Holed up and shipping out

L: Cum Grano Salis, R: Jasmine IPA

My final post from former Yugoslavia wraps up Ljubljana with the hotel and more train beers.

But before that, an Irish bar. It's not that we were desperate for a pint of Kilkenny or anything: the beer list at Patrick's warranted a closer look so down the stairs we went. I had Cum Grano Salis, a gose of course, from Reservoir Dogs. It's pale yellow and has a distinctly saline aroma. The flavour goes all-out with the hops, delivering a refreshing citrus spritz up front, rendered more serious by full-on lemon sourness and a certain peppery spice. It is a little watery for 4.7% ABV, but maybe that's part of how it's been designed to quench. Overall it's fun and easy-going; not much to think about but plenty to enjoy.

The other beer is, oddly, Canadian: a Jasmine IPA from Steamworks in British Columbia. This looks similar but is hazier. Somehow it manages to smell both sickly and savoury, much weightier than 6.5% ABV implies. I'm guessing it's the jasmine, however it was added, that gives it a weird herbal tea vibe, part hibiscus tea, part ill-advised aperitif liqueur. I found it curdling in my stomach and was very glad to be merely sipping someone else's. The combination of flavours here just doesn't work at all.

Retreating to the hotel room, one of the surprisingly few black lagers I drank on the trip was Castra Dark. It's very plain fare, hellbent on a dry burnt toast effect with none of the sweeter nuance, nor any hop-derived complexity. It's OK, I guess: clean and sufficiently lagerlike. A more pleasant, stoutish, creamy texture forms as it warms and flattens, though it never loses the palate-scorching dryness. While it's perfectly drinkable, I doubt it'll convince anyone of the multifaceted wonders of this style, however.

Omnivar Holiday Hog is an imperial stout, and a big one at 11.5% ABV. The texture is remarkably thin for that, and the busy fizz was the first impression it gave me. The flavour is very decent, though: rich mocha, a touch of wafer biscuit or waffle coated in chocolate sauce. Maybe it's just the name but I thought I detected a hint of cinnamon or similar Christmas spice by way of background complexity. Regardless, this is a solid half-litre of big stout.

The same brewery's Dubbel Date is a dubbel, with dates in it. See what they did there? Though a moderate 7.6% ABV it's deliciously warming and avoids the marker-pen solvent heat brewers who aren't dubbel specialists sometimes create by mistake. All the items one turns to this style for are present: the raisin, plum and fig. Nothing I recognised as date, mind. There's a distinctive dryness to it too, making it taste more like a tea brack than the more typical Christmas cake. The busy flavours mean a half litre may be too much for a single serve; it depends what you're up for.

I raved about Barut's Summer Snow Berliner weisse on Wednesday. A bottle of their Space Goat Brettanomyces IPA was more challenging. It's 6.7% ABV and a pale hazy orange colour. The aroma is very funky: a concentrated Orval vibe. On tasting the first thing to come through is a bleachy twang which I think is all part of the beer's Brett experience but which didn't endear it to me. There are gentler flavours behind it: squishy ripe apricot, a buzz of orange sherbet and some more serious sweaty-horse funk. So, plenty going on then, but is it nice? On balance, I'm saying no. The later flavours are lovely, but the foretaste is just too harsh and it's hard to enjoy anything after that. It's thin too, and for an alleged IPA there just isn't enough hop character. Some subtle refinement would be appreciated.

I approached Crazy Duck's Ugly Duckling oatmeal stout with caution. Some dregs had congealed on the neck of the bottle and the cap was bowing upward, A gusher was anticipated, and so it proved, though thankfully not dramatically. In the glass it's a shiny and even black with a lasting head of old ivory. The ABV is 5.7%. First tasting brings the sour cherry tang of attenuation gone a little too far. While not unpleasant, it's not rich and smooth as one would expect from an oatmeal stout, and I suspect it was meant to be. This is rough and uncontrolled, like wonky homebrew. There was no rush back to the shop to pick up more Crazy Duck beers.

Loo-Blah-Nah brewery, I assume, takes its name from the capital's pronunciation. I picked up the American IPA in a supermarket where it was cooking on warm shelves. It still smelled fresh, however: spritzy grapefruit with softer melon and mango. While quite a pale yellow, it has lots of foam, but that's not indicative of bottle-conditioning gone wrong. The flavour is clean, with a blend of tropical fruit in the ascendant: cantaloupe, mango and pineapple were the first I noticed, and there were others I won't list. "Tropical" will suffice. There's a drier finish with the bitterness of peach skin. That helps make it very easy drinking, given the sizeable 5.9% ABV. This was a highly enjoyable half litre.

Maister brewery has a porter with the attractive name of Noordung. A full 6% ABV, it appears even stronger, glooping stickily out of the bottle like an imperial stout and forming a dark tan head, albeit briefly. The aroma is an alluring mix of black peppercorns and rosewater. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of chocolate in the flavour: smooth and rich and dark, like churro sauce. There's a lactic quality to this, adding to the luxurious density. The floral notes so prominent in the aroma arrive late, while the very finish is a slightly disappointing carbonic dryness, but one entirely in keeping with the style. I have absolutely no complaints about this beer; it delivers all that's promised and quite a bit more.

Pronunciation fans will be all over Põhjala's Öö Baltic porter. It's incredibly thick and tarry; moreso than one might expect at a mere 10.5% ABV. There's a strong smoked element to the intense flavour, and buckets of very dark chocolate. Though the volume is turned up and feedback is blaring, it's still possible to taste the basic features of Baltic porter: an old-fashioned liquorice bitterness and plenty of burnt toast. Maybe it's a little too extreme, though. The best of these are balanced and quite easy to drink; this one is deliberately trying to be bigger, better, faster, more but it does nothing to improve the format.

As a palate cleanser, from the brightly-coloured macrobrewery cans in the supermarket, Jelen: the house beer of Serbia. Though relatively light at 4.6% ABV this is very full and cottony in the mouth. The flavour is just as unnatural as the texture: twangy zinc, sticky syrup and a weedpatch greenness which suggests a Germanic origin of whatever hop extract or substitute they've used. By the standards of big industrial lager, this is rough. One could pass that off as "character" -- and it's certainly a distinctive combination -- but there's a lack of the subtleties of good lager here, tasting exactly like a megabrewer trying to create a quality product on the cheap.

On the afternoon of departure there was just time for a swift one at the hotel bar. I had my first and only Mali Grad beer: Black Magic Woman, described as an India black ale. It's actually a coppery auburn colour, and with the thinness of colour comes a thinness of texture, definitely not befitting 6% ABV. The flavour is quite washed-out too -- dry roast in the ascendant and a vague, hard to pin down, floral hop taste. All that fades quickly leaving just a tinny rasp on the back of the tongue. It's clean and unchallenging, I guess, but there's no way to sugarcoat the basic lack of character.

And for herself, Baja, an oatmeal stout from Bevog. This was darker, but still brown, and has an odd beef Bovril aroma. On tasting, the meatiness remains, joined by the cooked-cereal oatmeal to create a sort of black pudding quality. I like black pudding, but not in beer. A strong herbal bitterness adds a little to the sausage effect, and there's more disturbing Slavic aperitif liqueur as well. It is smooth, so that's one oatmeal stout goal achieved, but overall it's too busy and too weird for me.

Finally, while trundling over the mountains towards Italy: Green Gold's Mars Colony. This is a pale ale with (per the can) oats and (per my palate) oodles of Sorachi Ace. I get a crazy bang of coconut from the start and all the way through. Even the acidic napalm burn on the finish has a tikki buzz about it. The ABV is a biggish 5% and it's amber coloured, that heavy malt giving it a thickness which accentuates those hops even more. It's a little one-dimensional, perhaps, but tremendous fun for those of us who like our Sorachi unsubtle

And with the Adriatic sparkling in the distance, the next phase of the trip was ready to begin...