A Fjord Fiesta

Last week in Norway had something of everything. The bombing and shootings were some of the most appalling events ever witnessed in my usually quite peaceful home country. On the other end of the spectrum, I personally had the pleasure of travelling from the very north to the very south, first by boat and then by car, experiencing the best Norway has to offer: magnificent mountains, fjords and valleys. However, great scenery looks even better when enjoyed together with a lovely beer or two, so here's a summary of what Norway has to offer the beer lover.

The northernmost brewery in the world is, according to fact or legend, Mack in Tromsø, and this happens to be where we started our voyage. This brewery is so far north that you probably wonder how they source the raw ingredients necessary for brewing. The water should be frozen, the barley shouldn't grow and the hops should be snatched up by breweries further south long before it got this far into the Arctic. However, due to the magical current we call the Gulf Stream, Tromsø isn't actually that freezing, at least if you're wearing lots of clothes. There wasn't much snow there in the middle of summer, anyway.

Two of the more drinkable beers from Mack

The brewery isn't hard to find. You walk up or down the single main street, and if you've walked 5 minutes in one direction without finding it, turn around and you'll be there no more than 10 minutes later. It's got a splendid tap called "Ølhallen" (which simply means "beer hall"), where they serve all their beers on tap until it closes ridiculously early at 6pm. The main disappointment is their standard industrial pilsner, which is no doubt their best selling beer for some unfathomable reason. Well, it's rubbish. Served at arctic temperatures it's probably not that bad as a thirst quencher, but as soon as it's above zero degrees and your taste buds start working, an unpleasant sweetness starts dominating. Luckily, it wasn't their only choice. Much better were a high-strength lager called GullMack, a Bavarian-style dark beer called Bayer, and a tasty golden lager called Haakon. Rumour has it that they've also experimented with small-volume microbrew-style beers, but we had already forked out 10 euros for every half litre several times by then and decided to prioritize having a little pocket money left for the rest of our holiday.

Then started our long journey southwards, and what a dreadful journey it was - seen through the bottom of a beer glass, at least. The scenery was unbelievable and we even had good weather, but it was depressing to have the same conversation with the bartender every time we went for a drink:

- Hi, I'd like a beer please! What do you have on tap?
- We've got pils, pils, pils, pils and pils.
- Ah. And what do you have in bottles?
- We've got Carlsberg, Corona and Budweiser.
- I see. And why don't you have anything worth drinking?
- Mainly to annoy people like you.

I don't understand why it's seemingly impossible to stock a few bottles of interesting ales, for example from Nøgne Ø or Haandbryggeriet. These have an almost infinite shelf-life, and though they take up a little bit of space they can also be sold at higher prices than the standard stuff, believe it or not. Norway's beer scene reminds me of what the US would have been like 25 or 30 years ago.

The scenery is infinitely better than the beer in this part of Norway.

There are some exceptions, of course. I've already written about Drammen and the Aass brewery which manages to brew a good pils as well as many other styles, and Oslo has a few pubs where the selection is excellent. But by and large I'm sad to report that even in 2011, Norway has very little to offer a serious beer lover except prices that are so eye-wateringly high that you actually end up enjoying the beer more simply because it was so bloody expensive. I can't say that I blame the Germans who fill up their huge campervans (or motorhomes or RVs or whatever you call them) with beer and head up to Norway for a few weeks every summer.

The holiday ended on a high though. I gathered a bunch of friends in exceptionally nice weather last Saturday and we sat down with a huge amount of beer and some nice food. I had bought loads of pils from Aass, of course, but I had also managed to find a couple of really good pale ales from Haandbryggeriet. These were so tasty I felt like inviting them to spend the rest of the summer with me, but by the time I thought of that they had mysteriously disappeared. Anyway, lubricated with splendid beers we had a fantastic evening and the spirits were high. We solved most of the current problems in the world, and we laughed constantly doing it - another proof that good beer is, well, a good thing. At least from time to time.

I've now returned to Germany to try and earn enough money to take another holiday one day, so the focus for the next post will switch back to the Fatherland. Auf wiedersehen, pets!