All the way up

There's always a good showing from the nordics at Borefts, confirming that region as an instigator and driving force of interesting beer in Europe. As one would expect, the 2018 iteration of the festival featured some old hands and a few newcomers.

Närke, for instance, haven't missed a Borefts yet, as far as I've seen. A lot of their offer gets repeated but there's often something new. This year that was Husings Skogs-Porter, literally a "forest porter". It's foresty all right: the label mentions spruce, birch, alder, juniper and honey. Despite this it's still a porter all the way through, built on a solid base of milk chocolate, the 7.9% ABV giving it a good foundation. All the fancy ingredients amount to little more than a sticky raisin and blackberry combination. This is offset by a berry tartness but it still tastes like a cake. I'd have liked some more exotic and unusual flavours, yet there's nothing wrong with a porter that tastes a bit like Black Forest gateau. Add more cherries next time.

Iceland made its Borefts début with beers from Borg brewery. Snorri No. 10 caught my eye in particular, described as a herb ale and 5.3% ABV. Arctic thyme is apparently the key ingredient. It's a hazy gold colour with an aroma which calls to mind homemade lemonade and herbed summer cocktails. The flavour is appropriately fresh and zingy: a sweet sugary base but with overtones of citrus zest, white pepper and assorted garden herbs. This is fun and refreshing while also being intellectually interesting in the way the flavours combine and contrast.

From the selection of Borg stouts I picked Garún as the one I hadn't had before. There's no mistaking the 11.5% ABV here: it's very heavily textured, the flavour being a bitter and sticky mix of toffee, liquorice and very strong ristretto coffee. While this is an absolute pounder, it has subtleties too. The flavours are strong, but they're comforting, making it an ideal winter sipper.

The Norwegian beers came courtesy of Klostergården, German and all that it sounds. Their Mint Saison intrigued me: it's not a combination I'd seen before. This turned out to be rather plain fare. Not even a hint of mint comes through to the taste, just vague herbs and an unpleasant rubber note.

Its companion goes by the cheery name of Herbie, a beer brewed for the festival with the nine ingredients specified by De Molen plus one extra of the brewery's choosing. Don't ask me to list them. What they came up with was an unhopped job, fermented with kveik yeast. It's a wan orange colour with a powerful farmyard aroma and then a flavour that is at once candy-sweet and heavily phenolic, strongly implying that peated malt has been employed. There's no smoothness or nuance or blended elements here and the whole thing is just a bit nasty. A failed experiment, I reckon.

Moving from Norway to Sweden, I stopped in my tracks when passing the Beerbliotek stand and seeing their orange-peel-infused black IPA Shakes Fist Angrily: the perfect beer for a certain sort of online beer commentator. It's a stonking 9.5% ABV and looks like a lovely creamy stout in the glass: purest obsidian with a tan-tinted head. Fresh and crunchy red cabbage comes out in the aroma while the flavour is sweet with lots of milk chocolate, laced with candied orange peel. A mild hop acridity finishes it off. There's a classy linear progression through the flavours with each mouthful, none of them building to dominate and with no alcohol harshness. This is smooth, balanced, easy-drinking, and probably very dangerous in larger measures. Hence the name, I guess.

I assume there's some sort of protocol to the 2004 accession treaty that says beer from Estonia's Põhjala Brewery must be present at a certain proportion of international beer festivals in Europe, because they really do get about. The only one of their Borefts range I tried was Leevike, described in the programme as a "spiced winter sour" with honey, cinnamon, hibiscus, and clove. It's a murky ochre colour, and the honey and cinnamon form the aroma: so far, so wintery. Warming cinnamon is most of the flavour but it's not laid on too thick. The texture is light and sparkly despite 6.5% ABV. The baseline sweetness is probably the honey again, and while it's not as complex as the ingredients list implies, it is pleasant and jolly.

My Estonian beer horizons were expanded by the presence of Sori, from whom I tried two beers. Vinum Secale is, as the name explicitly states, a rye wine: 10.1% ABV and a dark chestnut red. It tastes... oily: herbal like retsina with the same juicy red grape and then overtones of eucalyptus and coconut oil. Smooth and a little boozy, it's very sippable and ponderable. This is an unusual beer and one not to be rushed.

I returned to Sori much later for an even stronger beer: Conca d'Oro, This is a wine-barrel-aged imperial stout of 11% ABV. The base beer here is very plain and it lacks the basic profile of a stout. The barrel goes some way to make up for that, throwing out unadulterated grape juice, sweet raisin and plum and a fortified port booziness. Bitter herbs add to the complexity, giving it a pipe tobacco aroma and a finish like Fernet Stock. It's all rather delightful overall and a great finisher for the evening and this post. Sori is a brewer to look out for, it seems.

More from elsewhere tomorrow.