I’m not sure if you’ve tried making it but the recipes that I have tried all result in a dough that’s capable of standing on its own as a boule. If you do an image search you can see a lot of images of Irish soda bread with X score marks baked in to their tops, which you couldn’t make with a liquid batter.
Here’s a picture of the dough from a similar recipe to what I use![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c0c7cb56-ef7f-4f1c-aaba-4efe716b227d.jpeg)
If you do a search for “Irish soda bread” you’ll get almost all the same kind of pictures of X cut boules with some kind of add ins. Sounds like the brown bread is something different, but it’s probably still yummy.