Come Here To Me!

Ah Guinness. Daniel O’Connell might not have been the firms biggest fan, with the famous Guinness boycott of the 1841 Repeal election always forgotten today in the romantic narrative of the company’s history, but we here at Come Here To Me are certainly fond of the great “Protestant porter”.

You’d want to be but. Being honest about it, it’s not like you’ve a whole lot of options beyond it. Indeed, to borrow and rework a great quote from history, the Irish punter can have a drink in any colour that they like as long as it’s black. If they don’t want it black, they can have a pint of Budweiser.

The lack of selection in Irish pubs is pretty miserable. Even Witherspoons, the McDonalds of the British pub world, offer a wide selection of beers both local and national throughout their outlets. Here at home though, it seems Diageo have everyone by the bollocks. With that in mind, I’ve been trying some new things lately.

I have to say, I feel like a vegetarian who just tasted his first donor kebab. It really is that good. Here are three favourites so far:

1: Plain, The Porterhouse.

Plain, Temple Bar.

Walking into The Porterhouse, I was taken aback by the image of Flann O’Brien by the door. The check of them, I thought. O’Brien was more often (or too often) to be found down the far end of Temple Bar of course, in The Palace. Still, when you taste their inhouse stout, you understand the choice of image in the doorway perfectly. A pint of plain truly is your only man.

Plain is an All-Ireland champion stout, and deservedly so. Indeed, she’s the Global Gold Medal winner of Best Stout in the World.The rich, roasted malts make this one, and she just goes to show the Corkonians that once again the best stout in the world claims Dublin as home.

2: Spitfire,Kentish Ale.

The Spitfire beer bottle looks like somebody gave a Glasgow Rangers Supporters Club a bootleg copy of Photoshop and asked them to design a bottle of beer. ‘THE BOTTLE OF BRITAIN’ it proclaims, and the whole thing is a red,white and blue designers nightmare. The bottlecap is a beaut, taking in the classic RAF logo which was later adopted by the mod youth subculture in Britain.

Have you seen the ads? No? Jesus……

The stuff is absolutely beautiful but. A 4.5% ale, it’s got a gorgeous hoppy, bitter taste to it. We found it in O’Neills on Sufolk Street retailing at a very fair €4 a bottle. They gave us a glass of ice with it, which I thought was very odd and didn’t work with the beer.

Spitfire is currently on sale in Aldi of all places at a knockdown price.

3: Galway Hooker

I’ve great time for any pub which is willing to move beyond the old predictables, and I was surprised to see the Galway Hooker van parked outside The Palace on Fleet Street. This has long been a favourite, and was probably my first trek of the beaten track with alcohol. Galway Hooker has been very successful in its home city, making the great leap into a student bar, which says a lot when student bars are more often associated with cans of Dutch Gold under a table than pint glasses on it. There’s a great bitterness to this one, and it is quite widely available by the standards of smaller microbrewery drinks in this country.