Paris is the city of love, allegedly. It is
also a city of culture, fine wining and dining, history and the Metro. What
Paris is definitely not known for is beer, and for this reason (as well as some
minor other ones) I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the
French capital. It’s definitely an interesting and, at times, a great city to
explore, but I’ve also had bad experiences with insane traffic, rude people,
dog turds on almost every pavement, and last, but for me definitely not least,
expensive and bad beer.
My birthday gift to my lovely wife last
year was a pair of tickets to a concert with the acapella group King’s Singers,
who happened to be singing at a festival on the outskirts of Paris. One thing
the French do better than most is trains, and they’ve been considerate enough
to build an insanely fast high-speed line between Strasbourg and Paris, which
makes it possible for us to travel from our home in the south of Germany to
Paris in just over five hours – and so it came to pass that we headed off
towards Paris on Armistice Day 2016. Naturally, my secret plan was to do some
beer drinking when there was nothing else to do, which luckily was most of the
time.
France’s history as a beer drinking nation
is almost laughably pathetic. There are essentially two regions of this rather
big country that can claim any historical beer culture at all, and both just
because the beer culture of the neighbouring country accidentally or through
repeated invasions spilled across the border. The north-east region, known as
Flanders in English, has a solid tradition for the Saison beer, a style similar
to one of the many found in neighbouring Belgium, whereas the historically
contested area around Strasbourg in Alsace, which has changed hands between
France and Germany more times than anyone cares to remember, unsurprisingly has
a beer culture inspired by the latter. The most visible and well-known remnant
of this is the enormous global beer brand Kronenbourg.
Paris, on the other hand, has nothing. If
you feel like a beer in Paris, you will most likely be offered a choice of
Kronenbourg on tap or some Belgian beer from the bottle – and you’ll be
required to pay the best part of 10 euros, a price that only Oslo, as far as I
know, comfortably beats. Either way, it’s a disaster, and since you’re likely
to choke on traffic fumes, be spat at by rude waiting staff, have your wallet
pickpocketed and repeatedly step in dog shit, you’d be well advised to go
nowhere near this god-awful city.
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| Pondering the next blog post... |
At least, this is what I feared. I am happy
to report that things have taken a massive turn for the better in the world’s
favourite French capital. First and foremost, someone has cleaned the pavements
– there was hardly any turds to be seen, so instead of constantly checking
where you put your shoes, you can instead look out for crazy motorists and try
not to get run over. Except that even these were not as bad as they used to be
– Paris now has cycle lanes everywhere, and a few roads, including a scenic one
along the Seine, have been pedestrianised! Whatever next – perhaps there’s even
good beer to be had?
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| The selection from the Guette d'Or microbrewery. |
A quick bit of googling revealed three
promising locations – a microbrewery called Guette d’Or and a bar called Super
Coin, both not far from Gare de L’Est, as well as “Academie de Biere” or
something like that a bit further away. Since the bar did not open until 5pm,
we headed for the micro first, and what a wise move that turned out to be. We
rolled in around 4pm to find a guy basically serving up free samples to anyone
who was vaguely interested, including an older couple from Portland, Oregon –
home to the greatest concentration of microbreweries in the USA (or so they
claimed), so I was curious to know why they even bothered leaving home, never
mind travelling halfway across the world to the beer desert that is Paris. The
beers on offer were good – fairly typical for a microbrewery, with the
mandatory IPA as well as a Red Ale, a Saison, and an interesting one brewed
with chai that tasted a bit like old shoes in the positive sense (i.e. ones
that had never stepped on a turd).
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| Super Coin taps. |
After the tasting session, we were in the
mood for somewhere warmer and cosier, and the Super Coin bar could not have
been a better choice. There were three beers on tap – a Czech pilsner and two
ales from France, including one that was surprisingly tart. The real treasure
was the bottle collection, though – including a few red ales from local and
not-so-local microbreweries at very sensible prices by Paris standards. The bar,
empty when we arrived, filled up rapidly with happy Parisians clearly enjoying
the opportunity to drink some good ales instead of having to force down another
glass of crappy red wine. Sadly, their food selection was much more limited, so
it was with heavy hearts that we had to bid adieu to this great place after a
couple of hours in order to locate some food. The food selection in Paris is,
of course, legendary – but do take care not to be dragged into tourist traps by
sleazy men trying to cajole you into their dodgy restaurants where you’ll
inevitably end up paying an arm and a leg for pretty sub-standard food. We
found a great Moroccan place, always a good choice in France – and could
confirm that though the food was excellent and the wine list extensive, the
beer choice was either “crappy” or “none”.
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| Beer drinking in Paris can be a nice experience if you know where to go! |
