A Busy Week in Dublin 1
Last week saw a very busy week for any beer enthusiast in Dublin City Centre. It all started on Monday with a Craft beer talk in the Twisted Pepper, on Tuesday the Capital Brewers met up for their monthly homebrew tasting followed on Wednesday by the bi-annual Twisted Pepper’s Homebrew Cup.
The best place to start is probably with the cup. The NHC were very successful with 3 prominent members taking the top three prizes! Rossa who was defending his title came in third place with a lawnmower IPA, this beer had also received a lot of praise at the Capital brewers tasting on Tuesday. The beer was a parti-gyle, second runnings of a dopplebock hopped with Galaxy and Citra and coming in at only 2.5% is a nice easy drinker.
In second place came one of the north county brewers Jacob with an Imperial Stout which contained 740g of molasses. He was very humble when asked after winning, “However I have to admit that I wasn’t sure about it’s chances when tried few really good beers that were entered by other participants” with a particular mention given to Rossa’s American Stout. He was happy to received the confidence boost and even happier to take home a great hamper of beer.
In first place, another North County Brewer, Cathal was very disappointed to not have been able to make it there on the night, but was no doubt glad that whoever he tasked with bringing in his entries did not shake them on the way in. His entry was a Belgian Farmhouse Ale and the recipe can be found in the forum. He is a big fan of the format of the Twisted Pepper’s competitions, “samples being passed around to the audience is great, sitting there on the night you’d get a good feeling what you where up against”. He also got the inside track from Ian in the Twisted Pepper that they plan on running the competition again in October, while he was picking up his prize, a hamper of beer, “I’m still making my way through”. Cathal had entered 4 beers into the competition and was happy to see one of them rise to the top, he would also like to thank the Twisted Pepper for a great prize.
The other event held at the Twisted Pepper that week was a talk about craft beer, the speakers on the night were Colin from L Mulligan Grocer, WJ Kavanagh & the Brown Paper Bag Project, Gráinne from Metalman and Alex from the Liffey Brewers. They offered some great insight from their own perspectives with many interesting things being discussed about how they all believe the market is going. Gráinne mentioned that you would need €100k and a year of your life just to get a brewery up and running. Colin mentioned that he makes every effort to source new beers, an amusing anecdote about a brewery offering him a cask but telling him it would take him 3.5hours to drive to them to pick it up, a cask that never made it as far as his bar. Alex also offered some insight from a homebrewer’s perspective as well as a macro brewing perspective.
The last beer related event of the week was a trip to W J Kavanagh for some homebrew tasting. There were some great beer’s on the night including Rossa’s 2.5% IPA and American Stout mentioned earlier, but for me the best beers were from Dan, that said on the night there were no duds! It was as always a very enjoyable session in W J Kavanaghs. The Capital Brewers will be meeting this Sunday for a brewday at TOG and will be beer tasting again on the 28th, all are welcome on both days!
