Guinness Open Gate

Paid a visit tonight and have to say I was very impressed with the set up. It's €6 for a sampler flight of four beers (1/3 of a pint of each), and while it may not be he same sort of standard you'd get in a proper craft beer pub, it was still decent enough to be worth trying. For my flight I had both Christmas ales on offer, a milk stout and a dunkelweizen. The Christmas ales were the finalists in the Smithwicks home brew competition. The winner (Old Town) tasted a bit cough syrupish at first, but that's probably because I'm not a fan of liquorice. My drinking companion liked it more than I did. The other one is an apple pie ale, which wasn't bad, although the apples weren't always noticeable. The texture of the milk stout was possibly a little thin, but the flavour was good, if not quite as sweet as some milk stouts I've had. I agreed with my friend's suggestion that the addition of some coffee would make it a very nice beer, or it could make a nice vanilla stout as well. The real star of the show was the dunkelweizen. It's 8.4%, but you wouldn't really know it and it was worth going just for that imo. I'd be very happy if Guinness released it commercially. The barman also gave us a taste of a barrel aged cask ale they have maturing which I reckon will be very interesting after it's had another couple of weeks in the cask. At the moment they have a very tasty wee heavy on their hands.

Look, it's not going to be for everyone, there will be some who just won't be able to get past the fact that it's a macro brewery muscling in on the craft beer buzz. But so what? They're offering a couple of decent and interesting beers which ultimately might encourage some people to broaden their tastes when it comes to beer. And as I said, they also have some potentially commercial beers on their hands that could offer a little more choice to beer drinkers if they choose to make them.

For anyone who's interested, one of the barmen told me that they plan to offer a new beer every two weeks or so. They're down to their last two barrels of the dunkelweizen, and after that's gone they're planning an oatmeal brown ale with peanut butter, followed by a vanilla stout and then a California common/Vienna lager hybrid.