Playing away from home

Where to this time?

Four years ago Charita and I had our first winter holiday. We spent a week in Budapest and I discovered a back street bottle shop called Csak a jo sor! (not just good beer), which had a tap room and a couple of tables for punters to sit and drink. They had a very nice malty ale on tap, and fridges full of mostly imported beers. I found three local brews to take home with me.

Having thus discovered that trips to Europe were cheaper at that time of year and that the weather – in Hungary, at least - was equable, it became a tradition. This year we headed to Iceland. You will find my report on the trip later in this blog.

Our most memorable winter holiday wasn’t in November but in February last year when we visited first Prague then Berlin. In Prague we took in the Prague Beer Museum (not a museum!). That’s me in the picture above, with a sampling tray. On our second evening in Berlin I decided that we should trek out to the Hops and Barley, a brew pub in deepest Friedrichshain.

Charita is, on the whole, fairly tolerant of my hobby. She’s not really a beer drinker although she does like the occasional wheat beer or a pilsner, as long as it’s not too strong. What she is less tolerant of is my rather vague sense of direction. Sadly, GPS tracking and Google maps have not really made me any more able to find my way around places so to attempt to find a well-hidden bar, in the middle of a part of Berlin that neither of us knew, at night, maybe wasn’t the smartest of moves. Getting a taxi didn’t help either as our driver had never heard of the Hops and Barley.

But we did find it. It was a funky little bar, crowded with hipsters, soccer on the TV and an excellent IPA on draft. And, as you can see from the picture, once she was there Charita really enjoyed the evening J !

Mine’s no longer a pint

One of the unexpected consequences of my adoption of craft beer has been that I no longer automatically order pints when I visit bars. One reason for the change is that I’m often drinking keg brews. These are always served colder than cask so I don’t tend gulp the way I would a warmer beer. Also, I’m often savouring the subtleties of whichever beer is in the glass.

Although I’ve been a keen beer fan for most of my adult life I’ve never been a heavy drinker. Nights out “with the lads” have been rare. Nonetheless, I used to feel uncomfortable ordering just a half, even after having a couple of full pints. I can remember the days when I was able to take an empty pint glass to the bar, ask for a half and expect it to be pulled into the empty vessel. Invariably what I would get was more than half a pint. Those days are long gone. Now, if I want to avoid the embarrassment of drinking from a half pint glass, I have to leave my nearly-finished pint with a small amount of beer in it, order a half and then pour it in the nearly empty glass. Et voilà - glass more than half full!

The first challenge to my obsession with the pint happened when I went in one of Brighton’s growing number of craft beer bars and was told that, as well as the usual halves and pints, I could also order a schooner. This was baffling to me. I had come across schooner glasses before but they had contained large measures of sherry. These were now being used to serve beer? What was the world coming to?

But since I do favour the stronger brews, and since those beverages cost more than their lower gravity equivalent, I slowly began to see the value of the schooner, which holds two thirds of a pint. Because of the lower temperature I find that it takes me the same amount of time to drink a schooner as it would to knock back a pint.

Now that the hegemony of the large measure has been broken I find that I welcome the variety of options available. Cask is generally still only available in pints and halves but keg can usually be had in thirds, halves, schooners and pints. If I decide I want to sample a number of different ales and especially if these brews are strong in alcohol I now find that I can consume several thirds and still operate machinery afterwards!

Beer styles – rewriting history

It’s not that long ago that the cask beers in most pubs that I visited were either bitter, best bitter or mild. Exotic beers were the handful of old or winter ales that would start to appear in late October. There were a few bottled beers that passed the CAMRA test but the adventurous beer drinker was only really catered for by the importers of Belgian beers like Chimay, Duval, Westmalle and the abbey brews.

The first beer that I came across that appeared to break the mould was Hopback Summer Lightning. In the early 90s I was living in Forest Hill in South London and my local was a Wetherspoons pub. Unusually for the chain it was a small snug boozer called the Bird in Hand and every Saturday afternoon I would pop in with my mate Steve and while he drank Guinness I would have two or three pints of this wonderful brew.

I only recently discovered that Summer Lightning is considered to be a golden ale. I don’t remember the term being used at the time. I thought it was a pale ale. It didn’t taste like a strong beer but it was sweet and I knew very well that sweet beers were often potent. That explains why I would often fall asleep halfway through the football results.

Five or six years later I was living in Chiswick, just a stone’s throw away from the Fullers brewery. My favourite pub there was the Bell and Crown, a plush comfortable boozer perched right on the Thames. You could see Oliver’s Island, now the name of a low gravity Fullers ale, from the window. Round about this time the brewery introduced a fabulous ale which has not, in my view, been given its due: Honeydew. A light spring ale, it had a sweetish edge suggesting that honey had indeed been used in the brew. I didn’t know it at the time but this was a harbinger of things to come.

Jump forward nearly twenty years and the proliferation of beer styles, and the additional flavours, is bewildering. Much of the change has been driven by the curiosity of small American brewers. Indeed it’s they who were largely responsible for the revival and now pre-eminence of the IPA style. We can also lay the revival of stout and porter at their door, not to mention the use of coffee, spices and soft fruit in the mash, producing astonishingly rich beers like Kissingate’s Murder of Crows, an imperial stout so good that all others should bow down in its presence. And let’s not forget the influence, much longer in terms of time, of the Low Countries. There are now nearly as many saison beers – brewed originally to refresh farm workers – as there are IPAs.

I could go on – sour beers, smoked beers, wheat beers, bocks, dubbels, pilsners – but I have ales to drink. And they’re all different!

The Golden Circle of bars – craft beer in Iceland

Usually, whenever Charita and I go on holiday anywhere, we come home raving about some aspect of the holiday – the food, the scenery, the culture, the beaches (that would be her, not me). I think Iceland may be the first place we have visited where the first thing we talked about upon return was a negative. Iceland is the most expensive place that either of us have visited, so expensive at times that the positives, and there were plenty, seemed to get overwhelmed by the negatives. These mostly affected our bank accounts. One undoubted plus – for me at least - was the beer.

When we went out to explore Reykjavik on our first afternoon there, the first place we stopped at was an unpromisingly named bar in main street Laugavegur. Called The Public House, it had a beer list of 25 different brews. I chose Mikkeller’s Brett IPA, which was pleasant if unexceptional. The next day we had perhaps the only meal of the trip that was both tasty and reasonably priced. Icelandic Fish and Chips is within fillet-chucking distance of the harbour. My haddock and fried potatoes were accompanied by an excellent IPA (Nr. 3: Ulfur) from the island’s Borg brewery. When I commented favourably on it our waiter replied

“We are the craft beer town.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Two nights later I headed back to the harbour for a beer tasting at Bryggian Brugghus. You can probably work out what a brugghus is. The first thing that I noticed as I walked in was how big the place was. It’s on an unremarkable road that’s starting to show serious signs of gentrification. The brugghus is an ambitious venture. Not only do they brew their own beer, they have an impressive restaurant-standard menu, a sizeable space for live music and they’ve only been open for two years. Unsurprisingly they were busy when I arrived, at 6 in the evening, and more so when I left.

The beers were matched with tapas-size servings of dishes from their menu and comprised a pilsner, a session IPA, pale ale, IPA, spiced ale and a Belgian style dubbel. I was disappointed that there were no really dark beers included but all six that we sampled were good, with the IPA and session IPA the pick. When we were given a tour of the brewhouse itself, Candy, our host and the bar manager, explained that the Icelandic climate does not encourage the growth of hops. Theirs are imported from both the USA and UK. On the evidence of the tasting the American hops are in the ascendancy.

On my way back to our accommodation I stopped off at the Micro, a basement bar not far from the town centre. Of all the bars I tried on the trip this was the least appealing in terms of ambience. The furniture looked as if it had been recovered from a skip and the clientele, although not entirely male, did not fit the profile of the average craft beer joint in the UK. It felt very blokey. Still, I couldn’t fault the beer. It was a rich, chocolatey porter from Olvisholt definitely the best beer of the night.

My next boozy night took in the other two bars that my online research had suggested I should try: Skuli Craft Bar and Mikkeller and Friends. Skuli had been described in one guide as hard to find. It wasn’t. It was in a side road, close to the main drag and had a prominent, albeit handwritten, sign pointing to it. I’m glad I did find it because it was hands-down the best bar of the trip.

True, the music was a little on the loud side and was aimed more at Led Zepellin fans than anything more mainstream. The smallish bar had the vibe of a British micropub and the staff were friendly and knowledgeable. One thing I did notice here, repeated at Mikkeller and Friends, was their policy of serving their beers in a variety of measures, usually linked to the strength of the brew. Hence the terrific imperial stout that I sampled – again from Borg – was served in a 200ml glass. Amusingly, it resembled a prosecco glass (see picture below) but happily the beer wasn’t fizzy. I also had a decent IPA from Ide which had the splendid name Vinir Vors og Yllibloma.

The craft beer scene in Iceland seems to have developed with astonishing speed and, lest you weren’t aware, it’s only thirty years since alcohol was made legal in Iceland! Things have lately begun to accelerate with many of the bars specialising in craft opening two years ago or less. There are still restrictions though – Bryggian are not allowed to sell their beers anywhere other than from their own premises and you won’t find craft ales in supermarket. For that you have to visit one of the government-owned off licences called Vinbudin.

If you want to read more about the Iceland scene there’s an excellent interview by Stephen Ngo with Vikingur Kristjansson, the General Manager at Skuli, on the Bevspot website. And if you do decide to visit Iceland our advice is : book a long weekend, do the Golden Circle tour, have a soak in the Blue Lagoon and then have a few craft ales at Skuli.

Skål!

Pictures
Where they were taken and where they came from. Photos by the author or his lovely wife*

1. Prague Beer Museum
2. Hops and Barley, Berlin
3. Bison Craft House, Hove
4. Chez nous – Blood Eagle, a blood orange and pink grapefruit pale ale, is from Brew York, a collaborative brew with Alex Fionda, winner of Untapp’d’s 2017 Design a Beer competition.
5. Icelandic Fish and Chips, Reykjavik
6 and 7. Skuli Craft Bar, Reykjavik

*And speaking of my lovely wife, Charita, you may know her as Momma Cherri. She no longer has a restaurant but she does have a new website and a brilliant YouTube channel. Live recipes like you've never seen them!