Union city booze

Slovenia has two megabrand industrial beers, both owned by Heineken these days though still brewed in separate locations. Laško is in the spa town of the same name, while Ljubljana has Union. The site is just outside the city centre and from a distance looks strikingly monolithic: two flat grey cubes. Beside this cower the remains of the older brewery, established on the site in 1864.

Union Svetlo is the flagship pale lager. I bought a small can from the supermarket, where a plethora of packaging options were on offer. It's 4.9% ABV, a pale gold colour and smells sugary, to the point of being sickly. That comes through in the flavour, where it's "balanced" by a harsh gastric acidity. This is stomach-curdling stuff in multiple ways at once. I was glad I only bought a small can, and even that -- served cold -- was hard work. So within 12 hours of drinking it I was queuing up at the brewery for a tour.

The taproom is shiny and new, very much the sort of thing you'll find in any large "brewery experience" worldwide. Locals do use it, however, and a few joined us in the beer garden as we awaited our guide. While there we drank Union Svetlo Nefiltrirano, the unfiltered version of the previous beer. It's the pale orange colour of a weissbier and tastes like one too, packed with banana and butane; a grain crispness being the only nod to cool fermentation. There's a certain refreshing lager quality here, but I think the base beer just isn't clean enough, turning estery and headachey by the end. I don't know why I thought it was going to be better.

There's also a dark version, Temno Nefiltrirano, not that I see the point of dark and filtered in the first place. There was no discernible haze in the cola-red liquid; held up to the light it seems crystalline, albeit dark. It smells of espresso, and slightly beefy too, like Bovril. The body is full and the flavour is sweet, giving an initial impression of chocolate muffin. A dry and burnt bite follows that. Beers like this usually have a liquorice bitterness and I had to look for it here, eventually finding a mild tang buried under the sugar. Overall, not a bad example of central European dark lager but hardly a classic.

The tour itself is thorough to say the least. Yes there's the flashy audio-visual stuff, and the rooms full of old bottles and antiquated brewing equipment, but towards the end it brings you into the modern brewhouse where a three-storey-tall kettle of pale lager was boiling away angrily, and then to the packaging plant to see how a responsible brewery washes and refills returned bottles. Nobody mentioned "passion" even once.

To begin with, they gave their alcohol-free Elderflower Radler. Well, it sounded interesting. It transpired to be a very sweet affair, sticky with it, and tasting more like blueberry jam than anything else. It wasn't even particularly refreshing, just jarringly sugary.

Union also does a Grapefruit Radler, one with a bit of alcohol -- 2% ABV. I caught up with it a few days later as we were leaving the country. The aroma here is very promising: a eye-watering spritz of really real grapefruit. I thought I was in for a tart delight... but no. They must have shovelled boatloads of sugar into this one too as the end result is very sweet, dropping the acidity in favour of a lemonade thing. Grapefruit flavour sulks back on to the palate at the end, but still buzzing with syrupy sweetness. As industrial radlers go, this is par for the course and perfectly refreshing. Aroma aside, no special prizes here. Was Union going to throw anything worthwhile at me?

Back at the brewery, the taproom had three shots at redemption: three beers, exclusive to the venue, and at least some of them recreations of old recipes otherwise abandoned. First out was Union Amber, a copper coloured lager at 5.4% ABV. This had a lot in common with Irish red ale, being sweet and biscuity, though dry as well: a mixture of coffee grounds and oat cookies. It's wholesome and rustic in a way one does not associate with Heineken, though rather dull as well. Next!

The tall handsome dark beer here is Union Bok. This is another lager and 7% ABV, so could perhaps be considered in the doppelbock style. Mind you, the murkiness suggests dubbel to me. There's a strong chocolate aroma and quite a portery flavour to match that: mild roast with an air of mocha. While satisfyingly dense, it stays clean, never becoming too sweet. Tastewise it doesn't belong to any family of bock that I recognise, but it is quite nice.

Finally comes Triglav, this one definitely an old brewery recipe and of no particular style, just strong: 9% ABV. Though allegedly yet another cold-fermented one, it has a lot in common with Belgian tripel, from the pale orange colour to the tight white foam, to the mixture of heat and spices. Coriander and orange peel have been used in the recipe and both make positive contributions to the taste. When the initial herbal rush fades there's a mellow buzz of peach fuzz and melon rind. Despite the whopping strength it stays cool and refreshing, and another would have been lovely but it was time to move on.

Perhaps that's the real draw of the Union visitor centre: it pours the only really good beer they make. And several others.

Before we move back to the smaller breweries, a quick look at a handful from Union's sister brewery Laško. I had Laško Weissbier at the island café on picturesque Lake Bled. It's pretty much bang on for the Bavarian style, albeit on the pale side. There's a full and fluffy body topped with a handsome pile of foam. The flavour adds a bite of greenness to its sweet and smooth banana. An unexciting example of an unexciting style, perhaps, but it delivers what anyone might want from it.

Now here's an interesting experiment. Heineken has taken the flagship Laško lager (reviewed back here) and added copious doses of the national hop, Styrian Goldings. Please be upstanding for Laško Golding. It's... better than bog standard Laško Zlatorog: crisper, cleaner, more like a proper lager and less like plasticky lowest-common-denominator industrial fizz. That it's not simply plain Laško with a hop change is evident from the ABV going up from 4.9% to 5.4%. I don't get any especially strident hop flavours here, but it's a damn decent lager and were I in the habit of buying tins in a Slovenian supermarket I might make this my go-to. Your regular reminder that the industrials can make decent beer; they mostly just choose not to.

As well as the Grapefruit Radler described above, I also had a can of Laško IPA on the train onwards. The cream and green branding here bears a strong resemblance to the Guinness one. "100% Slovenian hops" exclaims the can, like that's a good thing. It is indeed very Fuggley, with an almost acrid marmalade-shred bitterness and earthy coconut husk. This is set on quite a sickly malt base. Even at a reasonable 5.2% ABV it makes for tough drinking, and I think that's only partly because of my personal difficulties with Styrian Goldings. Maybe it's the branding, but this has a lot of the same problems as that sickly stuffy Guinness Nitro IPA.

A final wrap-up of Ljubljana, and more train beer, to come in tomorrow's post.