Usually when it's someone's birthday, they receive gifts from friends but in this case, Metalman sent me a gift of some beer for their birthday. It really doesn't seem like 10 years ago that I was having homebrewed beer...
Usually when it's someone's birthday, they receive gifts from friends but in this case, Metalman sent me a gift of some beer for their birthday. It really doesn't seem like 10 years ago that I was having homebrewed beer with brewery owners Grainne and Tim at The Bull and Castle in Dublin, essentially providing market research for their plans to start a brewery. There was a lot of "market research" back on those days.....
After many versions of pale ale at the homebrew meetups, Metalman launched with their Metalman Pale Ale and really helped kick off Ireland's love of pale ales after Galway Hooker and O'Hara's before them. Metalman pale ale was a bit different than the others. It was more new world than the others which had always been more of a hybrid between Irish, British and American. Metalman pale ale was an American style pale ale, plain and simple.
A decade later and Metalman have launched a birthday beer to celebrate, aptly named Decade. If I'm honest, I cracked this open with a little trepidation because many cherry beers are sickly sweet to me or taste like cherry coke.
I needn't have worried, Decade might have the words Tart Cherry in a large font but it's the coffee porter that's important here. What we have is a beautifully balanced coffee porter using locally roasted Waterford coffee from Coffee House Lane. On the nose, there's a whiff of smoke which reminded me of Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier and then lots of coffee.
There's no smoke in the beer itself so I suspect it was something from the coffee aroma I was picking up. The cherries provide more of a tartness than any real cherry flavour. Anyone who's ever eaten a real cherry knows they are not a sweet fruit so where the fake cherry flavour we associate with cherry comes from, I don't know.
You know when you drink certain coffee blends, they can have an acidic tartness that reminds you of redcurrants or cranberries? That's what the cherry does here, accentuates the coffee. I cracked open some Madagascan 70% dark chocolate (Lidl) to pair it with and the result was exceptional, try it if you don't believe me.
