured with just a slight blur of haze. They weren't kidding about the bitterness: it's a full spectrum of citrus zest, tangy metal, hard wax and crunchy green vegetables, starting slow but gradually coming to dominate the flavour. The malt manages to hold it in check, however, sacrificing any residual sweetness to counteract the possibility of harshness.

The result is a little two-dimensional, in the way that early American double IPAs were, but is still delightfully clean, enjoyably punchy, and altogether worthwhile. It's very different to current IPA fashion, and that's reason enough for it to have been created.

Solid stuff here, from one of Ireland's most reliable breweries. Any lazy shortcuts are confined to the outside of the cans.

Tropic of chancer

Time for another round-up of the pale ales of Ireland. Here, randomly, is what's new over the last couple of months.

Hopkins & Hopkins has spread its wings a little, though still strictly local, with a new pale ale which went on cask at The Porterhouse in Temple Bar, the first employment that beer engine has had since Covid. It delights in the pun-tastic name of Sitric and is quite a deep amber colour once it's settled. Though definitely citric, the aroma is English to my mind, smelling of orange peel and marmalade. This intensifies in the flavour, adding fresh and zingy satsuma and a crisp cookie base. After the English oranges fade, there's a much more American lemon and lime bite. And while I'm describing these elements separately, really they're all perfectly integrated into a single harmonious whole: bright, clean and expertly balanced, smoothed out neatly by the gentle carbonation. It's a magnificent work of understated beauty, a superb advertisement for cask beer done with a proper buzzy hop character, and I hope it gets further afield. Though within walking distance from the Smithfield brewery which produces it, of course.

It's been a while since we had a canned special edition from Ballykilcavan, and I think we can blame the new deposit return scheme for that. Here at last is Clancy's Cans #14: Batchelor's [sic] Day IPA, named for having been brewed on 29th February and nothing to do with baked beans. It's described as a "tropical IPA": a light 4.8% ABV and contains top-notch hops Citra and Nelson Sauvin. I was apprehensive when I found it poured an unattractive murky ochre, and prayed that the oxidation fairy hadn't come calling. The aroma assuaged that worry, giving some lovely fresh white grape and general fruit salad notes. The flavour isn't anything quite so clean. There's a distinctly untropical toffee malt taste, and a savoury earthiness from the thick pall of suspended proteins. Not that the hops get buried: there's still the high-octane fuel oil side of Nelson and a certain amount of pithy citrus, but it's not the best use of these varieties I've encountered. I guess if you're looking for something along dark English bitter lines, this would fit that better than it fits new-world IPA. What it's definitely not is tropical.

Wicklow Wolf celebrated its head brewer's 40th (aww!) with Barberhop Quartet, an IPA with Amarillo, Bravo, Galaxy and Strata CGX, the latter of which I believe to be a kind of motor oil. It has WEST COAST IPA in all caps on the label and then pours yellow-orange and hazy. Lads. There's a fun peppery spice in the aroma, which was unexpected, alongside the standard gentle citrus fruit. In the flavour, that spark is still there: a strange mix of cap gun smoke, lemon meringue pie, earth, funk and toast. It doesn't really have any brightness, however: neither zingy grapefruit nor softly slick juice. Everything seems a bit processed; at a remove. The ABV is only 5.5% ABV, so maybe I'm being unfair by expecting fireworks. I would have wanted something brighter and bolder for my 40th birthday, not that I'll be seeing it again.

With Sidechain, Wide Street is offering us two beers in one. It's a West Coast IPA fermented with Brettanomyces, and they say that fresh it shows off the American hop character, while ageing will bring out the Brett complexity. My can was a fresh one. In the glass it's quite a dark murky orange, suggesting an extended ageing in the brewery, perhaps. The aroma is a tangy orangeade and sherbet thing, calm and subtle. It's big bodied, and doubtless the 5.7% ABV has something to do with that, but maybe some of it is the thick gummy character that goes with Brett. Flavourwise there's nothing terribly special: more of that orangeyness and a waxy bitter side, making me think, again, of English hops rather than American ones. There's no deeper complexity and the finish is quick. Fine but unimpressive is the verdict here. I'm sceptical about the idea of ageing it to see what happens, but I may just give that a go: look out for it on the other blog.

A malt-driven pale ale variant next: White Hag's Mullán, an Extra Special Bitter, for once not referencing the Electricity Supply Board, which most Irish beers in this style do. It's Extra Very Special at 6% ABV and is a dark mahogany colour; almost, but not quite, garnet-clear. The aroma suggests treacle, Black Forest gateau and just calories in general. Early summer seems an odd time to put it out. Hops barely feature in the flavour, present in the background and very English, offering a mere tang of flowers and minerals. For the rest, it's rich and sticky dark malt: more treacle, burnt caramel, and a growing cocoa character as it warms. The hops make their biggest contribution to the finish, adding a cleansing bite that balances the sweet malt nicely. I was dubious about that high strength but by the half way mark I understood why they did it that way. There's an extra complexity deriving from it; a bigness and boldness that wouldn't feature with a lesser gravity. While, yes, this would be a classic on cask, in the can they've captured a lot of what I think it would be. Buladh bos, Mullán.

I've reached the stage where the word "tropical" on a beer label gives me the fear. There are lots of beers that do taste of tropical fruit, but somehow the ones which put the word front and centre rarely do -- see Ballykilcavan above, for example. Lough Gill is the latest to try their hand, with Gone Surfing, a hazy IPA created in collaboration with Dutch brewery Baxbier. It's the sunset colour of mango flesh and does smell of a mixed fruit purée, incorporating guava, cantaloupe and tinned peaches. So far, so tropical. It's a little more dry and pointy on tasting, bringing peppercorn spice, oily garlic and peach skin rather than flesh: bitterer than the aroma promised. All of this is heavy and dense, feeling all of its 6% ABV and more. Final assessment: not tropical. This lacks the smooth and cooling effect that the word implies. It's absolutely fine as yet another hazy IPA, but unless they're your favourite thing in the world (which might explain their ubiquity) this doesn't have anything new to offer.

Those dreaded words appear too on the label of Tiki Trail, brewed for Aldi, again by Lough Gill. It's a pale yellow colour, fairly clear, and a sizeable 6.3% ABV. The aroma is quite pithy, reminding me of peach skin and mandarin peel. I suspected I was in for a bit of bitterness and indeed I was. There's an almost smoky savoury element before it reverts to pygmy oranges: satsuma, kumquat and the like. And that's your lot; a rapid finish ensues. It's not a bad beer for a supermarket cheapie, and those familiar with the tall cans of IPA the brewery does for Aldi will find it has a lot in common. It's real middle of the road stuff, the name and concept seeking to lure punters in, but then giving them none of the fruity party fun they might have felt entitled to expect.

Also via Aldi is Nasc, a session IPA of 4% ABV from O Brother. Dammit, I shouldn't have read the label: it does say it's tropical, though also citrus. It's quite hazy in the glass, a pale shade of orange and topped by a handsome stack of white foam. The aroma is certainly more citric than tropical, a sharp kick of lime suggesting that Citra herself might be in the house. They've added oats and got great value from them, giving it a lovely smooth body and greatly enhancing the sessionability by removing any sharp edges. The flavour is quite simple, but enjoyable too: a clean zestiness, of lemon and jaffa orange, delivering just enough bittering to pinch the side of the tongue. There's a certain lighter juiciness as well, but nothing I'd specifically call tropical. At least they didn't put it in huge letters on the front of this one. As a straightforward session IPA in the softly modern style it works well. Am I imagining the existence of IPA tropicality?

Third Barrel seems to be persisting with the terrible can artwork. I don't know what thought process gave rise to the prompt which rendered six-digit zombie brewer Dolly, but I know shite when I see it. One might think that Cup of Ambition should be a coffee beer but it's a hazy juicy IPA of 6.5% ABV. And it's a very good one, a demonstration of why even the most ardent of haze sceptics should give one a go now and again. The brewer says it tastes of wild berries, passionfruit and mango, and it's the last of these I get most: definitely and delightfully tropical. It's all (unspecified) New Zealand hops, but subtly done, adding side notes of tart gooseberry and rich coconut to the fruit. There's a tiny scratch of grit in the texture but mostly smooth and juicy prevails, as it should. I found it delightfully gluggable, and neither the high ABV nor woejus label would put me off opening another.

Is O'Hara's trolling me by calling their new one Sub Tropical IPA? Ahhh, we never said it was tropical. It's a 4% ABV session job, draught only at time of writing, and a lightly hazy golden. I don't think it's sweet enough nor full enough to be properly tropical, but there is fruit. There's a kind of dankly bitter feature in the aroma and at the centre of the taste so it's not lacking in character. A soft citrus -- tangerine and candied lemon peel -- follows. The herbal bitterness is solidly enjoyable and lasts into the finish, longer than might be expected with so light a beer. Overall, it's a jolly, punchy thirst-quencher, arriving at just the right time of year.

Dead Centre does not say Machine Learning is tropical. They do say it's a New England-style IPA, and it's one of the clearer, oranger ones, which is rarely a good sign. And it tastes fantastically tropical. Idaho 7 and Eldorado give it a multicoloured flavour of mango, guava and pineapple. On a different run-through I might bemoan the lack of bittering balance and the indecently quick finish. Not today though. I was happy to welcome the sweet and tangy fruit, as well as the soft base they've set it on. Maybe 5.4% ABV is a little on the high side for something so quaffably undemanding, but I'm not complaining. Dead Centre is a brewpub and is therefore well within its rights to produce this sort of pintable beer. It was a pleasant surprise to see it turning up in Dublin on draught.

There's also a new double IPA -- unapologetically West Coast -- from Galway Bay. It sets out its stall with the name Beyond the Pines. Pale and golden, it smells more dank than piney, with an almost sweaty sort of funk. It is oily, however, with lots of tongue-coating resin. I don't know that I'd call it piney as such: there's a lack of sharpness. The flavour sticks, literally, to the leafy, sticky dankness, adding a softer peach or apricot juiciness. I was never a fan of the more extreme sort of dry and bitter American IPA -- hi Sculpin! -- but now that they're a rarity I have a better appreciation of the novelty. This is one of those, and it doesn't quite sit right with me. I need a bit more citrus or else some balancing crystal malt. By going all-in with the dank they've produced something too cheesey for comfort. Fun for one, but I'm glad I turned down the upselling opportunity to buy a pint of it.

That's all for now. Tropical-watch will no doubt continue indefinitely. Be vigilant!

Ronbridge

Mr Ronald Pattinson of Amsterdam was in Dublin last month, as he has mentioned on his own blog. The hard taskmasters at the National Homebrew Club forced him to talk at length about brewing history in front of a crowd at UnderDog. The English visitor's presence was marked by the coincidental appearance of two new English beers on the taps, both single hop experiments from Thornbridge.

It felt like there was a bit of a deconstructed Jaipur thing going on, because the first on was Quiet Storm Ahtanum. Ahtanum is a fairly obscure American hop, and one I only really know from Jaipur and its subsequent clone, BrewDog Punk. The beers were that sort of strength too: 5.5% ABV. This one was a very pale yellow with a slight haze and lots of fizz, a carbonic bite disturbing the flavour somewhat. The flavour is very interesting and not at all what I was expecting from it, being a bowl of varied ripe fruits, including peach, apricot, white grape and red apple -- funky and foedtid, in a most pleasurable way. It's very sweet with it, and gets sweeter as it goes, having an element of strawberry too by the end. A tannic finish dries it out enough for the sweetness not to be a problem. I liked it. There's lots of complexity for a single hop beer, and it had a very modern profile: surprising for essentially a legacy hop. I didn't miss the lack of bittering.

When that ran out it was replaced by Quiet Storm Cascade, and I thought I would be on more familiar ground with this. Surprise! There was no earthy bitterness here, and no punchy grapefruit or resin. Instead, it's a rich and nutty dessert, suggesting nougat or almond paste. The fizz problem from the other one has been solved, as it was lovely and smooth. I searched hard for any familiar features, and only towards the end did I notice a very faint metallic rasp, like you get from Cascade's ancestor Fuggle. I'm guessing both of these were made using some class of fruit-enhancing IPA yeast, because I'm pretty sure Cascade wouldn't turn out like this from a neutral strain. Regardless, it was very tasty, if not quite as interesting as the Ahtanum one.

There are loads of Quiet Storms in this series and I'll be looking out for others. Single hop beers are usually about demonstrating the specific characteristics of an individual hop. These ones, conversely, appear to be putting a new twist on them.

Eight Degrees of separation

I really missed the regular new releases from Eight Degrees Brewing, which came to an end after the brewery was bought out in 2018. So, shortly after it was re-purchased by its founders earlier this year, I was excited to see the first in the new era of specials arrive in shops. I didn't even mind that it's a hopfenweisse, which is far from my favourite kind of beer.

That they named it Déjà Vu had me scurrying to check if it's a re-brew of something they've done before, but this is the first hopfenweisse from them I can find. It's 7.5% ABV, and I guess is in the kristalhopfenweisse sub-style because it's completely clear and Helles-gold. It's on the money for the flavour, however, having estery fruitiness meeting a harder hop bitterness to create a kind of green banana effect. That's the bit that puts me off hopfenweisse. Mandarina Bavaria is the hop, which is actually German, and the way it causes a clash suggests it's fulfilling its role as a new-world substitute. When the sharply acidic fruit fades, the flavour becomes more like an old fashioned American IPA, with harsh pine and grapefruit pith. That's not really an improvement, however.

I don't know how it is that the originators of hopfenweisse, Schneider and Brooklyn, absolutely nailed it on the first and second try, and then nobody else has managed to make it work properly, or at least to my taste, since. Still, Eight Degrees is back, and at least they didn't open with a hazy IPA. If it's to be beer styles that were briefly fashionable 15 years ago, let's have a black IPA next.

Assorted naughtiness

Rascals did a brand refresh recently, and with it came a new core-range IPA, called Sidekick. It's 5.3% ABV and promises "retro" citrus and resin. In the glass it's a clear golden-amber colour, quite reminiscent of Sierra Nevada pale ale. Is that the aim? The aroma has a modicum of modernity about it, smelling bright and juicy rather than zestily sharp. The flavour opens on a certain floral note -- a reminder that American beers of this kind are cousins of English bitter -- before the harder grapefruit and pine arrives to make the middle and finish. Happily, the lighter, more tropical, fruit side is tasteable too, bringing a more sophisticated balancing sweetness than you'd get from crystal malt's toffee alone. Overall it's rather enjoyable, and does tick the retro box quite nicely. It slightly calls into question Rascals's positioning as a trend-loving yoof-orientated brewery, but maybe we all have to grow up eventually. Learning to enjoy Cascade is part of that.

The last beer to bear the old logo was Haywire, a saison produced in collaboration with Kinnegar. It's a gentle affair, only 3.8% ABV and sunny yellow colour, looking like a witbier. There's plenty of flavour, however: zesty lemon for days, with a dry grain crunch and just a hint of earthy farmhouse goings-on. A smear of tropical fruit becomes apparent when it warms. It could stand to be even drier, and the only thing I can ding it on is a somewhat sugary lemon squash effect, particularly in the aroma. The label tells us it's made with Motueka hops and cardamom, one of which must be responsible for the lemon zest/squash character but I couldn't tell you which: the beer doesn't really taste of either ingredient. It's good, though, and well suited to outdoor drinking on a warm day. Don't expect a masterpiece of dry farmyard complexity and you'll be fine on it.

A tap takeover at UnderDog in early April presented the opportunity to try a couple of beers from the pilot range, and what appears to be a regular, but draught only, stout. That's called Bullseye and seems to be pitched right at the mainstream, being 4% ABV and nitrogenated. Well, a bit nitrogenated. The pint wasn't exactly a ball of cream. Although the head was thick, it faded quickly, like it didn't have the necessary amount of the foam-preserving gas. That left it feeling quite flat. Still, the flavour was very decent, avoiding any possible accusation of blandness and showing a healthy quantity of milk chocolate and sweet wafer biscuit. A little more roast or hop bittering would have balanced it nicely, and I got an unwelcome twang of buttery diacetyl. So, it's not stout perfection, but it will serve, and it's good to see another Irish microbrewery recognise that stout like this still has a place among the IPAs and whatnot.

The pilots at the same event started with a New Zealand Pilsner, a light 4.3% ABV while dark and moody in appearance; rose gold, almost red, though perfectly clear. As an expression of Kiwi hops it's magnificent, providing a gorgeous mix of ripe stonefruit and a hard herbal bitterness. I wasn't expecting the bonus oily sweetness of marzipan, but welcomed it when it arrived near the end. The texture is full and rounded, something I'm guessing might have something to do with all the oily hops, more than the gravity. At the same time it has a refreshing crisp bite in keeping with the strictures of the style. I loved how such a kaleidoscope of hop flavour could fit into what remains an accessible drinking lager. My only real criticism is that it may not go any further than the one-off pilot kit series. It deserves a wider audience, I say selfishly.

It couldn't be a Rascals rundown without something a bit silly, and today it was Smoothie Sour, one of those fingerpaint purple-to-grey jobs, this one including blackberry, gooseberry and strawberry. It's not usually my thing but I gave it a fair shake and, no, it's not really for me. There is a certain amount of sourness, but no more than you'd get in a yoghurt, and with the thick fruit mulch added in, that's what it tasted like more than a beer. I can't say I could identify any gooseberry in the flavour, and the other two give it merely a generic berry effect: I would have guessed raspberry. While I'm getting the digs in, 6% ABV is too strong for something so candified. I think I would have preferred this to be either a fully-attenuated, properly sour, mixed fermentation beer, or one loaded up with lactose and vanilla for a full-on and unapologetic tooth-rotting milkshake. This doesn't fit either genre and left me shrugging. Won't somebody please think of the beer reviewers.

That's all the Rascalling for now. The brewery doesn't make a whole lot of lager, and while it has a perfectly serviceable core-range one in Jailbreak, there's definitely room for getting creative in the cool-fermented space. It is nearly summer, after all.