The Year in Beer - 2022
Or, no wonder I’m so exhausted.
Ah, here we are, the end of another year. Not quite the same as the last couple that has gone by - in that they’ve been decidedly less pandemic-y and more “normal”. So it’s worth doing a round-up of all the highlights, but also perhaps a rant or two thrown in for good measure as well as some predictions for 2023.
Here’s a mashup of some stats from all aspects of my beer life:
Number of (new) beers tasted: 195
According to Untappd I checked in 167 new beers this year, but that’s only up until 1 Dec or so. I tried another 28 or so since, thanks (mostly) to my excellent advent calendar from Craft Central. So we’ll call it 195. That’s a great run, and TBF it doesn’t include all the homebrewed beers I tasted or those I forgot to or couldn’t be arsed to check in. The scary fact is that these are only the new-to-me beers, I would absolutely hate to hear how many actual beers I consumed this year…
Breweries sampled: 111
Cool cool. Most of these will have been non-Irish as I did some small stints in the UK, and sought out more than just local beers this year.
Styles enjoyed this year: 86
This sounds like more than it is. I can almost guarantee that when breweries add their beers to Untappd, a few new styles magically appear. Like Imperial Coffee Stout - which really is just an Imperial Stout. So this number doesn’t feel genuine.
Festivals attended: 2
While there were quite a few going this year in Ireland (and even more in the UK), they were often within weeks of each other. I know that weather plays a role, but we simply shouldn’t jam all the beer fests into the summer months…
That said, the first I went to was the Wild Beer Festival in Mullingar. I was well impressed by this one, probably mostly because I enjoyed how niche it was. It was not a big gig at all, maybe 150 people, and about 12 beers on. But all were either sour or wild fermented and for a country as small as Ireland, with an industry to match it shows just how much appetite there is out there for funky, interesting beers. Oh, and if you want to hear a little more about it, I chatted to DJ from Snugcast along with Peter Breen from Drink Irish all about it - have a listen here. It was a lovely chat!
The next fest was, of course, Fidelity - possibly the most anticipated festival of the year in Dublin. I wrote all about it here. Suffice it to say, it was the antithesis of the Wild Beer Festival - large, crowded, full of late nights and lost memories - AKA, hella fun.
Beers Brewed: 5
My goal was 6, so I didn’t quite hit the mark, but not too bad considering just how busy this year has been. I brewed the following:
Dark Mild
Saison
California Common
Red Ale
Porter (ish… it was a kitchen sink beer)
As you can see, none of these are hop-forward beers. The reason that’s the case is that I’m bottle conditioning at the moment and find that the hop character is often lost during that conditioning phase. More to come on this in another post!
Radio Appearances: 2
I found myself hitting the radio waves this year, representing both the Beer Ladies Podcast as well as the National Homebrew Club. The first was on RTE1 with Clare Byrne where David from Ballykilcavan and I chatted about homebrewing as a hobby and scaling up to commercial. The second appearance was on Cork 96FM where John and I spoke about brewing as well as the Beer Ladies Pod.
Bonus mention, BTW about the (re)opening of Underdog - what a great spot that is and very welcome (back) to the Dublin Beer scene.
But the year wasn’t all stats and socials, there were a number of other events I’d like to mention, out of pure self-indulgence - but also, well, pride.
BJCP
After years of not getting my shit together to sit down for the Beer Judge Certification Program exam, I finally did in December 2021. And after what felt like an eternity, I got my results this year and bloody well passed! I’m officially “recognised” as a BJCP judge, and only need some experience points to level up to Certified. This was the point of pride for me - that my tasting scores were good enough to not require another exam to be Certified.
National Homebrew Club
I’d been involved in the NHC, or at least my local club/s since 2018/2019 (it was a top strategy of mine when moving here to make friends), but this year I was elected Vice President of the Club. Now, there’s very little glory in that, it’s mostly hard work but I’m still chuffed to bits. The club had needed a bit of life since Covid, as we saw a lot of new brewers emerging from the pandemic with no real support or community. Beyond the value of the club as a resource for learning and improving, I adore how homebrew clubs foster friendships and wanted to be involved more with it.
Now Katie will hate me for posting this pic, but hells bells I love it. This is us, the Beer Ladies, doing our thing on Zoom each week for the podcast.
Beer Ladies Podcast
This year saw the end of Season 2 and the first half of Season 3 of the podcast. It started out as a half-baked idea from a bunch of panini-controlled friends and has turned out to be my number 1 commitment outside of family and work. If you’re reading this and haven’t listened to one of our episodes, I think you’re missing out; we put a ton of work and research into each episode and I feel as if we’re really finding an audience who enjoy the content. Some of my fave episodes of the year have been:
And if that wasn’t enough, we are doing our very first live recording of the podcast on 12 January 2023 at Rascals - tickets are free, so grab yours now.
Beer Club
As you probably know by now, I run a monthly beer club at work. Each month I decide on a theme and take my colleagues through 5 beers. It’s been a fantastic run so far, covering styles (IPA), countries (England, Belgium, Poland) as well as others like Beer & Snack Pairing, Eurovision beers, Spring beers, and Old Beer Styles. Each month, the crowd votes for their favourite and it’s almost always a NEIPA (if there is one). Le Sigh. One day, I’ll have them appreciating dark lagers and brown ales ;) But it’s been 9 months of research, curation, and data processing as I’m learning what they like (and dislike) so that I can expand their palates. Also, what a great excuse for me to try new beers. Luckily for me, it’s the highlight of some of my colleagues’ months - and I genuinely love that.
A massive thanks to McHughs who I have ordered from again and again, for being simply excellent and helping me source and curate beers, sometimes at the last minute.
A happy customer ;)
Thanks to @web_ianca for this Instagram Story
Let’s move on to some general musings.
I found myself leaning towards sours this year. Yes, I know you all were a few years ahead of me, but hey - it’s a journey. More and more, I’ve been favouring tart beers for two reasons:
I’m just not that impressed by IPAs lately.
There’s a huge range of sours, and they’re not all basic-bitch kettle sours.
On the first point - Untappd tells me that the number one beer style I consumed this year was American IPA. Honestly, it’s probably true. But, it’s most likely due to the fact that there are just so many of them on the market. But this is also where I have a rant or two. I’m finding so many IPAs where either the “selling point” is that they’re double-dry-hopped. Snore. Or ones where I don’t particularly like the hop combinations; not badly brewed, but just not my thing. I think part of it is that I tend to still think of beer in terms of BJCP styles; West Coast IPA v. Hazy (although that name change is a whole debate in itself). I’m finding so many IPAs either too much on the Hazy side or somewhere in the middle of the two base styles.
I know that so many people love the hazies - I get it - but call me old-fashioned, I actually preferred them when they were “New England” IPAs, and the focus was on juiciness. I am just finding that all these DDH Hazy Session IPAs taste exactly the same - like nothing. The base malts are unbalanced; the oat and wheat additions are actually dulling the hop flavours for me and add to that, they have no discernable bitterness (as minimal as it should be). So what we end up with is a soupy mess of opaque hop-hinted beer that just tastes like unsalted oats. Add to that, that brewers are spending a self-proclaimed fortune on hops (DDH…) and I can’t help but feel that this fad needs to be over now.
If you haven’t already heard me rant on the podcast about DDH, I’ll sum it up for you. DDH-[insert style here] is NOT a beer style. It’s also not a selling point. It’s a way of saying “this beer costs a lot because we wasted a ton of hops on late additions that add much less flavour and aroma than they’re worth”. Also, I find the term to be quite .. snobby. It assumes that every drinker has a base level knowledge of brewing and what dry-hopping does.
But there’s something else going on. I’ve noticed recently that some IPAs are not even being categorised at all on the label (which is ironic, since that too would assume some level of beer-style knowledge). Hear me out: I’ve had a DIPA that was effectively a DNEIPA (not called out), and I’ve had “Hazy IPAs” where the hop bitterness was way too high for the style. I’ve also had “west coast IPAs” that are cloudy and have no real bitterness. It just seems that the world of IPAs is getting harder to navigate effectively. No, your West Coast IPA shouldn’t have oats in it. Also no, you don’t need to advertise DDH when literally all IPA styles allow dry-hopping, and in fact, encourage it.
While we’re here - can breweries please stop inventing beer styles on Untappd?
So, I’ve found myself leaning towards the sours. I like the basic kettle-sours, but 2022 was the year of the Gose for me. There’s just something about that addition of salt that gets my attention. Not just that, but this year (like all before) I’ve been drawn to wild, funky beers. I’ve always maintained that Saisons are my fave style. But more than before, I’ve enjoyed the spontaneous ferments, blended beer and almost anything with Brett. 2022 was also the year that I learned that Berliner Weisse actually should be made with Brett. I also learned recently that I am an absolute sucker for milkshake/ice cream sours. The addition of lactose to sour fruitiness is exactly what I need in my life.
So it’s been the year of the sour, gose, and brett beers for me. Also, I’ve loved brown ales, dark milds and all the lagers (but then, I’ve always been a lager fan).
And with that, my beer of the year is the Piña Colada Gose by To Øl. Magnificent beer that I just kept going back for.
What does 2023 hold?
I’m no Nostradamus, but here are my hot takes for the year ahead.
The economy is shite, and beyond the usual “some breweries will close down”, I actually think that breweries will have to rethink their offering to stay afloat. All the DDH Session Hazy IPAs are expensive to make and I think (read: hope) that we will see other styles emerge. Not just once-off vienna lagers mind you, but a slimming down of the hop-forward beers in favour of cleaner, cheaper beers. Lagers (they take longer, but the ingredients are cheaper), Porters, Red Ales (could there be a renaissance of these?) and Brown Ales. It would be nice to see some more Weiss beers, but I’m not sure they’ll see much of an upswing yet.
I also think that along the same lines of hops costing money, people will swing back to West Coast IPAs or something like them. Predominantly because they don’t require as much late hopping - you get more bang for your buck if you can boil every last bit of Alpha Acid from a hop. Is it finally the year that we see clear, bitter IPAs again? I can only hope.
In my own homebrew setup, I’ll be aiming to try brew the following this year:
Gose
Weiss (done one or two, always a winner but I might try a Dunkel Weiss this time)
Bock/Doppelbock
Porter
Brown Ale
Saison (I do at least one a year)
Something with Kveik, now that I will have the ability to ferment at high temps. Thanks Santa ;)
Along with that, there’s a few things to look forward to:
My trip to South Africa in Feb (will be great to catch up on the scene there)
NHC Nationals happening in March
Hopefully, judging lots more beer competitions
So there it is. My year in beer for 2022 - it’s been a busy, productive, exhausting but wonderful year and I’m so grateful to have been able to do all that I have (including getting this blog going again). More of the same please, except with fewer hazies :p
