Hello again, I hope you’re doing OK. The brewery has been a hive of activity during March in the lead up to St Patrick’s Day. It’s a great opportunity for small independent brewers like us to get our beers out and about to a wider audience, and it feels like there’s huge interest in what’s brewing this side of the Irish Sea again this year.
This week we’ve canned four beers which will be on the shelves and in the fridges of your local bottle shop, as well as on our online shop, in time for the Easter break.
Easter wouldn’t be Easter without chocolate, so we felt it was a good time to brew Moto Psycho Nightmare again. This is our (virtual) collaboration with Sue of the Waen Brewery which we first brewed at the end of 2020. It’s a vegan chocolate and vanilla marble cake stout at 8% alcohol by volume; rich, dark and full bodied. This time round we’ve added organic cacao nibs to the hop back to enhance that chocolatey flavour. Sweet.
Another beer returning this week is Electra, an 8% alcohol by volume New England-style Double IPA that we first brewed last summer. Brewed with lots of oats and wheat, and dry-hopped with a blend of Mosaic, Cashmere, Chinook, Comet and Columbus hop varieties, it’s a delicious full bodied and hazy brew that we’re extremely happy to see back once again.
We were very pleased to get hold of some new (to us) hops to add into a couple of brand new pale ales, thanks to Geterbrewed. Grand Central is a 4.5% alcohol by volume New England-style Pale Ale brewed with Extra Pale malt, Dextrin malt, oats and wheat. It’s dry hopped with some very fresh and juicy 2020 US crop Mosaic, as well as a relatively new American hop variety called Talus and a pinch of Columbus. It’s a hazy beer, full of lemony citrus, and very refreshing with a nice resinous edge. Grand Central is also a VD grade climb on Slieve Bearnagh.
Pillar Variant is a 5.1% alcohol by volume New Zealand-style Pale Ale. We’re big fans of hop varieties from New Zealand but they’re not always easy to find and it has taken us a while to get hold of some of the 2020 crop. This brew is dry hopped with Motueka, Riwaka and Rakau varieties and has a fabulous aroma of pink grapefruit, lemon and lime, a tropical fruit undertone and that signature NZ herbal hoppiness that I think makes hops from the land of the long white cloud some of the best in the world. It’s a real treat to brew with these hops and I highly recommend you seek out a can or two of this beer! It’s fermented with Verdant yeast so expect some of those fruitbowl yeast esters in the aroma too. Pillar Variant is also an S grade climb on Lower Cove.
All these beers will be distributed across NI by Nelson Sauvin over the next couple of weeks. They’re available as 12 packs on our online shop, and as part of a new Easter mixed pack featuring seven lovely beers. We’ll also include an Easter gift of some delicious local chocolate from Neary Nógs in the first 25 orders, which you can enjoy with your Moto!
And finally, if you like listening in on beery geek chat, we Zoom’d with the fellas from the Beer Fridge Podcast a couple of weeks ago. We talked about our St Patrick’s Day releases, how our can labels are designed, how we develop recipes, and tried to resolve Marc’s existential crisis about Dot’s Delight. They’re a great bunch of lads. It’s quite long, so grab a beer or two and enjoy the natter!
