The men in white coats

At the last Copenhagen meeting in 2012, Carlsberg hosted one session of the EBCU's autumn gathering. For the return visit in 2018 the vast former brewery complex was all but unrecognisable, with almost every spare plot of land currently being redeveloped as part of the city's "Carlsberg Quarter". The Jacobsen microbrewery is still going in the middle of it all and that's where the company treated us to lunch.

With that came a couple of Jacobsen beers I'd never tried before, beginning with Jacobsen Extra Pilsner. Despite the name it's even less like a pilsner than most beers bearing the label. Thickly textured, it has a powerful candy sweetness running in parallel with a liquorice bitterness, plus some cinnamon spicing and a hint of red apples. Does that sound like a pils to you? It's only 5.5% ABV too, but tastes bigger and hotter, and not in a good way. I'd have been properly disappointed if I'd ordered this based on the name.

Jacobsen Pale Ale came with it, one made with orange peel. It's a dark gold colour, and a whopping 6.4% ABV. The base is lager-clean and a powerful bitterness is built upon it: wax, plus a hard citrus of lime and bergamot. A touch of nondescript spice, possibly from the peel, adds a tiny level of complexity, but mostly this is about that palate-punching hop acidity. It's certainly not bland and corporate, but at the same time it's a tough one to enjoy.

Did you know Grimbergen was owned by Carlsberg? A lot of us at the lunch didn't. The Belgian brand was owned by Alken-Maes, itself a part of Scottish & Newcastle until 2008 when that portfolio was divided up. Most of Alken-Maes went to Heineken but Carlsberg got Grimbergen for some reason. They served us Double Ambrée with dessert, a super sweet and sticky dubbel-ish, full of raisin, toffee and chocolate flavours, despite being only 6.5% ABV. A couple of sips of this was plenty and had me hankering after the clean profile of the Jacobsens.

In the evening we were granted a backstage look at the Carlsberg Laboratory, a vast institute which continues the scientific research for which Carlsberg has long been known. Our guide, the charismatic Zoran Gojkovic, hosted a short tasting at the end, to illustrate some of the experimental work they do. One beer presented was Carlsberg Red Lager, which has been around a while but never released commercially as far as I'm aware. This looked and tasted to me something like a berry-infused Berliner weisse, bright pink with a touch of yoghurt in the aroma and notes of blackberry and loganberry in the flavour. The trick? It's all malt with no additives. They use a highly unusual strain of red barley and ferment it to include an exceedingly high level of diacetyl. The end result is surprisingly good, a kind of fruit beer convergent evolution.

I wrote about Carlsberg's Rebrew project back in 2016. One of the long-term spin-offs from that experiment was Carlsberg 1883, a new mass market dark lager. I took one to drink on the train back to the city centre which means I didn't get to look at it, but it tasted properly dark, centred on caramel with an added complexity of herbs, and especially aniseed. It's a little thick and sticky but clean, and I liked its comforting old-fashioned vibe. I also like that Carlsberg has put something like this out in the beery mainstream.

That's all I have from that visit but I'm going to throw in an addendum from shortly after I got home. Diageo reps for Carlsberg in Ireland and earlier this year they launched Carlsberg Unfiltered into the market. I didn't see any of this in Denmark, and reading around it seems to be confined so far to Ireland, the UK and Sweden. I'd been meaning to give it a spin but before I could buy one I got invited to the opening of a dedicated Carlsberg Unliftered bar operating behind The Bernard Shaw for the run-up to Christmas.

This stuff is 4.2% ABV and a bright hazy orange, as one might expect. And for all that it's a big-beer product, it really does show the features of proper real kellerbier or Czech nefiltrovaný. There's the extra smoothness in the texture, and a lightly spicy complexity. I went in sceptical and came out convinced. Yet another example of a macrobrewery (two if you include Diageo's involvement) offering a lager of genuine quality as part of their mainstream portfolio.

We're not quite done with the Danish giant yet, however. Consider tomorrow's post as a sort of DVD extra on the Copenhagen trip, possibly a blooper reel...

Zoran in the Carlsberg Laboratory, minus white coat