That was a great evening, and a nice mix of the homemade and commercial beers. Of the homebrews I really liked Séan's dampfbier -- very unusual sour wheat-beer-with-no-wheat. Hombre Lúpulo's red ale and coffee stout were both great. Bog_Myrtle's winter warmer had some great spice flavours in it but just needs some more conditioning to bring them out.
On the commercial side, Jonathan and Session of California [size=59:3acsq22z]Wine[/size:3acsq22z] Imports[/url:3acsq22z] brought along some Speakeasy Double Daddy DIPA which I loved -- it does all the things Prohibition does, only more. I wasn't terribly impressed by the new Carlow stout, Leann Folláin. As far as we could tell it's been oaked and there was a bit too much of the fresh wood vanilla thing for me. Other people liked it, though. They have it in 355ml bottles so I don't know if we'll see much of it on the market here.
Blacckhawk brought along some Weavers Gold[/url:3acsq22z] which is a really good blonde ale. It has a lovely hoppy saaz aroma. We drank it next to some of the Morrissey Fox Blonde Ale which the house donated and the two just don't compare: Morrissey Fox is really bland and lagerlike.
All this and Phúca too -- there's plenty of it still available in the Bull & Castle.
Great to meet some of the new folks. It was the largest of these regular meetings we've had and I'm wondering what the brewers thought of the size -- were you able to get the kind of feedback you wanted on your beer or should we try and keep the numbers lower in future?
