Tasting Notes #4: The Irish Stouts

Leading up to St. Patrick's Day, it's nonetoolate (nare too early) for a note on the Irish Stouts.

Guinness from Dublin is, of course, the standard -- a black, dry, smooth quaff like no other and a meal unto itself. My absolute favorite beverage, after water; each pint a priviledge & symbol of hope. My most memorable conversations always seem to have panned out over that creamy head. But some wizened pallets feel it has lost some of its body over the last 25 years.

Here's some useful information for taking your Irish Stouts with food...

By far the best-known black beer the world over, Guinness is considered by some to be the standard by which all other stouts are judged. Others, like myself, may suggest that its character has been dulled over the past decade or so. Regardless of your view, however, it is still a fine, dry, appetizing pint.

Poorer County Cork cousins to that Dublin-brewed juggernaut, Beamish and Murphy's represent two different takes on the Irish-stout style — the former more roasted and firmer than Guinness and the latter more malty and a bit chocolaty. For oysters on the half-shell or smoked salmon, choose Beamish or Guinness, but with roasted or grilled meats from pork to beef, try the Murphy's.

...from Epicurus: read the full article for other recommendations such as Welsh and American Irish stouts.

Personally speaking, my first impression of Murphy's was of its richness -- which put me off. But I didn't think of it with a steak. I'll be seeking Beamish out at my local beer-savvy supermarkets and let you know how things progress.

Comments

[stephen hood]

After water, after water? Well your no Irishman but cheers anyways.

[Sam Hiser]

Stephen-

You misread me, man!

A comparison with water in my own mind can no less than flatter Guinness.

Ireland & the Irish have a long and mixed relationship with water (it rains a lot there). But there are enough examples of aquatic exhortations in Irish letters to drown the town.

Water to the Irish is feminine, is great, it is love, it is a mother.

Joyce's ana livial plurabel was a glorious female personification of Dublin's aorta, the River Liffey (from whence Guinness comes).

In Ulysses, Buck Mulligan looks out on he Irish Sea from the Martello Tower and refers to it as "a grey sweet mother"; and Stephen imagining his dead mother calls the sea, echoing in his mind "a great sweet mother". Also there, Joyce makes a parody and significance of the Yeats poem, "Who Goes with Fergus?" where it is sung in parts by different figures -- for one, it is the song Stephen sings to his dying mother. And Buck descending the staircase chimes: "And no more turn aside and brood / Upon love's bitter mystery / For Fergus rules the brazen cars" (...Joyce intentionally leaving out the line, "And the white breast of the dim sea" so the reader provides it himself).

Here is an interpretation that includes a telling reference to water...

The natural world upon which Stephen [your namesake, Deadalus] gazes from Martello Tower, particularly the sea, gains its symbolic value from Yeats's conception of elemental interconnectedness. In essence, Yeats power to create and delineate borders on the divine.

This, of course, only skims the surface. Ha-HAH! ...skim...surface...HAH!

Methinks your own placehold for Guinness is too low and for water not high enough.

[stephen hood]

WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

:)

[Sam Hiser]

The Stolen Child

Good man!

[stephen hood]

Well it was the most watery filled one I could remember...