The other Switzerland

If you’re a seasoned traveller in Europe, you probably have a fair idea where both France and Switzerland are situated on the map, and you may even know that these two countries in German are known as “Frankreich” and “Schweiz”. What may come as a surprise to you, though, is that a large section of what is technically Bavaria doesn’t like to call itself Bavarian at all – rather, the proud inhabitants call this region “Franken”, in English referred to as “Franconia”, and a sub-section of this even calls itself “Switzerland” – or “Fränkische Schweiz” in the native tongue. Sounds complicated? Well, at least there’s a pretty solid reason for you to find this place on the map and book your next holiday immediately because this, ladies and gentlemen, is the region with the highest density of breweries in the world. Furthermore, these are not just any breweries, these are old, family-owned small breweries that soldier on in tiny villages, serving the local population and a handful of tourists with some of the best beers known to mankind.

The natural focal point for beer lovers in Franconia is, of course, the city of Bamberg. This city is so charming and pretty that every other city in Europe effectively ends up looking like a rubbish tip in comparison. It also has a crapload of breweries and it is the spiritual home of the “rauchbier”, or smoked beer in English, a beer style that for beginners may come as a shock since it tastes suspiciously like bacon, but for those who like this sort of thing is just about reason enough to move there. However, Bamberg has become rather touristy of late, so if you want to head off the beaten path you should rent a beer-friendly vehicle like a bike or a toy tractor and head off eastwards towards Switzerland (as it were).

When you arrive there, it’ll be immediately unclear why it’s called Switzerland since it looks nothing like its bigger (and much more expensive) sister country to the south. There are a few hills and some rocks sticking up, but no banks, no holey cheese, no yodelling and not a single referendum in sight. However, unlike the other one, you’re not unlikely to accidentally crash your bike or tractor into a brewery, because there are several of these on every street corner. Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but there are literally a couple of hundred dotted around an area not much bigger than a relatively small section of Belgium.

Once you’re there, one great way to explore the region is to park your bike or tractor and proceed on foot. There are several beer trails of varying lengths that coincidentally lead you past a brewery every kilometre or five, where you can stop for suitable refreshment. One of these is simply called the “Brauereiweg”, or “Brewery Way”, a very simple and ingenious name for a 13km long countryside walk that crashes into four very nice little breweries along the way. The great thing about the walk is that you can sober up a little bit between breweries, the great thing about the beer is that it makes the walk so much more fun, causing people to break into song, cow-tipping and other shenanigans along the way.

The Kathi-Bräu in Franconian Switzerland

Then there’s the beer. Oh, the beer. My talent for waxing lyrical falls light years short of the kind of celestial celebration I would like to write in its honour, but I will attempt it nevertheless. Picture Bach, Beethoven and Mozart getting together for a little jam session where they would combine their talents to compose the greatest symphony ever written, and picture listening to this in the most beautiful place you can imagine, such as a particularly nice pub. That would perhaps come close to the sensory experience of taking a sip of one of the beers that these breweries make. OK, perhaps this was slightly exaggerated and somewhat influenced by the sensory enhancing effects of the beers themselves, but you get my point. There aren’t many places in this world where you can drink better stuff, and you can perhaps even remove the “m” in “many”, though I have not been everywhere yet so I can’t be sure.

Another brewery, another beer.

For those of you who may wonder what the beers are like from a more down-to-earth point of view, I also have some information. First, there’s no Pilsner and second, the lightest beer colour you’re likely to see is amber. Most of the breweries brew only one or perhaps two beers, and the main one will be the style known as “Landbier” or “Vollbier”. These are malty, yet very well balanced brews that are full-bodied without being sweet, refreshing without being tart, and served cold without being frosty. Make sure that you order the brewery’s own beer on tap (“vom Fass”) – they may also stock some bottles from well-known national brands just to cater for those who think McDonald’s is a restaurant.

As if by magic, we came across yet another brewery.

As mentioned, there are many brewery walks in this region, and it is possible to do circular, triangular, square, straight and gay walks spanning anything from a couple of hours to several days. Some breweries even offer comfortable lodging, and if you can distract yourself long enough from the singing and cow-tipping whilst walking, you may also appreciate the scenery which is pleasantly rural with rolling hills, river valleys and occasional rocky parts where you may decide to climb up, fall down and kill yourself unless you bring a rope, in which case the rope may save your wife. Enough rambling (no pun unintended), the conclusion is simple: this is a great region for beer lovers, and you should make a pilgrimage at least once (a year). Explore Bamberg first, then rent the aforementioned bike or tractor and head towards Switzerland, do a few walks, drink some great beers, meet some new friends, say goodbye, meet the same new friends at the next brewery, and so on. You can’t go wrong, there are signs everywhere and it’s really confusing. As they say in Mongolia: Tulatsgaaya!!

New year – more beer!

January’s one of those months that seem to just zoom by in some kind of a blur. It always tends to start off on a great note – together with old friends for a great party, good food and beer, and a superb atmosphere as the clock strikes midnight. Unfortunately, the rest of January usually doesn’t follow up in the same vein, so the fact that we’re already in February is quite OK – the days are getting longer and what the Germans call the 5^th season – carnival time – is just around the corner. Loads of opportunities to drink good beer, in other words.

The reason I sit down here feeling inspired to write a blog entry is something that did happen in January, though: together with a couple of old friends from university, I went skiing in the Austrian Alps. This was very nice in its own right, but these great chaps had also thought further ahead and bought a few great beers from the duty free store as a gift for yours truly. And therefore, since the beer blogger always tries to acknowledge free beer by posting some ramblings on the internet about it, I will acknowledge the generosity of my friends by posting some ramblings on the internet about it.

One of the first and also most successful micro-breweries in Norway is called “Nøgne Ø”. You may think that this name has a lot of zeroes or other strange characters in it, but the letter “ø” is actually the 28^th one in the Norwegian alphabet. It’s quite simple: you take an “o” and you slash through it, and you get something that’s pronounced more or less the same as the vowel in “turd”. The brewery’s name translates simply as “naked island”, presumably a nudist's paradise, and their slogan is “the brewery that does not compromise”, presumably by refusing to wear clothes even in winter. These days their "no compromise" attitude rings a little bit hollow since they allowed themselves to be bought out by a big brewery multinational, but their beers are still very drinkable even though the brewery is situated in a place called “Grimstad” which means simply “ugly town” in Norwegian - a corresponding name in the English-speaking world may be "Shitville" or "Crapton". They don’t lie when they say that Norwegians tend to get straight to the point.

Once you go black....

Today’s beer was the “Imperial Stout”. Imperial, no less! Defined by the internet as “relating to an empire” – I guess only “global”, “solar systemal”, “milky wayal” and “universal” would trump that. It is also interesting since Norway is one of the few countries that have never been part of an empire, even though the empire did strike back in Norway when they filmed it up in the freezing mountains back in 1980. This beer is black. In fact, it’s so black that it seems that it sucks the light out of the room, like a black hole. It’s also very thick – like crude oil with a head, only much more expensive and, hopefully, better tasting. And tasty it was – a full frontal assault on the taste buds, delivering massive amounts of firepower to make you instantly forget whatever else you had been tasting that day. In fact, it’s got notes of every single taste you’ve ever come across except apricots and aardvark droppings, so even though the beer was great there’s clearly room for improvement. I hereby confidently predict that they will release a “Universal Stout” later this year that will have notes of every single taste known to man and/or woman (and/or his/her dog).

So, what else is going on? Germans have a great way of saying this: “was ist los?” Which just goes to show that not all German words have 17 or more letters in them, unlike “Dampfbierbrauerei” which is a great little brewery in Oberstdorf, way down south in the Bavarian Alps. We went there to do some skiing, but since it got dark conveniently early we also managed to fit in a couple of hours in this fantastic place where you can sit at the bar and look at the staff dispensing huge amounts of beer that has been brewed in the kettle situated just behind the bar. The brewery is right next to the train station, so if you’re somewhere in Europe you can always think of these great beers as just a train ride away.

Well, the effects of the Imperial Stout are slowly wearing off, so inspiration is turning to tiredness, which means that I better wrap this post up before I start yakking on about things that nobody really cares about, like trees. Don’t get me wrong, I love trees, especially oak, which is one of the most suitable trees for making oak barrels in which you can mature beer. But you see my point, this is a beer blog and not a tree blog, so I’ll try to stick to that. Finally, I wish you all a great beery 2015, or at least what’s left of it. As they say in large parts of East Africa: Maisha marefu!

Seeking the Aurora Beerealis

As some of the regular readers of this blog may have realized by now, I stem from the country of Norway, which is situated way north of most sensible latitudes in Europe. Sharing a border with my home country is another country called Finland, also a weird place, covered in snow and saunas. However, should you happen to look really carefully at the map, you may find a third country stuck between the two aforementioned ones – and if you can be bothered to look up the statistics for this country you’ll also find that it is both bigger and more populous than either. This, dear beer lover, is the country of Sweden.

Sweden is a country with a long history of aggressive behaviour. A few hundred years ago, the king would round up an army at regular intervals and go marauding down in central Europe, mainly to escape the long winter nights and the endless supply of pickled herring back home. The army would pillage, rape and murder, but eventually they’d meet someone who could actually fight and promptly retreat homewards. Finally, after many years of such expensive tomfoolery, they simply decided that they preferred pickled herring and long winter nights and declared themselves forever neutral.

Having finished the mandatory history lesson, you now know pretty much all that’s worth knowing about Sweden – except what the beer situation is like. It’s really lucky that I’m writing this blog entry now and not 10 years ago, because back then it would have been summarized in a single word: simply awful. The sober ones amongst you may have realized that this was three words. Never mind. My point is: Sweden’s beer scene has actually improved massively, and can now be summarized in four words: not as awful as it used to be.

Sweden, like most countries, used to have loads of local and regional breweries that would output stuff suitable to quench the thirst of the local populace. The story continues as expected: as transport improved and capitalism started to bite, breweries got bought out by others, and the beer scene steadily converged on a handful of national brands, which then got bought out by the big international you-know-whos. The unusual thing about Sweden, though, is that the politicians decided to add a bureaucratic twist to the story by banning the sale of beers above a certain alcohol percentage from being sold in normal stores – more or less exactly what was done in Norway, too. The depressing thing about Sweden is that they set the limit at 3.5% instead of the Norwegian’s more sensible 4.7% - which means that all normal beer styles can no longer be sold in normal shops.

What followed was a disaster for people who like good beer. The 3.5% limit meant that all breweries focused on alcohol percentage rather than taste – the stuff in the normal shops was weak and undrinkable, whereas the stronger stuff sold in the state-controlled shops known as “Systembolaget” was, well, stronger – but still pretty much undrinkable, even though it at least did a decent job in getting you drunk. In fact, for many years Swedes would simply order "en stor stark", which translates as "a big strong", in this case meaning beer, completely without regard to which beer style or brewery was behind the alcoholic beverage that would subsequently appear in your glass. Luckily, the story does not end here. Slowly, but surely, the Systembolaget shops started to put foreign beers on the shelves, and discerning Swedes (and foreigners in Sweden) realized that there were other types of beer than just “weak” and “strong”.

Rewind forward a dozen years or so, and the Systembolaget stocks hundreds of imported beers as well as a reasonable selection of new Swedish beers made by recently established breweries keen to join the beer revolution. Since my arse is currently sat on a lovely Swedish wooden chair in the far-north city of Luleå, and since I have just had the pleasure of trying 3 of these Swedish beers, I thought I’d write an insanely long introduction before getting to the main point of this blog entry: beer.

Typical Swedish strong beer - nowadays brewed by Spendrup's

Oh, before I forget, since I may have been slightly unkind to Sweden at the beginning of this text, I will now try to balance this by saying that I find both the beer selection and the prices in the Systembolaget (conveniently situated around the corner from my hotel) excellent, especially seen with my Norwegian eyes. Both Norway and Sweden have a reputation for eye-wateringly high taxes on alcohol, but the beer is still about HALF the price in Swedish shops. This, of course, reminds me of the Great Scandinavian Beer Relay: Norwegians pop across the border to buy cheap Swedish beer, the Swedes pop across to Denmark to buy even cheaper beer, and the Danes to the same thing in Germany. I took the shortcut straight to Germany.

So what have I been drinking today to inspire such a wonderfully eloquent entry? Well, I started off with a St Eriks IPA. This brewery is situated in the wonderful capital of Sweden, Stockholm, a city worth visiting for many reasons, not least the chance of visiting the former pride of the Swedish navy, the Wasa, a ship so fantastic that it capsized in calm weather about 1300 metres (yes, metres - less than a mile for the lovers of imperial units) into its maiden voyage and then spent the next 300 years on the bottom of the sea before being salvaged and put into a rather magnificent museum. The St Eriks IPA certainly did not capsize, although I have to say that it didn’t massively impress either – good, but not great.

Next up was the Organic Ale from Sigtuna brewery. Sigtuna is a small town situated just outside Stockholm, and was apparently founded by the Vikings more than 1000 years ago. The brewery is considerably newer, having been founded in 2005. As it happens, their internet pages have just told me that this brewery shares its premises with St Erik. Oh well, I guess this might explain why this beer was also good, but not great. It’s a pleasant beer but without anything to set it apart from the bunch.

The final beer was from a brewery called “Oppigårds”, and the very promising label said “Thurbo Double IPA”. My expectations were unsurprisingly sky high, and in this case the beer did not disappoint. This was a hoppilicious beer, a bit like hopping on a hop field whilst chewing hop gum and being generally hoppy. In fact, I have already thought about immediately planning to write to them and suggest that they change the brewery name to “Hoppigårds”. If you’re now chuckling to yourself, rest assured that you have the same crappy sense of humour as the author, also known to myself simply as “I”.

OK, what’s the conclusion? Well, don’t go to Sweden just because of the beer. The same can be said about the food, the scenery, the weather and the skiing. However, Sweden is a bit like the Volvo – safe, without being terribly exciting. You might find that it’s the combination of many things that makes Sweden a worthwhile place to visit. That, and the Wasa ship. Imagine making one of the world's greatest museums out of your biggest, most embarrassing naval disaster. This alone is worth a trip, and when you’re in Stockholm you might as well drink a few tasty beers from the new breweries that have sprung up in the last decade or so. Have fun, and don’t forget to skål with the locals. Skål!

Back to Bavaria once again!

Every so often, when I travel around Germany for no, one or perhaps several good reasons, I come across strange little places that somehow stick out from the bunch. Most villages in Germany are actually pretty boring – they usually consist of a few well-kept houses clustered around a through road, with perhaps a church, a bakery and – if you’re really lucky – a pub to add a minor amount of interest. The two things that can make a German village leap from complete obscurity to a permanent place in my consciousness are a splendid name and the presence of a brewery.

Village names are usually forgotten as soon as you’ve cycled through, but since there are almost as many villages as there are people in Germany, some are bound to differentiate themselves by naming themselves a bit more adventurously. It could be argued that a handful have taken this too far – the village of “Fucking” situated on the German-Austrian border certainly have their fair share of people driving through with screwdrivers and angle cutters to purloin the signs. There are a few other ones that were no doubt named some time before English became the world language – my favourites, though, are the ones that don’t make sense in English (or any other language I know), but simply sound funny. Which brings me to the main topic of this blog post: beer.

I may have mentioned once or twice that I like beer and that Germany has both good beer and an amazing number of breweries. The fact that I, who likes beer, live in Germany and travel to Bavaria whenever I have the chance, is a happy coincidence. And so it came to pass that, for my lovely wife’s birthday weekend last week, I booked us a nice escape in, you guessed it, Bavaria. I managed to wrap the weekend present in fluffy things such as a gourmet meal, a race, a trip to the local spa/swimming complex and a bit of geocaching, all of which camouflaged the beer hunting agenda very nicely, except that I had made the somewhat obvious “mistake” of booking a hotel next to the local brewery, namely the Löwenbräu (incidentally a very boring brewery name) in Bad Wörishofen. The “bad” actually means “bath”, and was something just about every town that discovered some kind of natural spring decided to stick in front of their name to attract the hordes of tourists that seek to immerse their corpulent bodies in the allegedly healing qualities of the water. There are so many of these “Bad” towns nowadays that the humorous value of reading the name in English has completely faded, with the obvious exception of “Bad Kissingen”.

Another brewery we stumbled  upon

Anyway, having enjoyed a very expensive, fancy and incredibly gourmet meal on my wife’s actual birthday, I managed to convince her to sneak in a little nightcap half-litre in the brewery’s very pleasant and cosy bar. Fresh beer straight from the brewery seldom fails to hit the mark, and the very sturdy beers they had on tap both impressed – the Urtrunk was quite dark, malty and full-bodied whereas the Helles was also malty, but unsurprisingly a bit spicier and lighter.

The real jewel around Bad Wörishofen is a place about 10km away, though – and I’m talking about none other than the world not very famous village of……… DIRLEWANG. Now there’s a village name straight from the top drawer. I have no idea how they managed to come up with such a classic, but considering they also had the sense to reject closing the local brewery, I now officially declare the village of Dirlewang the best tiny place in Germany to visit for between 5 and 10 minutes, unless you’re not driving in which case you should stop for a few beers. As it happened, I was in a car, but I nevertheless stopped for 4 beers, which I requested to be surrounded by brown glass and sealed with a crown cap, a bit like a working class king if you see what I mean. Anyway, the brewery bar itself was an interesting place – probably refurbished sometime just after the Napoleonic Wars and populated by a bunch of geezers who were a smidgeon too young to have fought in them. The reception was friendly though, even though the local dialect can be a challenge, and I was allowed to take away said 4 beers for the princely price of €3.20, which I rounded up to €4 to ensure that the brewery remains profitable.

Why am I telling you all this? Mainly because I haven’t got anything else to say and that I have just tried one of the four beers, just to celebrate the end of yet another working day. And boy was the beer good, in fact even better quality than the work I did today, which wasn’t too bad either. A satisfyingly full body was livened by just the right amount of hoppy spiciness to ensure a pleasurable passage down my thirsty throat. The best news is that I still have two beers left from Dirlewang as well as a six-pack from a very nice brewery in Ottobeuren as well as a few more local ones that I picked up in a bottle shop. Feel free to pop by for a little tasting session.

A real Dirlewanger waiting to be consumed

All good things must come to an end, they say, and so it was with both the weekend in Bavaria, the bottle of beer from Dirlewang and this blog post. All that remains is to observe that the evening is dark and that the temperature is dropping. This, surely, means that winter is around the corner, and that the Christmas beer is sitting somewhere, maturing, and waiting to be wheeled into the shops and supermarkets, or – if you’re in Norway – the state-controlled monopoly outlets. The only benefit of this monopoly is that they’ve got a catalogue of all the beers you can supposedly buy there, so it makes it much easier to compose your Christmas wish list. In fact, perhaps I’ll just send the entire catalogue off to Santa Claus’ North Pole lair and hope he doesn’t drink it all before he delivers it down the chimney in time for the annual Christmas beer tasting. As they say amongst the Inuits up in that part of the world: Inuuhiqatsiaq!

Beer of Flying

I’ve been flying a lot lately. I like travelling, and end up jetting around quite a lot both for business and pleasure. I also like beer, as some of you may have gathered by now. How, then, do these two things go together? Are there hoppy pleasures to be had thirty thousand feet off the ground? These are questions I know most of you have been tempted to consider dying to ask, so I thought I’d share my experiences with you on this absolutely fascinating topic.

As with all serious subjects, a little historical background is a great way to waste a paragraph or two. Flying’s been around since some pre-historic birds first climbed up a convenient tree to fling themselves at the ground, and missed. However, it took a long time before humans developed wings – quite a few tried emulating the birds, but usually failed to miss hitting the ground in what was undoubtedly a very painful fashion, and so it wasn’t really until the Wright brothers combined two oversized ironing boards and a lawn mower on a beach in North Carolina in December 1903 that the concept of flying for humans really, and quite literally, took off. Humanity hasn’t looked back since, though quite often down.

The inflight service on the very first flight was probably quite limited, especially since it lasted less than a minute. Apparently, the first flight attendants appeared only about 30 years later, complete with a friendly smile and an appropriate amount of hard liquor to settle the nerves of the passengers, who back in those days had a relatively high chance of hitting the ground very hard and therefore regretting not taking the train. Luckily, the situation nowadays is very different – flying is just about the safest way to travel, so there’s absolutely no reason not to sit back, relax and enjoy a little luxury such as a fine brew or two, if only such pleasures had been widely available.

Those of you who have actually bothered to drag your arses to the nearest airport to board a sardine box that, in complete breach of most of the laws of physics, lifts itself from the ground and brings you relatively quickly (unless Icelandic Volcanoes are throwing some lava into the mix) to your preferred destination (unless you’ve made the classic mistake of boarding a plane to “Torquay” instead of “Turkey”, or “Dakar” instead of “Dhaka”), will know that (unless you’ve re-mortgaged your house to pay for business class) the stuff you get for free (or, more accurately, included) is, at best, very limited. In fact, many airlines won’t give you anything at all unless you pay extra through a nostril of your choice, though they usually accept credit cards. However, despite all this, most airlines do have at least one beer on offer.

A very common sight up there.

Unfortunately, the beer revolution that has resulted in an incredible increase in the number and styles of beers on offer in the average pub or supermarket has completely failed to lift off the ground. The average inflight trolley will contain a few cans of what is simply known as “beer”, whereas the wine buffs at least get to choose between “red” and “white”. To make matters worse, the “beer” on offer is typically one of the big industrial blands (sic), so if you fancy a “beer” with “taste”, you are probably out of luck. There are some exceptions though: the main airline in Switzerland, cunningly named “Swiss”, actually serves up quite a decent local beer from Appenzeller land (a rural Canton in the north-east for the many geography buffs among you), which – at least for people who like lager – has a nice hoppy taste. For the time being, Swiss is also one of the few airlines that will let you have a can or two without charging you for it. Not sure if this justifies always flying via Zurich regardless of where you want to go, but it’s clearly worth bearing in mind.

Quite a few cans of decent lager taking off.

Another airline that takes beer a little bit more seriously than most is good old British Airways. Last time I flew with BA, I actually had the choice of no fewer than FOUR beers, though since three of them were predictable global tasteless lagers, there wasn’t really much of a choice. The last one, though, was one of the fairly safe British bitters, namely London Pride. Never a truly great drinking experience, but hardly ever a disappointing one either, Pride for sure might just probably be perhaps the best beer you’re ever likely to get served in, on or above the clouds.

Having said that, a bit of internet research reveals that, mirroring the situation on the ground, North American airlines seem to provide both the worst and best beers in the sky. Some of the biggest airlines (which I have flown with), which I shall refrain from naming and shaming, stick to the old “making love in a canoe” ones, whereas at least a handful (including Alaska Airlines and Virgin America, neither of which I have been on) have started serving craft beers – a round of applause is merited, I think. I clearly need to travel more.

So who’s the winner? Which is the world’s best beerline? I can't decide, so I'm just going to say that it’s the train. It may be slower, but this simply means more time to savour your beer – and best of all, you can buy a couple of great beers and bring them on board with you. Apparently, it’s more environmentally friendly too, although getting to Canada, Australia and Japan from Europe on the train remains a bit of a challenge.

On this lofty note I shall end this informative and highly entertaining blog post, and wish you all a lovely autumn (or spring, should you read this from the southern hemisphere). My advice to you for the coming weeks until the next post appears is to drink beerfully, fly high, train hard and don’t worry – be hoppy. As they say in Finland: Kippis!

Try Trier!

Every year, exactly 7 weeks after the predictably unpredictable holiday we call Easter, occurs another, slightly shorter holiday, which in English is known as Whitsunday. In Germany and some other countries that like their days off, the Monday following more or less directly after Whitsunday is a public holiday. The main reason for this extra holiday, regardless of when it happens to show up in any given year, is to drink beer. Therefore, my wife and I headed off to one of the few cities in Germany where I hadn’t been, which also happens to be the oldest, namely Trier, mainly because it is one of the few that rhymes with Bier – which is German for beer. With such a cunningly clucked out plan, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, for starters I had booked the train to get there. Despite the Germans’ reputation for efficiency, their train system seems to be riddled with delays, which caused us to miss a connection, get re-routed through an entirely different region and arrive nine minutes late. As a result, all the beer drinking of the weekend was delayed by nine minutes, though I am not sure if this made a huge difference.

Trier was founded by the Romans, those dodgy wine-drinking folks that spread their forums, amphitheatres and hot baths around most of Europe before imploding in their own orgies. It is situated on the river Mosel, which meanders its way through vineyards and pretty towns, before emptying into the great river Rhine. Unsurprisingly, Trier has a lot of history, and also some pretty passable Roman ruins that you can enjoy looking at if you’re into that sort of thing.

The "Black Gate" (Porta Negra), Trier's most famous Roman building

The best thing about sight-seeing is that it makes you very thirsty, so it wasn’t long before we set off in search of the first Trier Bier. Always trying to increase our productivity by doing multiple things simultaneously, we were also busy pondering the following question: if you, like me, like to try beers, are you then a beer trier? Whilst mulling over this we observed something slightly odd: no matter where we looked – east, west, north, south, up, down, left, right or anywhere in between, the beer on offer was called Bitburger. This is a beer I’ve had many times before, as it is one of the biggest brands in Germany. There’s nothing wrong with it – it can, in fact, be quite good at times – but it wasn’t what I had arrived nine minutes late for. I was, of course, aware of the fact that the town of Bitburg, presumably named after the brewery, is situated only a couple of dozen kilometres from Trier, but I hadn’t quite expected such outrageous dominance. So, I gave in and order one. It was refreshing, quite tasty and in many respects acceptably local. However, I wanted more.

As it turned out, a 10-minute walk past the amphitheatre, my favourite people in Trier had founded my favourite place in Trier back in 1998 – the exquisite little brewery known as “Kraft Bräu”, where they not only brew their own beer, they also allowed me to drink as much of it as I liked. This fantastic combination was hard to resist, and given the lack of other choices in Trier I thought why not, give me the beer menu (they had two) and let’s get to work. Their standard beers were the same as most places in Germany: a light Helles, a dark Dunkles, and a wheat beer. These were all very good – unfiltered and refreshing, just right for everyday drinking, especially on a hot day (it was a hot day). Then they had their “special selection” – a pale ale, an IPA, an outrageous IPA and a pilsner. Combined with a lovely beer garden, perfect weather, superb food and a relaxed atmosphere, this place was so good that we just had to come back.

Fantastic brews from Trier's only remaining brewery

Another feature of Trier is its proximity to one of Europe’s most anonymous nations, namely Luxembourg. A small super-rich country which has seemingly never offended anyone, and therefore stays out of the news and most people’s consciousness. However, a country is a country and if I have the chance to drink a beer in it, I surely will. Thus, we rented bikes and set off on the lovely cycle path along the river until we crossed a bridge which also turned out to be the border. Gone were all the signs with “Bitburger” written on them, replaced by signs saying “Bofferding”. This mysterious-sounding beer turned out to be… very drinkable. And that’s just about all there is to say about Luxembourg, because after we finished our beers we caught what must be one of the shortest international ferry journeys in the world (sixty-seven and a half seconds) back to Germany, thus avoiding crossing the same bridge twice. The cycle ride back generated just enough thirst to warrant another visit to Kraft Bräu, where the beers turned out to be even better now that the weather was even hotter.

Luxembourg! The country is considerably bigger than the beer mat.

The last day in Trier, just before the train was due to leave, we noticed that there were loads of people drinking wine, and we also heard a rumour that the Mosel Valley is world famous for its wines. As this was the only thing you could drink in Trier not made by Bitburger, we decided to try some. Oh well, we all make mistakes sometimes.

Waiting for the international ferry (sadly no duty free onboard).

Since everything was nine minutes delayed due to our unfortunate late arrival, it came as no surprise that our return train was also nine minutes late. The unfortunate thing about this was that we then missed our connection to the only train that ran on time in Germany on this particular day. We then proceeded to make our way home on trains that, at some time or another, had every possible delay between 5 and 105 minutes. Needless to say, this was great fun, and we made inappropriate jokes about all the world’s train systems except the Swiss one (which we only made appropriate jokes about) until we arrived back home sometime in the middle of the night.

In conclusion, Trier was a nice and interesting place to visit, but the dominance of a single pilsner-only brewery makes it a little bit boring in this respect. However, if you search you will sometimes find, which applies to both geocaching and breweries – and so it came to pass that both the beer blogger and his wife found what they were looking for. A couple of weeks later, we completed an epic journey from Copenhagen to Karlsruhe by bike and beer, so check out this blog in a few weeks’ time and perhaps you'll be lucky enough to find a summery summary. Until then: Zum Skål!

Are you being serbed?

I don’t often get to add a whole new country to the rather long list of countries from which I have sampled one or more beers, and it’s a similar story when it comes to countries I have visited. Therefore, you can imagine my excitement when last week I got to add a country to each list – and not just any old country, but a relatively new one, namely Serbia.

Serbia, with its capital Belgrade, is one of the many countries in Europe with a rather unfortunate history. Dominated by either the Turks or the Austrians for centuries, the country was attacked, sacked, burnt down, rebuilt, reburnt and otherwise molested dozens of times all the way up until 1999, when (hopefully) the last bombs finally fell. Belgrade, meanwhile, went from being a Roman settlement through a fortified town and then on to become the capital of the rather substantial country I was used to seeing on the European maps of my childhood – Yugoslavia. Then bit after bit fell off, until today we’re left with a smallish landlocked country that roughly half the world think is about the size of Kosovo smaller than roughly the other half of the world.

Belgrade itself is a very interesting city, though you do get the feeling that it’s past its heyday – lots of buildings are crumbling and the pavement is anything but even. However, there’s also a vibe and a big bridge in the city that suggests it may be heading back towards former greatness, and what better place to start than to be the main topic of a blog post by the famous beer blogger? Which, incidentally, reminds me nicely that I need to move on to the main topic of this blog: beer.

Belgrade: interesting city, but more gritty than pretty.

I had, of course, done some homework on Belgrade before leaving, so I knew that it would be unwise to expect a huge variety of fantastic beers. However, being both an optimist and a strong believer that I am almost always lucky meant that I attacked the task of drinking my way through the Serbian beer selection with no small amount of enthusiasm. The first problem I encountered was actually buying the stuff – when I got to the supermarket, the selection was remarkably biased towards the big European brands you can buy almost everywhere – Staropramen, Carlsberg, Amstel and all the others you should always try to avoid. However, I managed to find a handful of beers that I thought looked sufficiently local, not least due to the label having cyrillic letters, and put them in the fridge in the small apartment we had rented.

The first two beers I tried were the “Niksicko Pivo” and the “Niksicko Tamno”, a pils and a dark beer, which I subsequently discovered were actually brewed in the Trebjesa brewery in…. Montenegro. Oh well, the beers weren’t that good and the brewery is, unsurprisingly, owned by one of the big bad guys, namely Molson Coors. So on went the quest for my first Serbian beer.

My first ever Serbian beer. It was crap.

Next up was a beer called “Lav”, which is a light industrial lager that made the unfortunate, but not uncommon mistake of insulting the beer blogger by tasting of next to nothing, though when I tried really hard I thought I detected a slightly unpleasant hint of metal. A quick look on the bottle confirmed my suspicion that the brand is owned by Carlsberg, but since it’s brewed in Serbia it was, and remains, the first beer I have ever tried from this country – sadly, it was rubbish.

Much better head and much more taste.

The next two beers were from a brewery in a small town called Valjevo. First down my throat was the “Bajbebcko Tufo”, which turned out to be the most interesting beer of the session – first and foremost it poured with a good head, and then it actually tasted of something. In fact, I thought I detected a hint of smoke on the palate, but it could just have been the cigarette smoke that was present all over Belgrade – not a city for people who can’t stand smokers, by the way. The second beer, called “Atlas Pils”, was therefore a huge disappointment – it tasted as if it was brewed with stuff that shouldn’t go into beer such as maize, rice or armchairs, though to be fair it was slightly better than Lav.

Could be worse - see above.

I didn’t find the final Serbian beer of the holiday until the next day – we had been walking around the very picturesque castle area, and stopped for refreshments at a café when I saw the brand “Jelen”. I wasted an infinitesimal amount of time before ordering a half litre, which duly arrived after a considerably longer waiting period. This draught beer was actually very pleasant - nice hops and a medium body complemented the sunshine and the rising temperatures perfectly. I later tried it in a bottle, where it wasn’t quite the same, and I also discovered that the brewery, called “Apatinska” and founded in 1756, is nowadays owned by – you guessed it – Molson Coors.

Sunshine and draft beer is seldom a bad combination.

Serbian beer was, in conclusion, a lot less interesting than the country itself. My advice is certainly to visit Belgrade some time, and if you fancy a half litre of your favourite tipple, then there are hundreds, if not thousands of bars that will happily take your order and charge you a remarkably small percentage of your holiday budget for the pleasure – roughly €1.50 seemed to be the going rate. So what Belgrade lacks in beer quality you could certainly make up for in quantity without necessarily breaking the bank, which incidentally was exactly what the river was doing as we visited, apparently due to four months’ worth of rain falling in two days just prior to our arrival.

So, go ahead and book your plane, train or bus ticket to Belgrade unless you happen to live there already, and spend a few days checking out this very lively and friendly place where old decommissioned Swiss trams still rumble around on rickety tracks and the floating bars on the river are heaving until the early hours. Most people are happy to speak English, but if you do fancy trying out the local language you could do worse than ordering a beer and shout “живели”, or “Ziveli”, which apparently means “let’s live long”, which surely is something worth drinking a non-fatal amount of beer to.