2017-12-20

C'est la bière

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.

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?

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).

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”.


Beer drinking in Paris can be a nice experience if you know where to go!
In conclusion, Paris took a big step up the list of my favourite cities starting with the letter P after this visit. It will never be a beer lover’s paradise (unlike several other cities starting with the letter P), but in some ways the treasure hunt is even more rewarding when the gems are hard to find, so in that sense I enjoyed the beer scene very much. I probably won’t be heading back there for some time, but once I do, I shall look forward to finding even more little gems hidden in obscure alleys. For those of you who plan to go there before me, I hope that this post has inspired you to go a bit out of your way when you search for good beer, and thereby increase demand – paving the way for even more little adventurous breweries and beer bars to try their luck in this winey city. C’est bien – bon voyage, et santé!

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