At around the same time Galway Bay had started to introduce a full range of soured beers to the market. Heathen was the early entry, in fact it came in the winter, then Godspeed arrived in the summer and was a peachy and mangoey lip-purser and the collaboration Maybe Next Monday was a more straight-up sour, with some tropical Citra in the mix. In bottles was the more adventurous The Eternalist, oak aged on raspberries.
At the big Festival in late summer there was the excellent ultra-tart Kinnegar Guezeberry, with Gooseberries in the mix. A real tooth stripper of a beer. It was very elusive though.
I picked up a 375ml bottle of Galway Bay Space Suit, this one an Amber Sour, fermented in Oak, dry hopped with Galaxy.
It pours a slightly murky dark amber, with a thin head. The sourness is pretty much all you get in the aroma, and it's pretty good. It gets those saliva glands interested straight away.
The flavour is complex, with the lacto and brett immediately evident, but the oak is slightly there in the background along with some balancing sweetness. Then there's the aromas from the Galaxy hops, tropical and juicy - it's not overpowering but it's there toying with the dryness and upping the tartness levels just another notch.
Galway Bay are making excellent sours, even if the odd one is a bit off, they can only be congratulated for taking on this style and tradition of brewing and pretty much nailing it. To do it once would have been great, but they've done it five or six times now and that sub-range of their overall stable is a very welcome addition to the Irish Craft Beer family.
A complete change of pace, and I had to mention this next beer having sampled it in two of the Galway Bay bars, and at home in a bottle too. Diving Bell is a Scotch Ale in the Wee Heavy style - with a salty twist.
This is a rich, decadent and big strong beer. On the nose you get dried fruits, figs, raisins and warming rum alcohol. It pours a very inviting deep ruby-red.
I'm not going to try to describe everything going on in the taste of this beer, not least because each sip brings something different, but also because words alone cannot do it justice. It needs to be experienced. Thick and syrupy, heavy and molasses, treacle and that rum again. Jam-like fruitiness, you could spread this on toast and expect to pick out a few berries. And that is perhaps the most apt description, because underlying all of that sweet goodness is a just-discernible salty undertone. Like lightly buttered toast with some dark berry jam on top.
This beer is like a hug from great big bear who's just been through the fruit bushes. Sticky toffee goodness, slight heat from the 9%, but that's not overpowering. This is most definitely, unapologetically a Winter Beer.
For all that sweetness and big malt flavours, it's the ever so subtle salting that makes this beer. You never think this is a "salty" beer, but the salt is used as it should be, to enhance the flavours around it. To complete the experience and make you want to keep coming back.
I was always more inclined to the malty side of beer flavours, and even though in recent years I've embraced hops in a big way, Diving Bell has reminded me in the best way possible that for all the complexity and great aromas that brewers can get from expert hopping - none of that really comes close to what can be done with the right combination of malted grains.
