Blind Ambition: Take Five Irish Stouts ...

Back in the late eighties and early nineties I was exclusively a stout drinker, which meant in this part of Ireland that I was by default a Guinness drinker of course. That was after my brief love affair with Harp lager and before my general apathy of drink in general either side of the millennium. After that there followed a brief flirtation with trying different lagers from various corners of the world before I ended up on my current path of beer appreciation via trips to Belgium and elsewhere. So really my return to drinking dark beers came via beers such as Hercule Stout and Fuller’s London Porter to name but two, and moved onwards to Irish microbrewed porters and stouts. Recently I have been bitten by the beer history bug and started exploring our island’s brewing past, which of course has brought me full circle back to the ‘historic’ stouts that still exist in Ireland - albeit the new versions are hardly the same as their past iterations.

With the exception of the Diageo owned Guinness, these 'older' stouts are available as one beer type and serve - a nitro stout - with Beamish and Murphy’s now being simply brands owned by Heineken. As far as the take-home versions of these nitro beers are concerned, two more names have been added to the line up of easily available stouts in can format. O’Hara’s Stout brewed in Carlow - my home county for clarity - and the new Island’s Edge which Heineken added to its range for no apparent reason other than to annoy Diageo as far as I can see. They appear to even give a slight dig at Diageo’s Rockshore brands with its name ...

It has been on my mind to do a tasting between these five nitro stouts for a while but I had difficulty finding single cans of Murphy’s, so eventually I had to purchase a six-pack - only to discover that the cans I found are being brewed in Scotland! I wonder if this is a temporary measure and if kegs are still being brewed in Cork? There is certainly some irony in the fact that both Beamish and Island’s Edge are being brewed in the old Murphy’s brewery in the city but Murphy’s stout itself is not! (It is entirely possible that production in Cork stopped due to Covid pub restrictions and will commence again shortly.)

Anyhow, having finally - and literally - lined up all five stouts I wondered which would actually be my favourite? I must stress that I have a liking for fuller bodied, less bitter stouts, and had tasted all five previously but not in a side-by-side comparison. There can only one way to do a tasting like this and that is (mostly) blind, as other factors will certainly sway your palate if you know which beer is which. I put the names of all the beers on the bottom of matching half-pint tulip glasses and poured them out myself looking straight down on them in case there were obvious head-size issues. Then my independent adjudicator mixed up the glasses so that I did not know which beer was which, and as you can see the look practically identical at this point, with similar colour and head size. I then numbered each one, wrote the numbers on a pad and got to work tasting the beers. (By the way, I tweeted this tasting as I was doing it and kept referring to Island's Edge as Ireland's Edge!)

I started with writing a few simple notes after each number regarding the immediate perception of what I was tasting, which read as follows:

1 - Mild tasting, a little bitter and dry with quite a light flavour/mouthfeel.

2 - Stronger, more bitter but better balanced. Pleasant body and mouthfeel.

3 - Full flavour with a soft quality - not dry.

4 - Very mild and light tasting, a little dry and bitter.

5 - Fullest in flavour and body, lovely balance and not too dry or bitter.

I sipped some water and went through them again in different orders before dividing them in to three groups.

A - (5) This was the fullest flavour and most appealing to my tastes.

B - (2 & 3) These were the next fullest in flavour and body, and quite alike in certain ways.

C - (1 & 4) These were the lightest, driest and the weakest flavour-wise for me.

I then compared stouts number 2 with 3 and although they were close in taste and possessed similar qualities I had to decide which I preferred, and I then did the same with stouts 1 and 4. I now had a ranking of the 5 beers for my tastes and palate, and to make it more interesting I also attempted to name the brands. I went as follows in descending order with my favourite at the top:

5 - O’Hara’s

3 - Beamish

2 - Murphy’s

4 - Guinness

1 - Island’s Edge

It is hard to describe my nervousness as I picked up each glass and looked at its base, with my adjudicator writing down the actual beers beside my guesses on my note pad.

I was wrong on four of them - so this is my actual list in descending order of favourites:

5 - O’Hara’s

3 - Murphy’s

2 - Beamish

4 - Island’s Edge

1 - Guinness

As you can see I got the beers in the groups right, although I mixed them up with each other. I was quite happy to have picked out the O’Hara’s, although it was easy in hindsight, and it is a beer I am quite familiar with of course - but it was still quite tense as I got down to the last three beers. In fairness all the stouts were generally alike in taste and flavour, there were no ‘bad’ beers or even close to poor in the selection - hardly a surprise given the brewers - just some that were not to my taste preferences.

So what does this mean?

Well not a lot for anyone other than me, as this was my palate on a given day and relates to my personal preference. But I was surprised on two fronts, firstly that I preferred Murphy’s to Beamish, as I always thought it was the other way around. (Maybe the Scottish brewing has added to it!) Secondly that Island’s Edge and Guinness were so similar, with the Island’s Edge having that slight advantage flavour wise - maybe it is the tea and basil it contains! Island’s Edge has had a bit of bad press but I think much of that stems from people knowing they were drinking it and having preconceived notions perhaps? It would certainly be interesting to repeat this blind side-by-side tasting on actual draught in a pub.

Guinness being my least favourite is not a surprise to me in many ways given my tastes, it is perfectly brewed to be an everyman stout and not to stand out in any way, so there is certainly a logic to my mind in where I placed it. Where I would rate a large bottle of Guinness among some other non-nitro stouts might be a different matter I suspect - but that is a blind tasting for another day ...

Cheers!

Liam K.

Just so you know:

I served all of these at cool - but not fridge-cold - temperatures, as this is my preferred temperature for beers in general and dark beers in particular - the colder the beer the less flavour you perceive.

Yes, those are O’Hara’s glasses and no they did not directly provide them - this is not some kind of sneaky, bribed promotion for their beers - I was given a box of these glasses by my local off license a few years back.

I am sure some of you are shocked regarding my ranking of these beers, but my palate, my rules, my opinion. Feel free to try it yourself, I would love if you did, just be honest and leave all the ridiculousness that usually surrounds Irish stouts regarding glassware, lacing and head size out of the equation - it is (mostly) meaningless social media clickbait …

That independent adjudicator - my long-suffering better half - can verify all the above if need be!

(All content shown here including pictures cannot be reproduced elsewhere without permission, full credit to its source, and a link back to this post.)

Plain Boring?

A short while back I tweeted about a minor epiphany I had while drinking my homebrewed reproductions of historic Irish beers, as it had dawned on me that perhaps I was looking for too much from these brews. I threaded a few comments together on Twitter at that time but I decided it might be better to make a more permanent piece regarding my thoughts on here too. (It is probably worth mentioning that by historic Irish beers I mean those I am trying to recreate as best I can from old Irish brewing records - albeit on a modern homebrewing system - while trying to be as authentic as possible with brewing times, ingredients, etc.)

Up to now I have thought of these beers from the point of view of being 'special' both in flavour and in terms of their heritage and history, but on that taste point it must be said that these old beers were not brewed or drank for the appreciation and discussion we see today in 'craft' beer drinking circles. They were consumed for other reasons such as refreshment and revitalisation as well as their use as a catalyst for conversation and companionship in the pubs and other establishments where they were drunk. The actual beer was never discussed much apart from the very odd passing comment I am sure, in fact if the beer did become a great part of the conversation, then it was usually for the wrong reasons. The beers I have brewed recently such as mild ales from the 1930s, plain porter from the 1870s and vintage ales from the 1950s were the equivalent of the macrobrewed lagers, stouts and ales that are in most pubs today and which are drank by the vast majority of 'normal' beer drinkers in this country - and again those beers - mostly - only elicit conversation both on social media and real life when something goes wrong. (It is certainly true that the breweries themselves mentioned the flavour and strength of their beers in their newspaper advertising back then but that was really no more than the marketing spiel of the marketeers, something we see to this day in beer advertisements.)

Those older recipe beer did - and do - need to taste clean and free from flaws, and certainly they theoretically at least use ‘better’ ingredients on the malt side of things, where heritage malt varieties such as Spratt Archer and Chevallier seem to bring a more flavoursome base to the malt bill, but the only way to confirm that would be to do a side-by-side brew and tasting with a modern malt. (As an aside, there is certainly more time invested in the process of brewing both in the mash and the boil, but whether these could be shortened is up for debate. It seems to me that the longer mash time is need but perhaps the boil time could be curtailed as it might have minimum affect flavour-wise on modern systems - so yet more side-by-side taste tests required.)

So would these old beers appeal to modern drinkers?

Well what is clearly true is that these beers are not flavour-bombs aimed at today's palate, and especially not on the hop aroma front, so they might not strike a note with the majority of craft beer drinkers, and that demographic would be seen as their perceived target audience. Flavour-wise they might fall short, as hop-forward IPAs and certain novelty brews are still the top sellers.

And what of nostalgia and history side of these brews? Is that enough to make people curious about them? My twitter timeline and the reader count of these posts would seem to show that this is of interest only to a minority-within-a-minority of drinkers, and it certainly true that beer history is not something most drinkers care about - and I can understand that stance.  History in general can be seen as boring and beer history in general can be ultra boring - or even irrelevant - to many drinkers.

The ultimate test of any retail product is whether it would sell to a given range of consumers given a good marketing program, so a good way at looking at these historic beers is whether they could be commercially marketable based on uniqueness, heritage and process, where the actual product is assumed to be well brewed but could essentially be classed as ‘meh’ by a large part of its perceived core customer.

I feel it would indeed be a hard sell, although I know there are breweries in the UK that have sold these kinds of historic recipe beers - but they are mostly bigger breweries with huge reach ...

But there may be a different angle, and that is within the cohort of macrobrewed lager drinkers. I thought of this while drinking a pale X Mild Ale I had brewed and thinking how much - in a way - like a pale light lager it tasted, and its bigger brother the XX was quite like a ‘standard’ lager - albeit both had a little more going for them to my palate. So what if these ‘boring’ beers were used to wean more macrobeer drinkers from lagers to ales? I am well are that we have plenty of good microbrewed lagers that are already trying to do that but they do not tell a story on the marketing front.

And it is from a marketing point of view that these older beers can tell and proper tale, and have a real story and timeline - a factual story involving real people and breweries. For sure, some compromises need to take place but the basic ingredients and process can be replicated albeit on modern systems. Those records of American hops from Yakima and Oregon being used in these beers are of interest surely, and the tale of what we lost in flavour and what we gained in efficiency as we moved from one lovely old barley varieties to another before we resurrected them again for a new generation who appreciates their flavour and history. What of the defunct breweries themselves? Think of the tales we can tell of the people and towns the gave succour and employment as well as beer. There is a long list of authentic woven history wrapped up in any of these lost beers - plenty of material for actual, real marketing …

Okay, so excusing all of these musings, in reality the commercial appeal of these beers is probably a bridge too far outside of the odd once-off special brew, but at the very least independent microbreweries should be looking at actual historic records - or talking to those who have - when they decide to brew a historic beer and not just go down the easy root of creating - not recreating - a red ale or porter plastered with words such as traditional, heritage or whatever sounds good.

And still on that point perhaps there is a different marketing angle, as surely there is something appealing about these beers to tourists who look for something more interesting and different drink-wise? A minority of them perhaps but there must still be plenty of visitors to this country who might hanker for genuine historic Irish beers from real Irish breweries, served in real Irish pubs - not just the red-washing at the beer tap that we typically see …

Food (or drink?) for thought - for me at least.

Liam K.

(All content shown here including pictures cannot be reproduced elsewhere without permission, full credit to its source, and a link back to this post.)