HOME is... well, go into any interiors store and you’ll find a plethora of little twee signs which will give you any number of assertions as to where home is – where the heart is, wherever you lay your hat or head and so on.
For a couple of northern brewers, their ‘home’ has either changed or is soon to change in the not too distant future.
For Heaney Farmhouse Brewing, they’re getting closer geographically to that ‘farmhouse’ feel after cutting the first sod on their spiritual home in south Derry, but for now they remain cuckoo brewers, churning out their ever-impressive brews with the aid of Boundary’s kit on Belfast’s Newtownards Road.
In a nod to their future intentions though, they have released a double dry hopped IPA called Flit The Nest. Now, dry hopping is a widespread technique in brewing where hops are added after the boil, usually during fermentation, to give the beer a nose-catching aroma but without adding any sharp bitterness to the taste. Double dry-hopping is a term which is as hazy as New England IPA; some argue that it refers to two separate hop additions after the boil, others that it means that twice as many hops are added as usual.
Whatever version of the technique Heaney’s have used here, the result is an IPA which is high on sweet, stone fruit flavours, but low on sharp bitterness. It’s quite cloudy and murky in the glass, with not much of a head but a dank and fruity aroma. In the mouth, there’s very little carbonation, but a soft, fruity flavour before a piney, smooth finish. It’s strong enough at 6.2 per cent, but there’s not much hint of that in the taste.
Whitewater have already flitted their previous best, having left their original home in Kilkeel, Co Down and moved upstream to Castlewellan. They’ve marked the move with an American-style pale ale called Upstream Tangerine.
As the name suggests, this is a pale ale crammed with orange flavours – in fact they’ve used real citrus fruit to flavour it and it shows. The orange is pretty full on, so much so that it tastes more like can of fizzy orange crush than a beer. But there is a slight bit of sweet malt and light hoppy finish to bring you back into the beer and you do get every inch of the 5.5 per cent.
However, it is hard to get away from the intense sweetness of the tangerine and one (or maybe two) of the 440ml cans is probably enough.
