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Another beer festival, just weeks after the first in years? Yes, indeed!

We’ve previously participated in Hagstravaganza via their virtual/at-home Boxtravaganza option, but being in person is a very different beast, in all the best ways. Well, most of the best ways – there were so many people to catch up with and so many breweries I adore, but rarely get to see here in Ireland that there simply wasn’t time to really say hello to everyone nor savour everything, but this is a Good Problem to Have.

First, though, to the logistics; while Fidelity was an easy stroll from my house, The White Hag’s brewery is located in Sligo, so a good 2-hour-plus train ride from Dublin, each way. However, this proved to be very simple indeed, thanks to some good advance planning and – shock – actual communication about how to get to and from the location via public transit; this is not at all a given in Ireland, even though it certainly should be. Train options and their timing were clearly described, as were the ‘stay local’ alternatives, complete with themed pub crawls for those up for continuing their tasting journeys after finishing up at the festival. I certainly don’t have the stamina for staying out late even without all-day drinking, but fair play to those who can! I was very pleased to be able to take my time in the morning – get in a run and copious amounts of tea before meandering to the train – and still arrive shortly after Hagstravaganza kicked off. Even better, I could catch the train by my house, rather than having to go into Connolly; this was even better coming home, though with slightly more drama than expected, but more on that later.

So, on to Hagastravaganza itself – the festival is spread across the brewery’s indoor and outdoor spaces, with both tented and full-sun picnic tables. We were in the sun, and it did get a bit warm, but luckily we brought plenty of sunscreen with us, and we kept topping that up. Given that this is Ireland, in most circumstances it would be unseemly to complain about the sunny weather (though as I write this, I’m struggling to recall what rain is like), and it was by no means quite as hot as it has been here in Dublin, but it would have been an easy day to get a bad sunburn and/or get very dehydrated, so I’m glad we planned ahead in that regard.

Rather than being an all-you-can-consume for a single entry fee festival like Fidelity, Hagastravaganza gives you tokens for your entry, which you exchange for beer and food, and it was very simple to top up tokens later; I’ve been to some US festivals run this way that end up having very, very long queues to get more tokens, but this was not an issue at all. I had an amazingly good toastie – is there a more perfect food for any festival? – and good pizza, too; for an all-day beer festival, having these sorts of substantial options was essential (although again, we did bring along snacks, both for the festival and the train, since it’s still not possible to buy food onboard – but that’s another story).

And so, on to the beer set-up: most of the options were poured from a 30-odd tap bar, with a special barrel-aged room off to the side. Water – for both rinsing and staying hydrated – was just outside the main bar. If I had a minor quibble or suggestion, it would be to have had a second water station near the other end of the brewery, but I did quickly develop a rinse/hydrate/queue routine that worked perfectly well. And there were some very exciting beers indeed – I would have bought tickets just to have Green Cheek and Maui Brewing beers in any instance, since they aren’t typically available here, and they did not disappoint, even if the Maui beers were ‘old faves’ vs new oddities – no complaints in that regard, though I am always missing their top-notch Pueo Pale Ale – but it was a perfect day for Pineapple Mana Wheat, which I last had by a pool in Hawai’i. I’m hopeful their recent Modern Times Brewing deal means both brands may be more available on this side of the Atlantic in due course…well, we’ll see what happens there.

Other ‘bests of the fest’ for me included the aforementioned Green Cheek from Southern California, but especially their Bier – a gorgeous, clean Helles, ideal for a summer day. Radiant Beauty was also a perfect, old-school West Coast (and, let’s be real, best coast) IPA. I knew nothing of Italy’s Birrificio Vetra, but their Vetra Black was a beautiful dark lager, full of toasty goodness and very refreshing. Locals didn’t miss out on my ‘best of’ listing – Trouble Brewing’s Harry’s Peanut Butter Brown Ale was absolutely delicious. Fun fact: I don’t like peanuts, or peanut better – but I’ve really enjoyed most peanut butter-adjacent beers I’ve tried. This was another, and I’m glad I got to try it, after missing out on it at Fidelity. My ‘thought-I’d-hate-it-but-loved-it’ beer – there always seems to be one at a festival – was Siren’s Caribbean White Chocolate Pancake Stack. Listed as ‘a tropical white stout with cacao and maple,’ I was expecting a sweet, viscous mess (after all, what would an English brewery ‘understand’ about these ingredients?), but it was all perfectly balanced. It’s possible witchcraft was involved.

@beerladiespod

At Hagstravaganza!

♬ Seven Drunken Nights – The Dubliners

In both layout and ‘vibe’ (sorry), Hagstravaganza reminded me of Kennett Brewfest (now in its 25th year – good lord), an event we used to regularly attend when we lived on the US Right Coast. This similarity was possibly heightened by the absence of working wifi, so Untappd check-ins in real time were not an option; this was back to old-school notes in the printed program, and I’m not remotely mad about it.

The only thing I am very slightly annoyed about is that I didn’t immediately buy a festival t-shirt when I arrived; they were sold out of all the smaller sizes by the time I tried to snag one later in the afternoon. I’ve more typically seen plenty of leftover smalls and mediums at the festivals I’ve attended over the past two decades, so that was a bit of a surprise, though I did get a ‘normal’ White Hag shirt and a handy bag, so I certainly did not come home empty handed, though there wasn’t the sheer amount of beer mats, stickers and other generally portable swag you sometimes find. I’ll know better for next year.

Finally, the train ride home was very merry indeed, though again, I kept running into people I hadn’t had a chance to see all day, so clearly, we need more festivals! The burning dumpster behind the pub around the corner from our house was a bit of a surprise as we walked home from the train station, but I’m sure those who stayed over in Sligo had more dramatic stories to tell…if they can remember them.

All in all, an excellent event – well done to all who worked behind the scenes to make it come together. Let’s do it again!

After the better part of two years of anticipation, Fidelity, the Dublin beer festival brought to us by Whiplash Beer and their sister bar, The Big Romance, finally happened! The last beer festival I attended was not just in the Before Times, but was in our previous city and country: Seattle’s annual Women in Beer at Pike Brewing in May of 2019. On the whole, we tended to stick to the smaller, ideally cask-focused festivals (yes, they exist in North America); while some of the larger events like Oregon Brewers Festival can be great fun, at a certain point, they can just seem, well, crowded. There is also the tendency to bring out all of the ‘weird stuff’ – which, at a weird stuff-specific festival is delightful, but I do get a big curmudgeonly when that’s all that’s on offer at a more general beer festival. Now, some of this is related to where one is on the Craft Beer Cycle at any given point, but I do like to use a festival to find out whether or not a new-to-me brewery has a core range I might like; that said, if there is a ‘secret’ tapping or bottle opening of a bizarro one-off, sure, that’s fun.

So, with that preamble out of the way, what was I expecting from Fidelity? In truth, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, and the anticipation of the unknown was rather exciting. There seem to be – based on my limited experience of non-Covid Ireland – relatively few beer festivals of any kind in Ireland, and many of the others I’m aware of (but have not yet had a chance to attend) have been small – perhaps 5-10 breweries represented. That’s no huge surprise given the size of the craft beer market in Ireland, but Fidelity was certainly on a very different scale. Running over two evenings, with breweries from across Europe, the UK and North America as well as Ireland, this was a real EVENT. Organised (curated? I normally hate using the term in any non-specialist context, but I’ll bend the rule here.) by Whiplash and held in the Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, or, more accurately, in the Round Room, which advertises itself as ‘Ireland’s premier events venue since 1821,’ this was full-on, properly put-together Good Times. This was, perhaps, less of a beer festival and more of a festival of people who enjoy beer, which is not a criticism – just a bit of a different vibe, and, given the lack of opportunity for events of any kind for so long, a very welcome one. I got to SEE MY PEOPLE and had a great time with them.

And there was some really tasty beer on offer, even if my own personal preference would have been for a few more bitters and pale ales, given the hot weather, the trend toward weird sours was likely fortuitous. There were also a fair few beers in the 10-14% ABV range, but I usually give those a miss at festivals anyway; I just don’t have the stamina for that kind of thing any more. However, I especially enjoyed the following:

Wylam Keeper’s Ale, 8.3% – For me, this hit in all the right beer festival feels: a short but useful chat with the person pouring, who explained this was brewed in conjunction with historians at Newcastle – er – castle – from a medieval recipe, brewed with figs, raisins and other various oddities. It reminded me very much of Dogfish Head’s Raison D’Etre, and while it was stronger than my usual festival sample, it was fantastic. It definitely made me keen to think more seriously about getting over to Newcastle (where it will eventually be on tap in the castle dungeon) and doing the Great North Run at some point.

Verdant 300 Laps of Your Garden Hazy Pale Ale, 4.8% – While I tend not to be a fan of most hazy pale ales, some get it just right, and this is a perfect example. It was ‘soft’ without veering too much into the ‘juice’ category for me, and had a nice bit of bitterness as well; very refreshing indeed.

Deya Steady Rolling Man Pale Ale, 5.2% – I’ve had some really nice lagers from Deya before, but this was my first time trying this beer, and my first chance to try one of their beers from a keg vs a can. It really did tick most of the ‘Platonic ideal of a pale ale’ boxes for me, and it was so clean and fresh; I will certainly be seeking this one out in future.

And again, not a complaint, but most of my favourite Irish breweries were not represented at Fidelity (even if many of their staff were) – the likes of Hope, Ballykilcavan, Dead Centre, Kinnegar or Lough Gill were not around, though it was great to see Mescan, Trouble and Boundary, and you could certainly see and feel the Whiplash approach in everything, from the professional lighting design and art direction – yes, this was a beer festival with art direction – to the DJ setup. But as mentioned above, given the size of the industry here, I would never expect every brewery to make every ‘event’ – and perhaps a few will appear at some of those smaller festivals as they (hopefully) return to the calendar. In fact, my only knock of any kind on Fidelity is that it is an evening festival; I don’t think I’ve ever been to one before that didn’t start in the afternoon, and for a Tired Person like me who is typically well on my way to bed by 8 pm, starting at 6 was a bit of a struggle – I do much prefer the event to be a daytime one, but I’m sure there are very good reasons around venue and capacity that made evening better in this case. That was my only real FOMO – it looked like all the fun photos were taken after I’d gone home!

But a few other really positive things to highlight: the water stations were tidy and accessible, the bathrooms were clean and did not have horrible queues, and I did not see any untoward behaviour – the email sent out in advance advising people to ‘be sound’ seemed to have done the trick. There were posters around giving clear advice on how to seek help if any difficulties arose, and the tortilla chips from Blanco Niño were a great snack, even if they did eventually run out of them. This had to be an enormous undertaking from an organisational perspective, so Leah and the rest of the Whiplash/Fidelity team deserve a huge amount of credit; well done, all! My only regret was not making it over to The Big Romance, which is only a 10 minute walk for me, for the day-after afterparty, but while not hung over (thank you, water stations, reasonable pours and sensible prep!), I was still Very Tired.

We also have tickets to Hagstravaganza in August, and that should be interesting to compare; I’m expecting a very different ‘feel,’ but a lot of fun…and for that one, while it involves a train journey, I should still be able to be home by 9…the report on that will come in due course!

While Beer Twitter occasionally likes to lament that ‘IPA’ has become something of a generic for ‘craft beer’ (whatever that might mean), I’ve been mulling over how we got here. Not so very long ago, IPAs barely registered a blip on the beer radar, even for old-school nerds. My early memories of ‘microbrew’ – and then ‘craft’ – drinking in a pre-Untappd world were very much tied to bitters, pale ales, stouts, porters and a broad ‘Belgian’ category. As memory is very much an unreliable narrarator, I had a look back at my library to see if the beer spectrum I remembered from the late 1990s/early 2000s was, in fact, reasonably accurate.

Dipping into The Beer Enthusiast’s Guide by Gregg Smith (1994), there are a number of German and Belgian styles bucketed together, with what we can broadly call English styles listed out more specifically: pale ales, brown ales, porter, stout and strong ale. IPA doesn’t get a mention in the main table of contents at all. Digging into the details, we *do* see IPA as a sub-category of pale ales, along with bitters, and English and American pale ales. Commercial examples aren’t given for each sub-type, but we do get listings for those two – English pale ales name-checked are Worthington White Shield, Samuel Smith’s and Bass. For the Americans, Sierra Nevada (natch) and Red Hook are the standard-bearers. But what I find most interesting in this book are the hops called out for IPAs (‘…a classic style born of necessity’ – all you mythbusters already know the story here, please go read Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson like sensible people): Goldings, Galena and Brewers Gold for bittering, and Fuggles, Cascade and Tettnang for aroma. I suspect it would be difficult to find even English IPAs primarily made with these hops nowadays, barring a few holdouts – and I also doubt the commercial examples are still using exclusively their recipes from the 1990s. It’s certainly an interesting list: Anchor Liberty Ale, Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, Young’s Special London Ale and Ballantine’s Old India Pale Ale.

Even checking a homebrew book from the same year, Homebrew Favorites, by Karl F. Lutzen and Mark Stevens, has a very brief IPA section, and the beers – mostly Anchor Liberty clones – rely heavily on Fuggles and East Kent Goldings. Fast-forward to 2007 and Brewing Classic Styles, by Jamil Zainasheff and John J. Palmer (of How to Brew fame), and we see a very clear distinction between English and American IPAs – English IPAs are ‘…hoppy, moderately strong’ pale ales, while American IPAs are ‘…decidedly hoppy and bitter.’ The English IPAs still feature Fuggles and East Kent Goldings, while their American cousins are loaded with Horizon, Centennial, Centennial, Simcoe and Amarillo.

So, what changed between 1994 and 2007? In 1999, Terry Foster wrote in his volume Pale Ale: ‘…American micros are generally to be commended for their return to traditional values in pale ale brewing, particularly regarding their approach to producing beers of high hop bitterness and character.’ And this passage stands out:

‘But, why is bitter the predominant style? Why not pale ale? Why not IPA? As I said at the opening of this section, even the concept of what an IPA should be seems to have been forgotten by the few English brewers who still turn out beers under this name. Brewers seemed to use the name pale and and allowed the name IPA to lapse, just as the East India export trade itself was retrenched. Competition from lagers, as well as outside influences such as Prohibition in America, resulted in the name no longer having the cachet it once had.’ – p. 65

However, Foster also notes the 1994 British Guild of Beer Writers IPA conference, where there was a take on an 18th century IPA brewed, for science (‘intensely bitter’). And later in the book, he points out that American beers are trending hoppier and more bitter overall – I found this graph (as well as the other showing IPAs in the UK – apologies for the terrible image quality) showing American ESBs as hoppier than IPAs fascinating, though perhaps some context is provided by this note: ‘Bert Grant’s ‘original’ IPA is said to have 60 IBU. In general, levels of 50-55 IBU are not rare, and Anderson Valley claims that its Hop Ottin IPA has as much as 90 IBU!’ (emphasis Foster’s). He also singles out Cascades specifically, which makes sense – try to imagine a West Coast IPA without Cascades nowadays.

And speaking of the Pacific Northwest, by 1999’s Buying Guide to Beer (ed. Marc Dornan), we see that ‘…US craft brewers have claimed the style as their own, and often brew IPAs with assertive Pacific Northwest hop varieties that give them a hugely aromatic hop accent.’ Brands given plaudits include Full Sail IPA and BridgePort IPA (RIP), as well as Fullers IPA.

Moving on, the 7th ed of Michael Jackson’s Pocket Guide to Beer from 2000 recognizes American IPAs, but still highlights relatively few of them – still, many more than in his Great Beer Guide (my edition also 2000 – it takes a lot of leafing through to find an IPA).

My very, very uninformed assumption is that the IBU (and, eventually, ABV) arms race among (mostly) American IPAs of the early-to-mid 2000s was tied directly to the new (and now common) varieties of hops developed in that era…and that the eventual rise of hazy and milkshake IPAs was the direct response to the bitter and HARDCORE era that preceded it (though let’s all pour one out for brut IPAs and their hot second in the spotlight). Someone much more knowledgeable than I am has no doubt worked through the chicken-or-egg driver in that relationship…though my point here was less to determine the ‘why’ and more to confirm that my hazy (har) memory was correct – IPAs were Unusual, once upon a time.

Perhaps Randy Mosher summed up the versatility best in his 2004 book, Radical Brewing:

‘As a platform for improvisation, IPA is a pretty good one. It’s a simple concept – a pale, subtly malty base, not quite overwhelmed by fresh hops. Such an idea is robust and timeless. No wonder it has satisfied the discriminating beer drinker for a couple of hundred years now.’

I’m not sure he meant milkshake IPAs, but hey, why not? More importantly, what comes next? And can we have more ESBs and brown ales again, please?

I tried to recall my first brewery tour, and, although the memories are hazy – not, I should point out, for any drink-related reason – I think it must have been the Anheuser-Busch tour in my non-beloved hometown of St. Louis, back in the early 1990s. I had no particular interest in beer at that point, and certainly none at all in the local offering; I was only on the tour to see the Clydesdales. Fast-forward to late 1998; I had recently moved back to the US from the UK, where I had discovered that beer was, in fact, quite tasty, and, I when living there, I used to enjoy looking from the train at oasthouses and 19th century brewery complexes as part of the built environment. But Silicon Valley in the late 1990s offered a number of brewpubs within easy stumbling distance, so I got used to looking at the setups while enjoying a few beers and a meal at places like The Tied House (now defunct) in Mountain View and Faultline Brewing Company in Sunnyvale, and the legendary Magnolia Brewery in San Francisco proper, though in their case, the brewery is well-concealed.

But I don’t think I saw a real production brewery of any size until moving to the other coast, in 2002. Although I lived in Brooklyn and knew a few of the owners of the Brooklyn Brewery in passing, as some friends lived in the same building and we’d have the odd dinner together, my first real ‘brewery tour’ was on a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine. We stopped off at both Bar Harbor Brewing Company and Atlantic Brewing Company, then separate businesses, and did the now-familiar tour-and-tasting. I still have a real fondness for Cadillac Mountain Stout and Thunder Hole Ale; both beers are brewed by Atlantic Brewing nowadays, as they took on the Bar Harbor beers when the original owners retired. There’s a much-needed discussion to be had about the craft beer industry as we know it now needing to get better at succession planning, but I digress. After that trip, brewery tours became a must-do part of any holiday, or getting to know a new locality when we moved cities/countries. It’s safe to say that I’ve seen a lot of tanks and taprooms in the decade(s) since those initial tours. Indeed, after you’ve seen a few small-to-medium breweries, they can begin to blend together; most of the time, the basic setup is broadly similar.

But having been out of the brewery tour game for so long with Covid, it felt very much like a return to normalcy to finally make it to one of my now-favourite local breweries, Hope Beer. It’s true we did have great fun at Western Herd not too long ago, but it’s on a much smaller scale than Hope, and was less of a formal tour than a very-welcome exploration of the site – a true farmhouse brewery. We were welcomed to Hope’s handy-for-the-train location by head brewer Richie Hamilton, who gave us great insights into Hope’s relationship with its Dutch ‘sister’ brewery, Hoop, and took us around the immaculate brewhouse and warehouse portions of the brewery. I’m not suggesting I’ve ever been to a ‘dirty’ brewery, but Hope is absolutely spotless – none of the expected odd puddles of water or dust from milling grain. According to Richie, some of this is down to Hope having ‘the best brewery floor in Ireland’ – because the concrete floor was custom-poured and the brewhouse all designed and installed in one go, there is a cohesion to the kit that isn’t always the standard; so many smaller breweries have tanks handed down from several previous owners, or a bottling or canning line they’ve similarly ‘inherited’ from another facility. Not so at Hope – there is perfect drainage and a symmetrical series of gleaming tanks – even the pilot kit is lovely.

And so to the tasting – we got to enjoy a sample of the excellent Bohemian Pilsener from the tank (and for local fans of this beer, buy it while you see it – much of what’s left is heading off to Italy, where it’s wildly popular), as well as others from the core range, while discussing the origins of the recipes and the local folklore presented on each can. We also tried a SEEKRIT BEER that won’t remain so much longer, and I can confirm it was very tasty indeed. There was also a fun archaeology angle to that one, so I could tick the ‘using my archaeology degrees’ box, but the rest of you will have to wait.

All told, it was great to be back wandering around an industrial estate and hearing stories of the beer and brewery – thanks so much to Richie for being a fantastic host. Can’t wait to see the SEEKRIT BEER out in the wild!

It seems to be New Megacorporation Stout Season here in Ireland, with Heineken recently releasing Island’s Edge, and Guinness rolling out their new Guinness 0.0. Island’s Edge has been expressly positioned as a stout for people who don’t typically drink stout, and to that end, it includes tea and basil in the recipe to make it, to paraphrase, less bitter and more refreshing, though none of the flavours of tea or basil are noticeable in the resulting beer. So, having had a pint of it recently, I can confirm that it does, indeed, lack those flavours…along with most other elements of flavour. It’s oddly thin, creamy head notwithstanding, and barely registers anything beyond roasty water – it’s less a stout and more the ghost of one. If anything, it put me in mind of some of the recent high-profile non-alcoholic beer launches. While it didn’t simply taste like wort (looking at you, Heineken 0.0), it really did taste like many non-alcoholic beers I’ve tried over the years…only with a surprise dash of alcohol. In short, I won’t be going back to try it again.

By contrast, I tried a pint of Guinness 0.0, and it was surprisingly good. While it wasn’t quite like the real thing, it was flavourful, still very much a stout, and did not have that insipid character so many non-alcoholic beers seem to have. All told, it was a slightly less ‘chewy’ Guinness. Granted, for people who like to drink a lot of stronger stouts – think Russian Imperial Stout or something more barrel-aged with a high ABV – it may seem, once again, a little thinner, but for the regular Guinness (or other dry stout) fan, it’s very much in the ballpark. In fact, I can see myself opting for this in pubs that have no local craft beer option, or as something to alternate if a long session in the pub is required/allowed in the near future – it would also be fantastic for business lunches, though frankly, I’m still grateful those have not returned, at least for me.

So, while taste is of course subjective, this is an odd one for me – a much-promoted new stout that tastes like a non-alcoholic beer, and a new non-alcoholic stout that tastes like, well, a stout. I know which one I’ll go back for*.

*I did snag a few Island’s Edge beermats on the presumption that it will soon disappear and they will become collectible. Forward planning.