Two Great Craft-Beer Pubs in Dublin, Ireland

Hey guess what? There’s a lot more to Irish beer than just Guinness.

The Black Sheep Pub in Dublin was described as an excellent place to get ‘crafty’ beers by the guy manning the Info booth at the Guinness Storehouse.
Although affiliated with Galway Bay Brewery, they had plenty of other craft beers on tap — ‘minimum 24 beers on tap’ and none we’d ever heard of, and no Guinness either.
Of course, the Galway Bay Brewery beers were front and centre and we had to try them out! Al ordered a ‘Siren, Liquid Mistress’ and wrote on his beer app Untapped, “smooth, average black beer, didn’t stand out, nice name…”

I was a bit overwhelmed by the selection but one that looked interesting was Buried at Sea Chocolate Milk Stout.
“That’s just a description, right? They don’t actually add chocolate milk to it do they?” I queried the bartender. (If it sounds like a strange question we had been to the Guinness Storehouse earlier and it appeared that they sometimes added black current juice.)

The bartender explained that the chocolate part comes from chocolate ‘nibs’ that were tossed in with the barley when it was roasting; the milk part refers to its milky texture, “sort of like creamy only not as much”. He gave me a taster – it was fantastic, just the way I think a black beer should taste. I didn’t think I liked stouts until I had this, and it was one I made sure to bring home with me when we left Ireland a month later.

Here is my Chocolate Milk Stout and the glass it came in which reads “Here at Galway Bay Brewery, it makes us feel AWFUL that so many people out there are forced to drink TASTELESS and bland beer. So we decided we would cut the CRAP and carefully hand craft our beer for flavour.”The food selection was not to my taste so we headed off to L Mulligan Grocer, a gastro-pub that specialized in food and craft beer pairings.
On the way we passed the Old Jameson Distillery…
And this cool mural…
L Mulligan Grocer had over 20 taps and 4 casks so it was no slouch in the craft beer department either.
The menu was certainly a small novel – I have added the page that especially intrigued me.I ordered a ‘Fresh-Hopped Brown Paper Bag Project Loupe Garou’ from Stoneybatter to go with my Scotch egg.
Al had a Sabotage by Trouble Brewing. (“Yumm..”)
This was a day for interesting beer glasses. This one reads “Spare a thought for all those who wish they were holding this glass right now”.
Slainte!