Primátor Excluziv 16 and a Morrissey Fox Blonde

What a week. Any restfulness I accrued from three weeks Christmas holidays has been wiped out from a week of working 9 to midnight, and a stinking cold on top of it. I just hope the work was worth it.

As a result, I couldn't even face a beer till last night, and then I stuck with home brewed, easy drinking tasty drops so I could just chill and watch a movie. However, to keep some semblance of normality, I shall now present a short description of two beers I drank the night before I left Ireland to return to Germany last November. The shame! To add to that shame, I'm typing while I drink a small bottle of Guinness Extra Stout, the left overs from the six pack I bought for cooking over Christmas. In fact, I just cooked a spiced beef my mother brought over for Christmas last night in Guinness. It's bloody delicious.

Anyway, my friends, Mr. BeerNut and Thom, and I each received a bottle of Primátor Excluziv 16 from Mr. Velky Al (thank you again Al!) when he happened to be vising Dublin the same time I was. Although I fully intended bringing this back to Germany, my bag was way over weight, so I had to drink it there.

It poured a lovely clear, light amber witha rocky head that disappeared sharpish. The aroma gave me hints of resin under a sweetness, and the sweetness certainly came out in the flavour as sweet toffee malt flavours with a wash of slightly spicey hop flavours but with only a hint of a peppery/orange pith bitterness. As hinted in the aroma, I got a slight resin aftertaste that reminded me of those German beers I didn't like very much that it turned out had included hop extract as an ingredient. Although my Czech language skills aren't great, it seems that Primátor are using hop extact in this beer, as well as E300 Antioxidant.

Overall I found this to be a pleasent, heavily malted, sweet lager with a nice mouthfeel. Unfortunately the resin flavours put me off a bit.

On the same trip I was also gifted a bottle of Morrissey Fox Blond Ale from Geoff in the Bull and Castle. Mr. Fox had been there a couple of days beforehand launching some food and beer pairing marketing crap with the brewers of Ireland (the big ones mostly) and had left samples with Geoff, telling him to get comments. So here are mine...

A clear, bright, very pale amber (strawberry blond?) with a clingy, foamy head, this looked the part. It had a zesty hop aroma at first sniff which I thought was quite strong, but under that was a sweetness too, a soft, caramel with mandarins. There is a soft maltiness on the palate, presumably the ale part of the "hybrid" they describe it as, and a floral hoppiness. It's not bad, but frankly I found it a little thin and unsatisfying. Certainly not distinctive, and I was reminded more of a sweetish lager. To be fair, I think this is a beer for a warm Summer's day, not a cool November evening, so I expect it would be quite sessionable at the right moment. Apparently it's good for cooking with.