A carnival of technology

On the approach of a St. Patrick’s day some years past, the one day a year that I look for meaning in an ignored surname-based heritage, I found myself in a liquor store, wearing green and shopping for supplies.  The lady at the checkout was Jamaican with a thick accent and skin dark as the night.  She noticed my shirt, and we got talking about Irishness and its meaning on such a holiday, as well as her own link to the Emerald Isle, which turned out to be a couple generations closer than mine.

In the early 16th century, after Ireland had enjoyed a few years of relative independence and prosperity as a building Gaelic influence began to displace an apathetic English prescence, and the various earls and viscounts forgot about their summer cottages and fiefdoms, the House of Tudor rose to power and set off another long period when being Irish wasn’t really so great.  Though the emigration during the potato famine is probably the most famous due to the impact it had on North America, there had been a steady stream of unwilling migration going on since the time of Oliver Cromwell, an Englishman famous for being a huge dick when it came to the Irish.  After putting down a rebellion and solidifying the refreshed English control of the island, he began shipping Irish off to Barbados to work the sugar cane plantations.  These Irish slaves and their descendants were shuffled about the British possessions in the Caribbean, and after the Spanish gave up on a little island south of Cuba, the British landowners eventually created a concentration of Irishness in Jamaica.

The island colony gained independence in 1962 under the leadership of Alexander Bustamante, son to an Irish father and Arawak mother, and though the Irish influence has mostly melted invisible into the Jamaican culture and people, as it began to do the moment some poor, sunburned Irishman stepped onto its shores, this unlikely cultural mark can still be found in some oddly placed Mc’s, a tendency to muddle vowels like a boy from Cork, and what I’m getting at is that though the English colonists usually had the sense to keep their dark, heavy beers out of the tropics, I’m not surprised that Jamaica makes a stout.

Dragon Stout

Dragon Stout is brewed by Desnoes & Geddes, makers of Red Stripe and proud sponsors of the Jamaican national bobsled team.  It poured like a stout, brown just a shade shy of black with ruby edges, though there wasn’t much of a head.  And after that things got a little different.  I didn’t find the smell particularly strong, but what was there was more mollases than roasted malt, and it tasted very sweet.  There’s the roasted, stouty malt flavor, with a little bit of coffee-like bitterness, but dominant instead is sugar and cooked fruit.  The taste overall didn’t have that big stout punch, which, given the sweet focus, worked favorably by keeping the beer from getting sickly sugary.

In all this was something a bit unexpected, a bit simple, but not unwelcome.  I don’t think I’d want more than one of these of at a time—the sweetness would be overwhelming after too long and a 7.5% ABV is a bit high to be sessionable—but it made for a nice dessert.