Irish Craft Beer in the Wild

 

I don't usually write beer reviews on here as well I'm just not much use at them. I always run out of adjectives. I'm hoping that might change after christmas as Randy Mosher's new book Tasting Beer arrived for me yesterday. It has been hidden away until the big day though. Radical Brewing is my favourite beer and brewing book. I was allowed a flick through and it seems to be much more than just a tasting book with lots of asides and interesting beer facts.

I shall have to soldier on without Mosher's help on this one. Everyone knows Aldi the German supermarket for cheap treats. I like their Specially Selected range for good value chutney and sauces and now their Specially Selected range includes Irish craft beer. Tipped off by the ever vigilant folks at Irish craft brewer I heard they had something described as an Irish traditional ale for sale for €5.99 for a pack of four 330ml bottles. It's brewed by Carlow Brewing Company so hopefully this turns into some good exposure for them. The Red one was dispatched to get some. Now that I've danced around the issue with some preamble I suppose I better attempt some tasting notes.

It's a garnet brown colour with tints of red and a nice foamy head that dies down. It's got a sweet malty nose on it. It's a balanced beer with lots of caramely malty flavours, I tend to like beers where you can taste the malt so this gets an instant thumbs up. It has a great dry roasty finish with some nice spices to knock out the full flavour. It's a really nice beer, it's complex but not too much. Some beers go crazy on the complexity and then you can only have one of them. This is like some sort of spicy less intimidating version of Clotworthy Dobbin. You could kick back with this and enjoy a few of them.

Carlow are making some very tasty beers recently which are given much better reviews than I can by The Beer Nut. The stand out being Goods Store IPA. This new traditional ale is a very solid, good value, pleasant beer to drink for an evening.