Hillstown Brewery

Hillstown Brewery is based on Glebe road in Northern Ireland in a place called Randalstown. It's a collaboration between homebrew shop Get ‘er Brewed and Hillstown Farm Shop. Apparently they originally started brewing to feed beer to their cows in order to produce the best wagyu beef. Feeding cattle beer and massaging them to make the beef more tender could be a myth or it might be true but either way, I'm sure the cows are pretty happy.

They have re-branded recently with younger, more dynamic labels and they sent a few cases to those of us running the Beoir Cider Competition. I made sure to bring some bottles home to write about.

Squealing Pig IPA is only 4.5% so I'm going to go with Irish Pale Ale here. Underneath the toasted grain and bit of chewy caramel body is some pine and citrus. There's a nice, clean bitter finish. It's rather sessionable.

The Goats Butt is a 5.3% wheat beer which also uses some rye. The result is a very easy drinking wheat beer with some lemon, citrus notes. It's a little tart and pretty spicy. One interesting thing was that it wasn't nearly as carbonated as most wheat beers and I think that served it well here.
I recall this one winning the best wheat beer category at this Killarney this year. It came third last year and second in 2015 which means this is a solid wheat beer that consistently wins awards.

Massey Red Ale, at 5.2% is quit strong for a red ale. There's a picture of a Massey Ferguson tractor on the front which of course s traditionally red in colour. As you might expect from a red ale, there's a big caramel body but less than many. Instead, this is far more bitter than most red ales. There's a big chunk of orange citrus notes here too.

A few weeks before, I was up in Bushmills and had a bottle of their Horny Bull Stout with lunch one of the days. This is a big 7% stout but when it first came out, they had thought it was 12% for some reason. It's a big imperial stout full of  chocolate and mocha notes. There's a hint of licorice too. I didn't look at the date at the time, I had no reason to. Sure a 7% stout isn't really going to go off for a very long time. Now that I see the branding has changed, I wonder how old mine was. It was bloody delicious though so if it was a little on the elderly side, the time did it no harm whatsoever.

It's worth mentioning another one of their beers that I haven't had in a few years and didn't write about. Spitting Llama won the best Belgian beer in Killarney in 2015 so it's worth keeping an eye out for. It's a 7% Belgian strong golden ale and I'm not sure how many of those are made in Ireland.

I see my cat photobombed the first two pictures and the third has a shadow of a cat to the right. Anyway, thanks to Hillstown for the first three beers I wrote about today. The cider judges appreciated them.