St. Patrick’s Day and drinking are linked. It may be a stereotype, but the Irish have a reputation for drinking a bit.
St. Patrick’s Day this year comes on a Saturday, which is good, because you can start the day with a good Irish breakfast of eggs, Irish bacon and pudding — if you want. And as a T-shirt that I saw at the Lakes Region Beer Festival said, “You can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning.”
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The beer to drink in the morning is an Irish dry stout, because at 4 to 4.3 percent alcohol and with some heftiness, you can drink a few without serious intoxication.
You can get Guinness everywhere at 4.2 percent alcohol, but if you have an iPhone, you can go to tinyurl.com/6u94vv3 to get an app that tells you where the nearest pub selling Guinness is located.
On draught is the best way to drink Guinness. It has to settle a bit after it is drawn, and it has a wonderfully stiff head that bartenders, when they have the time, can put a shamrock on.
If I am drinking at home, I prefer the old-fashioned Guinness Export to the Widget cans that infuse the beer with nitro. For a while I drank a lot of the Widget beers, but have since gone back to the original Export. But that is personal taste.
Murphy’s Irish Stout is a bit rarer than Guinness, and comes in at 4 percent alcohol. This has a more hoppier finish than Guinness.
The third Irish dry stout is Beamish, at 4.1 percent alcohol. This is much harder to find, and my personal favorite. It is stouter, creamier and smoother than the other two.
O’Hara’s is less creamy but a bit more complex, and comes in at 4.3 percent alcohol.
If you don’t want stout, there are other Irish beers. I am not a fan of Guinness Black Lager, at 4.5 percent alcohol. It seems thin and tasteless.
Smithwick’s Ale and Harp Lager are Guinness siblings. I like Smithwick’s, which has 5 percent alcohol and a good rich flavor with a bit of oakiness. It’s a good beer for drinking rather than thinking. Harp is OK, but for me, it doesn’t stand up to the best European and American lagers.
Just so you know, when I was in Ireland — twice over the past decade — the locals drank an awful lot of American Budweiser. So if you want to be a bit twisted and counter-intuitive, you could have a Bud to show your allegiance to the Old Sod.
Many American brewers make beers they refer to as Irish red ales, patterned after Smithwick’s. They range from Killians (a sub-brand of Coors that is now part of MillerCoors) to small microbrews. Try some of them if you want, but not on St. Patrick’s Day.
The American beer I will accept as a St. Patrick’s Day tipple is McSorley’s, based on an ale served at an Irish pub established in New York’s East Village in 1854. The beer is now brewed in Utica, N.Y., and is a subsidiary of Pabst, but the tradition of old American Irish is worth something.
The beer is good, yeasty and crisp with a good mouthfeel and an earthy hoppiness. I bought a six-pack for $8.99 at Shaw’s.
I think I’ll go with Guinness at a bar for breakfast, McSorley’s for lunch and a Beamish if I can find it for dinner.
Sounds like a good day.
Tom Atwell is a freelance writer who lives in Cape Elizabeth. He can be contacted at 767-2297 or at:
tomatwell@me.com
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