Brewery: College Green
Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
ABV: 4.3%
Version: 500ml bottle

The last of the current range of beers from the College Green Brewery, Headless Dog is named after a mural adorning a wall of the building housing the restaurant and brewhouse. It’s a light golden ale and pours with no head. A light malty flavour with no bitterness, it’s much too thin and watery and lacking in character or stamina. Inoffensive and unexciting, with as much life as I’d expect from a headless dog.

Brewery: College Green
Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
ABV: 4.3%
Version: 500ml bottle

Continuing on from the last post, this is the second of three beers currently on offer from the College Green Brewery. A light ale, closer to a pilsner in character, it pours a light golden colour with no head. There’s a very light malty flavour present with a hint of bitterness but overall it’s just too bland. If you’re after an inoffensive thirst quencher it’ll certainly do the job but I found it lacking any lasting appeal.

Brewery: College Green
Origin: Belfast, Northern Ireland
ABV: 4.2%
Version: 500ml bottle
Source: The Vineyard, Belfast

Recent years in Ireland, north and south, have seen a rise in smaller breweries not only producing a range of beer, but also managing to get their produce more readily available in shops.

The newest of these is College Green Brewery, based in the heart of the Queens University district in Belfast. Set up as part of the Molly’s Yard restaurant my research has been unable to determine if any beer is actually being brewed yet on the premises, or if it’s still being made at parent company Hilden Brewery (handy enough considering Molly’s and College Green are run by the offspring of the Scullion family who own Hilden).

Anyway, enough preamble, on with the tasting. First impressions are of a pitch dark, brown beer smelling of chocolate, as you would expect from the name. However, much of the bitter chocolate malt flavour I was expecting seems held back, and the whole affair is just too light for a stout. I also detected what seemed like cocoa powder mixed with baking soda, which while providing a bit of zing only served to leave a not very pleasant aftertaste. I so wanted to like this but was sadly disappointed.