Muc Ghuine
Noble Creature Cask House

 

Dark brown with faintly clear edges under a beautifully massive and convexly reverse cascading nitro head.

Wow, that tastes almost EXACTLY like Guinness, if only slightly more bold and roasty. There's even a bit of that mineral water background that I perceive within the standard bearer, introduced by that crazily dense, thick head before exhaling tobacco.

Revisiting in 2026, this sucker is really quaffable, but also perhaps a little bolder in roast and a hint of cigar smoke this time, still subtly so though, while finishing paper dry.

Crusher.

 

"Based on a traditional dry Irish stout, Muc Ghuine is a smooth, roasty beer, with a blend of 3% oak aged wild ale, for a refreshing, sessionable tang."

Looks: Pronounced 'muc gi-nee' I'm having mine from the can, hard poured into my trusty pint glass. Exuberant carbonation, a welcome sight for a beer meant for the nitro tap. Almost black with ruby highlights. Super tight, creamy tan head. Just what I'm looking for. You can tell it's a stout; The defining quality of a stout being unmalted, roasted barley, which also influences the head color.

Aroma: Roasted barley is only about 10% of the mash, yet imparts intense coffee flavors (no actual coffee was used here) along with bitter, dry, and smoky qualities. The next layer of aroma is from the 3% oak aged wild ale, which smells like vanilla, oak, and tangy house sour. The faintest aroma is from the hop used, the northern brewer, known for woodiness and mint.

Taste: Follows the aroma. Coffee, bittersweet chocolate, molasses, and a hint of smoke, with a lasting coffee finish. Thanks to the wild ale, oak, and hop, it finishes crisply. The mineral composition is notably soft, Dublin style, which also means it leans towards coffee (whereas Cork style leans towards chocolate).

Feel: The body is very light, silky sweet, and has a texture of velvety smooth cream. Roasted coffee gives way to acidic sharpness, which finishes dry, while the lightly bitter roast powers on.

Overall: Mac Ghuine is absolutely packed with flavor and depth, and a much needed contribution to Irish dry stout. The only thing this beer needs, is a history lesson!

Hailing from the London porter, stout originates in the 1800s with the industrial era. Before then, malt was kilned in a traditional perforated floor kiln. In 1817, Daniel Wheeler, after seeing coffee being roasted, invented a revolving drum style kiln that could dry and roast malts without scorching or leaving green spots.

Maltsters could now for the first time adjust the temperature and length of the drying processes with ease and thereby control the color and flavor of the finished malt—from gently kilned pale malt all the way to severely roasted black malt. This new flexibility in malt drying led not only to a vast array of new malts; it also spawned a revolution in beer-making. Simply put, new malts begat new beer styles, including various types of porter, stout, and pale ale on the British Isles, and märzen, Vienna, pilsner, Oktoberfest, and helles lagers on the Continent.

In the same era, 1790, William Nicholson developed the hydrometer, meaning brewers no longer needed to rely on traditional brown malt and variations in the grist-to-water ratio to make different beers. Instead, they could now make any shade and flavor of beer by simply mixing extract-rich pale malts (70% Maris Otter) with various amounts and types of dark malt (20% Barley flakes and 10% roasted barley), and do so much more economically and efficiently than ever before.