Five Lamps IPA Review: Dublin’s Beer, Named After the City’s Own Landmark

A mate of mine handed me a Five Lamps IPA on a table outside a bar on Amiens Street, a few hundred yards from the actual Five Lamps monument the beer is named after, and that felt like the right way to try it. Five Lamps is Dublin’s own IPA: brewed for the city, sold with a wink, and served in a pint glass that is basically a printed guide to how Dubliners talk. I picked it up straight from the tap, and this is the honest verdict on the beer, plus the story behind the name and the slang running down the side of the glass.

Five Lamps IPA at a Glance

Why “Five Lamps”? The story behind Dublin’s most literal beer name

Most beer brands invent a name. Five Lamps just pointed at a landmark down the road. The Five Lamps monument is a freestanding cast-iron lamp standard and drinking fountain built around 1880 at the junction of Amiens Street and North Strand, where five streets converge. It was erected in memory of General Henry Hall, a British Army officer who had served in India, and it carries five separate lamp brackets, one for each of the streets meeting at that spot, which is where the name comes from: literally five lamps, addressing five roads, at the gateway into the north inner city.

It is now a protected structure on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, rated for its artistic, technical and social significance. The technical case is the ironwork and casting quality for the period; the social case is more interesting for a beer review, because the fountain part of the monument once supplied clean drinking water to a part of Dublin that badly needed it during the slum conditions of the late 1800s. It was converted to electric lighting around 1900 and is still standing on its traffic island today, a genuine everyday Dublin landmark rather than a tourist-trail one.

The brewery leaned on that directly. 5 Lamps Dublin Brewery was set up in early 2012, and its first beer, Five Lamps Dublin Lager, launched that September. Brewery records note the beer was originally intended for the North Strand area, hence the name, even though the brewery itself first operated out of Donore Avenue in Dublin 8. It moved in 2019 to the former Camden Deluxe Hotel site on Camden Street, where its head brewer William Harvey, who spent 26 years at Guinness across brewing, technical and procurement roles, now runs specials and seasonals, while the core range is brewed by parent company C&C Group (owner of Bulmers Ireland) at its Clonmel facility. So the beer moved across the city and changed hands, but it kept the name of a cast-iron lamp post that has stood on the same corner since the 1880s.

The glass is doing half the marketing

Before you even get to the beer, the pint glass is worth a read. Five Lamps prints a run of genuine Dublin sayings down the side of it in place of a plain logo, and it is a better piece of branding than most breweries manage with a full campaign. Reading around the glass I picked up mine in, plus the promotional shots below, you get lines like “yer man,” “yer wan,” “the neck of you,” “go away out of that,” “gerrup dah yard,” “relax the cacks,” “ah sure, it’ll be grand” and “ah sure, where would you get it.” None of that is invented pub-tat slang either, it is all real, everyday Dublin English.

“Yer man” and “yer wan” are just how Dubliners refer to a third person without naming them, “yer man” for a bloke, “yer wan” for a woman, roughly “that guy” or “that woman.” It is not automatically an insult, it is closer to a shrug, a way of gesturing at someone in conversation that comes straight from an Irish-language sentence pattern carried over into English.

“The neck of you” (or “the neck of her,” “some neck”) is about cheek, not appearance. It means audacity or nerve, as in “the neck of him, asking for a raise on his first day.” It is the Dublin equivalent of “the cheek of you.”

“Gerrup dah yard” (properly “get up the yard”) is disbelief, close to “get out of here” or “no way,” supposedly traced back to Dublin schoolyards where wardens shouted it to send younger kids away. “Go away out of that” does similar work, dismissing something as nonsense. “Ah sure, it’ll be grand” is close to Ireland’s unofficial motto, a laid-back “don’t worry about it” that Dubliners use for everything from a missed bus to a job interview.

Put together on a beer glass, it reads like a night out condensed into eight phrases, which is exactly the point of the “the beer from ah here” line the brand uses everywhere. It is a small, well-executed idea: instead of putting a generic tagline on the glass, they printed the actual way people in the pub talk to each other.

How it tastes

Five Lamps IPA fits the Red IPA style, and that is the right call: it pours a deep copper-orange rather than the pale gold of a West Coast IPA, with a thick, dense white head that held its shape long after the rest of the glass had gone. Head retention was genuinely the standout feature of the pour, still sitting there in a solid cap well after the first few sips.

On the nose it is more fruit than pine or resin, ripe orange and a touch of stone fruit ahead of the hop bitterness. That fruit character carries through on the palate too, with a light caramel malt backbone from the red-ale-adjacent base supporting it rather than fighting it. It is a session-strength IPA at 5% ABV, and it drinks like one: bitterness is present but restrained, there is no harsh resinous finish, and it goes down easily rather than demanding you slow down.

I’d put it at 3.46 out of 5, which lines up with what this is: a well-made, easy-drinking IPA aimed at a wide Dublin pub crowd rather than a hop-bomb built to impress craft-beer obsessives. Judged on those terms, on the night, it earns its keep. Judged against a serious West Coast or NEIPA, it is obviously playing a different, gentler game, and that is by design, not a flaw.

Five Lamps IPA is not sold through US delivery apps. Lagunitas IPA is a widely available US craft IPA comparison, below.

FAQs

What is Five Lamps beer named after?

It is named after the Five Lamps, a cast-iron lamp standard and drinking fountain built around 1880 at the junction of Amiens Street and North Strand in Dublin. The brewery’s first beer was originally intended for the North Strand area, which is where the name comes from.

What ABV is Five Lamps IPA?

Five Lamps IPA is 5.0% ABV, classed as a Red IPA.

Who brews Five Lamps beer?

5 Lamps Dublin Brewery was founded in 2012 and is now part of C&C Group, which also owns Bulmers Ireland. The core range is brewed at C&C’s Clonmel facility, with specials and seasonals coming from the brewery’s Camden Street site in Dublin, run by head brewer William Harvey.

Is Five Lamps beer sold outside Ireland?

Five Lamps is primarily a Dublin and Irish pub pour. It is not distributed or exported to the US.

What does the Five Lamps pint glass say?

The house pint glass is printed with genuine Dublin sayings including ‘yer man,’ ‘yer wan,’ ‘the neck of you,’ ‘gerrup dah yard’ and ‘ah sure, it’ll be grand,’ playing on the brand’s ‘the beer from ah here’ tagline.