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Profiled by Maria Devan for PGA

Pours the color of sunshine. Yellow gold. If it weren’t for the particles in suspension to offer haze, you would need sunglasses to look at this bright beer. Fat white head of foam that fell slowly and left great lace.

Nose is decadent with hops. Fruity hops run the gamut from citrus and citric tartness to mango and stone fruit softness and depth, to a graceful pineapple that screams hops,with a touch of twang. There’s the brightness of citrus zest and this yeast is the funkiest of the entire box of Belgians. Dry earthy yeast. mango, pineapple with it’s bit of acidic tang, and mango with it deep stone fruit soft sweetness. A floral like flower petals.

Now let’s have some…

Taste is IPA all the way. Light body. No slickness no heaviness. The malt is crisp dry wheat that offers a bit of sour and a refreshing middle. It almost puckers but not quite. Delightful! The fruit is stellar. With so many fruits to create the idea of complexity, until you drink it and realize that without the characteristic IPA bitter this was fruit punch. Light wheat cracker malt brings you a crisp dry floral with a bushel of fruits that do not realize their intense sweetness because on their heels is an IPA bitter. It swoops in like a predator and takes the finish but you are satisfied.

Craker-y, crisp wheat with a touch of natural sweetness, dry and crisp from carbonation. Beautiful. Congratulations Ithaca. The bit of funk did this beer good and I enjoyed it immensely. It’s as though the sun came out today and I put it in my glass.

Welcome to the PGA beer rating system: one beer “Don’t bother.” Two: Eh, if someone gives it to you, drink. Three: very good, go ahead and seek it out, but be aware there is at least one problem. Four: seek it out. Five: pretty much “perfecto.”

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Maria Devan lives in Ithaca, NY and is frequent reviewer of beer and a beer lover deluxe.

Courtesy dazzlejunction.com

A St. P’s Day Special @PGA by Ken Carman

  Two of the most popular stouts in the world. Years ago I had Murphy’s and I wasn’t impressed. OK, to be fair I was in a bar in Ellicotville, NY and two people I had met were trying to get me drunk: they succeeded. So my “comparison” may not have been fair. Years later: still long ago in a different craft beer universe from now, I compared them at Seanachies: a sadly past tense Irish restaurant on lower Broadway in Nashville. Now it’s a honky tonk. Yeah, like we really needed another one of those. Barf.
  I still preferred the Guinness. Caveat: they were both on tap, these were canned with the widget.
So probably 10 years later my palate has changed and I was very surprised… Continue reading “Stout OFF!!!”

Black and almost impenetrable by light, stout has a deep history rooted in Europe. Most notably recognized across the world as a cascading pint of Guinness, stout is eternally linked to the famous brewery from St James Gate, Dublin.

In 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease on an obsolete brewery with just a handful of years under his belt as a brewer. At the time Ireland was under English rule, and imported English beers were taxed far less heavily than local Irish beers. Guinness held out until the tax laws were changed, giving him a fair chance at both the Irish market and the overseas trade. He then acquired a skilled porter brewer from London and soon was exporting Guinness Export Porter in the 1800s to as far away as the Caribbean.

Stout is a descendent of Porter. In the late 18th Century brewers began brewing a heartier version called stout porter. After time the word “porter” was left behind and the beer simply became known as stout. In 1817, Daniel Wheeler, created his patented roasting machine that allowed complete control of roasting malts and barley to create the distinct high roast of the beers to come. Capitalizing on this new invention Guinness started using the uniquely high roasted malts in their beers to create the famous espresso-like character that sets their beers apart. While Guinness was highly successful, it soon gathered competition from Beamish, Crawford, and most notably Murphy’s.

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It was a tough life being a king in ancient Ireland. The Irish poetic epic called “the Cattle Raid of Cooley” describes the typical day of King Conor Mac Nessa, the legendary ruler of Ulster around the end of the first century A.D. King Conor, the poet said, would spend a third of the day watching the youths at sport (the ancient equivalent of tuning into the football on television); a third playing fidchell, a popular Iron Age board game; and the last third of the day drinking ale – coirm or cuirm in Old Irish – “until he falls asleep therefrom.”

Cuirm comes from the same root as the curmi mentioned by the Roman writer Pliny, about A.D. 60, as a drink made from barley and consumed by the Celtic Gauls. At some point the “m” in curmi changed to “v,” and when the Romans adopted the Gaulish practise of ale drinking they called it cervesia in Latin, from which the Spanish word cerveza is derived. Coirm, as well as meaning ale, also meant a drinking party or feasting, and coirm agus ceol was the Irish for feasting and singing.

Another Irish word for ale was scó, which occurs in the old Irish expression scó scethach, used for beer that was off, and meaning literally “vomiting ale,” or “vomit-inducing ale.” Under ancient Irish law, if anyone served scó scethach to his guests he could be sued for the consequences. (Incidentally, the modern Irish for beer, lionn, was originally a word for any sort of liquor.)

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Ireland is full of traditional and new breweries alike, and while it’s become famous for one style of beer – the Irish Dry Stout – there are plenty of other options to be had. That said, this list is reflective of what Irish beer is really all about.

If you’re looking for new twists on Irish beers, or perhaps Irish beers brewed in the United States, you might be interested in my St. Patrick’s Day article from last year.

10. Porterhouse Brewing Company Oyster Stout

Established in 1996, Porterhouse has become Ireland’s largest independent brewery after getting it’s start in the pubs of Ireland. While not all oyster stouts actually use oysters in the brewing process – some are just commonly served with oysters – Porterhouse’s does, as oysters are used in the conditioning tanks. The result is a very subtle oyster flavor that makes the beer slightly different from the traditional Irish stout.
9. Franciscan Well Shandon Stout

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