The nationals

My last three posts covered what I saw of the craft scene on my visit to Bulgaria, and I make no attempt to define what I mean by "craft" there: Bulgaria has a fairly clear line between the small producers making IPAs, stouts, sour fruited beers and the like, and the industrial multinationals who do pale lager and very little else. I'm always interested in how the macro game plays out in any country, and so drank quite a bit of this beer, both by choice and by default when nothing better was available.

I guess the national flagship is Kamenitza: it is at least the beer I saw most often. The history of this one (they claim) goes back to 1881 in Plovdiv, though production now happens in the nearby town of Haskovo. It's one of the StarBev family of brands across central and eastern Europe, initially acquired by AB InBev at the fall of communism but now part of Molson Coors. As a national flagship goes, it's not a bad one: 4.4% ABV and pretty much as clean and dry as you would like. Inoffensive, but not dull, with a soft and bready texture and little sign of cheapness or cut corners. I got a very slight solvent note from one pour as it warmed in the afternoon sun, but I blame myself for that. It's usually about €3 for a half litre so is not meant for sitting over. 

StarBev's second brand is Astika, which I drank on the epic journey from Burgas back west to Sofia. This is lighter than most, at 3.8% ABV, and seems to be brewed to a price point that's displayed on the can. For all that, it's fine: crisp and clean when cold, with merely a tiny buzz of bitterness from what I'm guessing is hop extract. As it warms, which this one did in a non-airconditioned train carriage on a 30°C day, a note of pear creeps in, but it doesn't get unpleasantly estery the way some beers of this sort do. The price-conscious Bulgarian lager drinker is well-served here.

Occupying, I'm guessing, a place between the two in the StarBev portfolio is Burgasko. The branding here leans in to Burgas's location on the Black Sea, and the jumping off point for the many holiday resorts along the nearby coast. A sunbather adorns the can and, maybe I'm just the suggestible sort, but the beer seemed well designed for that context, being very light, very pale, very refreshing, but tasting of almost exactly nothing, just fizz. No need to worry about the beer losing character when served chilled to the maximum: there's nothing in here to be lost. Beach-resort drinking did not feature on my trip at any point, but if it had, I wouldn't have objected to this being the cheap local lager for it.

Naturally, Heineken has stuck its oar in for a piece of the pie, and their most ubiquitous brand is Zagorka. I had two pints of this, and slightly different experiences with them. At the hotel bar in central Sofia it seemed either poorly-made or very tired, with notes of disinfectant and metallic aspirin. But it was much better in the airport hotel on the way out, for a given value of better. It's quite surprising how plain and characterless it is for a 5% ABV lager: you might have thought there'd be a decent malt base at least. Instead, it's an exceedingly pale golden and, in good condition, tastes of almost nothing. Whatever their process is for sucking all the personality out of a beer, it works very well indeed.

Much as I didn't enjoy my initial Zagorka experience, I was charmed by the look of Zagorka Retro when I saw it in Carrefour a little later. "Retro" doesn't just mean the 1970s label, it's also unpasteurised, and I think that makes a big difference. Unfortunately it was very skunked, thanks to the green glass, smelling of fermented cabbage and old lawn clippings. The flavour is cleaner, and I couldn't really detect the lightstrike. Instead there's sweet cereal and a little noble grassiness. Beyond the too-obvious skunking, it's rather decent. I don't know if a canned version of this would fit the branding, but I reckon it's worth trying regardless. At a guess, this answers the demands of Zagorka drinkers who noticed how bastardised the main beer had become.

The Zagorka brewery also produces Ariana, though I don't know where on their premiumisation spectrum it sits. The beer is good, however. It's beautifully smooth and clean, with low carbonation and a soft bready texture. While only 4.5% ABV it's in no way thin or watery, showing some quite Germanic vibes. There's maybe a tiny estery element -- the suggestion of a headache -- as it warms, but I had to look for that. Otherwise it's quite a plain but satisfying affair. I didn't see it on draught anywhere and would have been perfectly happy with a cold mug of it.

The brewery also produces the Stolichno brand, of which I saw two different beers, both in German styles. It seems a little odd that a premium type of range didn't include a take on American pale ale, but whatever. First up it's Stolichno Weiss, claiming to be a normal weissbier, though at the toytown strength of 4.4% ABV. It's a little on the dark side, and not very hazy, but the flavour is spot on for accuracy. There's lots of big and mushy ripe banana, almost into the foam candy level of sweetness. Clove doesn't feature, nor anything much else, saving a soft caramel sweet side. There's a surprising amount of body given how light in alcohol it is, and it absolutely passes muster as a proper weissbier, just not one of the really good ones. File under "workmanlike". If it serves to introduce a Bulgarian audience to the wonderful world of strange-tasting beers, as Erdinger did for so many in my part of the world, then it has an honest and worthwhile purpose.

There's also a Stolichno Bock: a rare and valuable seam of darkness through this otherwise uniformly pale set of industrial beers. This has a bit of welly at 6.5% ABV, and with it it's dark and treacly, the flavour piling in gooey fudge sauce and burnt fruitcake, with some lighter cherry. That gets balanced by a very Munich-dunkel-style herbal bitterness, adding a tang to the finish and balancing all the dark sticky sugar. It's one of those beers that serves as a reminder that even Heineken Bulgaria's brewers have the talent and equipment to make really good beer, but mostly don't. This one was better than about 80% of the independent beers I drank, and it's readily available across the country in bottles and cans. It's not for the session though. One or two at a time is plenty.

Carlsberg's mainstay in these part is Shumensko, in its vibrant red can. It's 4.8% ABV and a slightly washed-out shade of golden, suggesting that high quality is not part of the spec, but sometimes we get lucky with these. Not here. It tastes cheap. There's a syrupy extract feel to the malt side, and a hard tangy metallic character in place of hops. If I look hard there's perhaps a bouquet of fresh meadow flowers as well, but I'm reaching for them and I can't sustain that picture in focus for long. A few seconds later we're back to pencil sharpeners and flinty sparks. I knew this round-up would include at least one basic-of-the-basic industrial lager, and here it is. Drink it if there's nothing else, or if you fancy it at c.90 cents the can in Lidl, as I did. 

Around the same price, Carlsberg also offers Pirinsko, which is 4.4% ABV. This is proper middle-of-the-road stuff, medium-bodied with a hint of golden syrup sweetness but nothing much by way of hops. It's... Carlsberg, essentially. There's the building blocks of decent lager but with all the corners cut and all the edges planed beyond smooth into a dull blandness. This is a beer it's hard to be offended by and, for example, consumed cold from a hotel fridge while sitting on a hotel balcony, is bang on. It's hard to write a review of it, however, because it's so purely average, and deliberately so, no doubt. Basic industrial lager is what this post is about, and Pirinsko is an exemplar. Full marks for that, I guess.

Britos seems to be quite commonplace in the east of Bulgaria, and this one may actually be wholly locally owned. I couldn't tie it to any of the big players and the company was only founded in 2012, even though it looks like one of the heritage brands. The beer itself is a very middle-of-the-road macro lager, and I doubt that bringing a quality drinking experience to the people was what the owners have in mind: this seems very much designed to be indistinguishable from the many other big labels. It's a middling 4.5% ABV, and nicely smooth, but the flavour is quite cheap-tasting: a generic mix of crackers and metal, which I've tasted in many, many hot country lagers, but which the Bulgarian big boys have mostly avoided. Anyway, Britos is fine if it's what's being poured, but is by no means a cut above the mainstream, unfortunately.

Finally we have Gayda: the bagpipe beer. A fully armed bagpipe, according to the label. Like they're not dangerous enough already. I'm not sure this should really be included amongst the industrial beers as it doesn't seem to be from a multinational, but it is contract-brewed and is a fairly standard pale lager. To wit: it's 4.8% ABV and a medium golden colour, smelling sweetly of honey-crusted breakfast cereal. That sweetness intensifies on tasting, giving it an almost bock-like sense of concentrated malt. For me it was quite tough drinking: the beer isn't big-flavoured, but what's there is at once sickly sweet and vegetally bitter. An overactive fizz is thrown in for bad measure. I wasn't charmed by this guy at all, finding it rough and difficult, even at a low fridge temperature. It has character; just not the good kind.

And that's all I have to say on Bulgarian beer, for better or worse. Of course, imports are available, and I'll be talking about those next.

To the sea

The final segment of my Bulgarian adventure brought us to Nessebar, a cutesy and well-preserved mini city on the Black Sea coast. It's well preserved by the strictures of UNESCO, though increasingly encroached upon by the towering holiday apartments of the neighbouring resorts.

It's a small place, and opportunities to drink interesting beer are very thin on the ground. There's only really one outlet: the beer shop which I think is called Shark, but it doesn't have that written anywhere, only a carving of a shark above the door. A sign above it says "You Need A Beer" and it seems to be occasionally known as that too. It's very much a shop, bordering on a stall, open onto the street with fridges on one side and shelves on the other. But they have a portable draught system for three beers, and barrels and window ledges you can stand and drink at. In the absence of anything better, it serves.

On the one occasion of drinking there, I picked the stout called Kom Emida, a 6%-er from a contract brewer in nearby Burgas, called Beer Bastards, a name which deserves to be consigned to the same early-2000s bin as "Punk IPA" and "Evil Twin". It poured worryingly headless and a dark brown colour. Despite lacking foam, there was a certain gentle sparkle going on, and the flavour was quite proper. Dark chocolate gets together with thick espresso, leading to dark dry toast in the finish. It's a little thin, especially given the strength, and some creaminess would have set it up beautifully. As-is, and visuals aside, it's a workmanlike stout, and all the better for showing up in a part of the world where I would not expect such a thing to be pouring.

I had another of theirs, back at the hotel, courtesy of the Shark. The beer is called Opasen Char, which apparently means "Dangerous Charm" -- the name of a famous Bulgarian film of the 1980s. It's an IPA of 6.6% ABV and was knocked down to a bargain price even by local standards as the best-before date had just passed. That doesn't seem to have done it much harm. It's still a rock-solid IPA, broadly in the west-coast genre, amber in colour and fairly clear with it. The flavour is a bright mix of succulent jaffa oranges and spritzy lemon zest: simple yet delicious, and the sort of profile that made hoppy American ales famous in the first place. Quite a low carbonation and a weighty texture give it an attractive smoothness and make it very easy drinking. This, and a generally low-key bitterness, lend it some shades of New England, though it's neither as sweet nor as fluffy as they typically tend to be. Despite the high-concept art and too-cool thin 33cl can, it's simple and approachable, and very enjoyable for that. I don't know if it's being phased out, or is simply out of season, because this sort of beer should be a cornerstone of every independent beer scene.

The latter might be the case because I also found Opasen Char Summer Edition, which has a different coloured can to the regular, though I couldn't figure out what other differences there are. It's still an IPA, still 6.6% ABV and still a mostly clear and a medium amber colour. I didn't drink them side-by-side, but I thought that maybe this one, despite being fresher, had more malt going on. Zesty marmalade, dank resins and a whack of toffee or caramel were the principal players. Early double IPAs did all this, although this is quite a bit more modest in strength. It's certainly not a double IPA to taste, low-balling the alcoholic heat and adding a clean crispness to the malt side which underplays the toffee. The hops are still singing, in a deep and slightly sticky baritone: jaffa rind meeting piquant peppers over a warm mixed-herb gravy. It is at once fruity and savoury; enjoyable and exceedingly retro. Even avowed west-coast practitioners tend not to make IPA like this any more. The kids might complain, but this old-timer got a rare taste of when beer was exciting and a bit scary, something the Americans since taught everyone else how to do. Putting a bit of piney funk into your IPA may indeed be dangerous these days, but it's also very charming. Fair play.

The same brewer, with a similar look, makes Basi Kefa, a white IPA. It looks a bit orange for that, and the writing on the big-art, poor-information can doesn't show enough to tell me what it actually is made from. Nothing suggests anything different from ordinary IPA, though: an aroma of peach and mandarin is followed by a flavour along very similar lines, offering posh and highly-sugared cloudy lemonade and a slightly harder bitter grapefruit skin on the end. The only "white" bit I got was that there's a touch of herbs -- coriander and basil -- right on the end, but I would be fully prepared to believe I imagined them. This is a perfectly cromulent 6.7% ABV IPA, in the American style, with nothing fancy going on. If they've added wheat and herbs to make it into something else then they haven't really taken, and that's not a problem for this drinker. It does the job and doesn't try any silly tricks of the sort that make white IPAs too often taste soapy and savoury. This is IPA first, and "white" maybe, if you squint and turn your head sideways.

From Sofia brewer Alchemik comes Cherry Amaretti, one of those supposedly sour but actually sweet beers, though one which incorporates some of my favourite flavours. It's a deep shade of scarlet in the glass, and smells of an ingredient which isn't advertised in the name but is mentioned on the can, tonka beans: that sweet and spicy mix of chocolate and cinnamon. There's less of that in the flavour, where the billed cherry and Amaretto almond really do pop, suggesting cakey dessert, fruity cocktails and a little extra serious sourness as well. While sweet and quite thick, it's only 7.5% ABV, and the brewery deserves credit for keeping it so modest -- it stands to the beer. I don't think one could mistake this for one of the lesser "sour" fruit beers. It's been thought out, trialled and errored, and optimised for the drinker. I do like finding a novelty beer that's been done properly.

Along similar lines, the brewery also produces a beer called Peach Bellini, one containing actual sparkling white wine among the ingredients. It doesn't look attractively cocktail-like, being a murky orangey brown without a proper head. It's no quaffer either, at 8.5% ABV and soupy thick, much like all those other fake-sour fruit beers. This is very much in that genre, and exactly as not-sour, with peach syrup as the main feature. At least we're spared any lactose vanilla. And... and few sips in, I think I found the wine too. There's a certain oak character telling us that at least part of it has spent some time maturing in a wooden container. That's nice. That makes it a little bit of a cut above the usual; just a shame the usual is so very poor. I did like the wine element. Alas, you probably need a much more liberal excise regime than we have to make that possible here.

Bulgarian craft beer still has bottles. Imagine! The aptly named Sans Changement is from Bulgarian contract brewer Dunav but actually produced just across the border in Greece. It's an India Pale Lager and has a bit of a homebrew look -- bottle-conditioned and fairly murky as a result. Happily, the flavour is completely clean, if not very lager-like. The hops are fresh and citric, at a bitterness level somewhere between lemon rind and grapefruit flesh, but there's quite a hefty malt component which makes me question (a little) the cool-fermentation credentials. Not that it's a bad beer by any means, but don't come to it for crispness; that's not on offer here. The finish is a little on the quicker side than a typical pale ale, but otherwise it's pretty much one of those. Dunav, and the people it pays to make its beer, do seem to know what they're doing, however.

Ready comprehension of beers wasn't much of a problem for me, but I was stumped by this next one at first, thinking it another Dunav beer because it's in a half litre bottle and was next to it on the shelf. It's not, though. This is CH IPA by Trima i Dvama, whom we last met back in Plovdiv. It's a 7% ABV job, very much in an old-school American style, and a bit rough with it, shot through with yeasty dregs a-go-go. The aroma says toffee and marmalade while the flavour piles in unsubtle lime, grapefruit and pine in an  oily way that's all about shock bitterness with no regard to freshness or zest. This is American IPA made by people who have never tasted fresh American IPA -- a frequent problem in a global industry that depends on products being consumed close to source for best effect. It's not unpleasant, and I would guess this has changed the perspective of more than a few nascent Bulgarian beer fans on what's possible once you get away from yellow lager. It's all good from there on in, right?

My last, desperate, sweep of the shelves at Beer Shark in Nessebar yielded several cans I didn't get to drink until I came home. The Peach Bellini was one; another was Pelta's Can-Ye-West, a West Coast IPA, of course. This tied together the trip neatly, being a collaboration between Pelta/Hopium over in Plovdiv but also the High Five bar back in Sofia. It's a dark amber colour with a generous head, which is lovely, and massive gobbets of yeast bobbling through it, which is less so. The aroma is mostly sweet, but piney resinous too, channelling perfectly the dankbro IPAs of our youth. The hops go AWOL on tasting however. There's an initial rush of jammy summer fruit but right where the hard citric bitterness ought to kick in, there's a blank space. At the end there's a wisp of dry tannins and a little cedarwood spice, and that's your lot. I applaud that the floaty dregs didn't interfere in any of this, but dammit I wanted hops. This has mastered one side of the classic US IPA formula, but totally neglected the other, equally important, one.

The big finish brings us all the way back to Sofia Electric, and one they made with Põhjala, called Väga Suur. This barley wine is born of of a 12-hour boil and blended from batches which were six-month-aged in brandy, rakia and virgin Bulgarian oak barrels. Hoist the green, white and red! It's 12.5% ABV and a mahogany brown in the glass. There is a reason that breweries tend not to use fresh oak, and this smells of it. It's a sappy, syrupy sweetness that shouts over the top of anything else. I could still smell a little cherry-liqueur fun behind it, but would liked to have had more of that. The flavour is better balanced, and while the oak and fruit are still there, they meld together nicely. It's viscous and sweet, and there must have been a temptation to go big on the hops to try and balance that, but they didn't, and I think it's a better beer for it. On top of it all there's a sprinkling of dessicated coconut, making the whole thing taste and feel like some idiosyncratic eastern European dessert. It's quirky but absolutely excellent. In this run-through of my experiences in Bulgarian Craftonia the tone hasn't always been upbeat, so it's nice to finish on a high note.

From Nessebar it was the big schlep 400km back to Sofia, and then home. But I haven't told you about all the fizzy yellow lager they have in Bulgaria, and that's much more useful information than all this fly-by-night craft stuff. Come back to me on Monday and I'll tell you all about it.

When in Plovdiv

I loved Plovdiv, the little city with a big history, right in the middle of Bulgaria. I wouldn't class it as an A-1 beer destination, however, although it has definitely made an effort.

The Kapana district has recently been developed as the cultural quarter, and they've done a better job of that than some other European cities I could name. In amongst the artisan shops, cocktail bars and restaurants are two specialty beer bars, back-to-back on parallel streets.

Hopium, much like the bars I visited in Sofia, is a tiny one-room, high-stooled establishment. It has connections, though, seemingly sharing an owner with the Sudden Death brewery in Germany and Plovdiv's own Pelta Brewing. I began with a beer from the former, a West Coast IPA named Grindhouse. At 7% ABV and a pure, clear amber colour, it meets the basic specs. The question of freshness raised its head again, as it had in Sofia: although this has been given a substantial dose of hops, it didn't have any zing or spark. Instead, there's a weighty funkiness, starting on an aroma of rotting fruit and proceeding to a resinous, leafy flavour. As the colour implied, it has been given a substantial malt base, but that doesn't offset the hop funk and only increases the difficulty level of drinking it. To top it off, a very slightly warm serving temperature on a very warm evening made it even more of a plod. I remember when the only American IPAs you could buy in Ireland were elderly imported bottles. This reminded me of those.

On a return visit, we went for something lighter. The clear golden beer on the right is Session India Pale Ale 1 from a Sofia-based contractor called Megamosh. Presumably all the good beer and brewery names were already taken. Anyway, it's pretty good: a lovely tropical aroma and a flavour with light and refreshing notes of melon and peach. That's it. There's a quick finish and it's maybe a little watery of body for 4.4% ABV, but it does what's needed for a session IPA on a warm afternoon.

The slightly hazy fellow next to it is a pale ale called Bar On, and is by Cometa. See the previous post for other beers by them. This is 5.1% ABV and has a little more complexity than its tablemate, but still shows the same level of basic decency. Here there's a base of tropical fruit, pineapple in particular, and then a light dusting of cinnamon spice. Those two elements work very nicely together. Exploring further, there's a harder mineral edge and a wisp of pear ester. Still, it tasted fresh and was very drinkable and refreshing. Job done again.

Around the corner is a slightly larger café bar arrangement with a bohemian beads-and-cushions vibe, called Kotka i Mishka ("Cat & Mouse"). They have their own range of beers, both bottled and draught. I went with the one named simply as Pale Ale on the hand-drawn tap badge, but which I think is bottled as (oddly) Ale Tap II. It's 4.5% ABV and mostly clear; a dark gold shade with a fine and lasting head. No quibble about serving temperature here: it arrived ice cold, which was appreciated. And that probably helped the flavour for a change, for while the aroma was a light and breezy melon effect, the flavour is seriously dank. It's that hard hop funk which begins as lime rind and proceeds into fried onion before building to old cheese. That took some adjusting to, and I give it a pass, but it's a bit extreme for a low-strength house beer.

Herself went for a Pelta beer which the artist-in-residence named as "Red Lager" on the badge but which does have a name: Zhega Li E? ("Is It Hot?" Huh?) And it's not red at all, but a muddy orange. The lack of redness also means there's not much malt character, only the grain and golden syrup of a decent pilsner, but without the hops, just a mild zinc-like mineral bitterness in the finish. It's very plain, in a way that something advertising itself as a twist on basic lager should not be.

As in Sofia, we finish drinking out with a beer in an excellent restaurant: Chisto i Prosto ("Clean and Simple") by the Trima i Dvama ("Three and Two") brewery, found on the menu at the Aylyakria restaurant, which is my top food recommendation for Plovdiv, in the unlikely event that you trust me on such things. But again like in Sofia, the beer quality wasn't up to the grub, and this is quite a plain blonde ale of 5% ABV, which I guess they're trying to make clear in the name. It's a hazy shade of yellow and quite dry, with a touch of pils-like grass in the aroma. That turns rough and earthy in the taste, finishing on a green spike of asparagus bitterness. There aren't any actual faults, but it still tastes like an unpolished home-brewed lager. 5/10, must try harder.

Elsewhere, on the edge of the city centre, is the Beertherapy beer shop, one which also stocks small-batch spirits, natural wines and meads. I picked up a handful of cans from the local and international selection.

It's tragically fussy of me to have been disappointed that I couldn't find any black IPA from Bulgarian breweries, and also that Tetrapod's Black Sea Tsunami conjured the concept sufficiently in its name for me to buy it. In keeping with the vast majority of the Bulgarian craft beers I found, it's a New England-style IPA: 6.5% ABV and one of the darker orange of examples that aren't quite made in accordance with high haze fashion. It's one of the better ones, though, mixing mandarin with vanilla and set on a softly pillowy texture to create a sweetly citric ice cream effect that's all dessert without any problematic vegetable or booze sideshows. This fine piece of work was contract brewed by the Burgas-based brewery Metalhead, and I discovered a couple more cans from them under their own brand.

Metalhead Metalworks Barleywine is a 13% ABV fellow, claiming figs, dates and spices. It's a pleasant amber colour once poured from the tiny tin. The aroma doesn't say much, just a broadly tannic dryness, and equally the mouthfeel is not that of a powerhouse strong beer, being light and surprisingly drinkable. The flavour is something else, however. They've combined the ingredients beautifully to create a rich and complex Christmas-cake effect, including the booze-infused sponge, the dark fruit pieces, and even the marzipan on top. The spicing -- unspecified but tasting like nutmeg and cinnamon to me -- are perfectly integrated into this, adding to the character but not feeling any way tacked-on. And while it doesn't taste hot, it does leave a lovely comforting warmth in the belly after swallowing. The teeny 25cl can is a shame, but maybe that means there's more of it to go around.

In the same format is Mind of God, which the lovely people of Metalhead have badged as a crème brûlée imperial stout. I didn't check the ingredients. I didn't have to. They have successfully managed to make this taste exactly like a crème brûlée. I deconstructed it as best I could, but it's that all the way down: vanilla as the centre, but real and creamy, not just a pail of essence; then a sweeter caramel smoothness that lingers on the palate, before a proper burnt brown sugar bite at the end. All that left me wondering if it counts as an imperial stout, and I get precious little of the things that make stout worthwhile, except where they're creamy and dessertish. Regardless, this is another piece of strong beer perfection from the Metalheads.

Both cans were in the €3-€4 range in Plovdiv's super-fancy beer nerd trap. I dreaded to think what they'd come out at back home. While I appreciated that it's mad money for small measures, the quality to justify it is present and correct. There were several more in the range and I deeply regret not buying them.

But we go onwards, pushing further east, to the edge of the Black Sea, to find out what sort of beer they have there.

Minibars and solitude

For my summer holiday this year I went to visit Bulgaria, largely because I've never been there before and it was an itch needing to be scratched. On arrival, the local mosquito population made sure that there was scratching aplenty across the 800+ km three-city trek.

Before I sit down to process exactly which beers I drank on the way, I'll say that my overall impression of the national scene is quite poor. Pale lager from multinational brewing interests rules supreme, of course. And while there's an independent end of the industry as well, doubtless run by the same breed of idealistic enthusiasts that makes microbrewing happen everywhere, it looked to be under-regarded and showing little signs of individuality. Which is to say that hazy IPA and milkshakey fruit beers were hard to avoid, try as I might. On the plus side, I never had a problem finding somewhere to sit in the specialist beer bars, and that included ones where capacity didn't go much into double figures.

The tone for that was set on day one in the capital, Sofia. Bar one was High Five, where I counted the seating as ten stools and a toilet. On two visits on different days, those were occupied by precisely zero other drinkers. Beer one was July Morning, a Helles from Sofia Electric, whose beers occasionally show up in Dublin. This one, a bit underdone at 4.4% ABV, had a tang of vinegar about both the aroma and the flavour, though less pronounced in the latter. Looking around, I guessed that turnover and freshness were the issue here. Beyond the beer's initial problems, there's a crunchy biscuit malt and a token pinch of lemony hops, which still leaves it well short of being a good Helles. There seems to be a bit of a tendency for brewers these days to turn out the same sort of mediocre lager they've always had, then pinning the H-word on it to make it seem classier. I'm not fooled.

I switched to a brewery from way over on the Black Sea coast next: Metalhead, of Burgas. Heavy Low is a triple IPA and again the pour let me down. It was the very tail end of the keg, and presumably as a result of which was horrifically dreggy. I'm not sure it was technically fit for sale but accepted the 200ml glass of grey/green sludge anyway. The aroma is strong on garlic as well as alcohol heat from the 10% ABV. I think there is a decent and clean resin-and-fruit hop bomb somewhere in here, but that was overlaid with dry and gritty plasterboard, rendering it completely unenjoyable.

Beside it is Varushka Oatmeal Stout, from a contract operator called Zavera. This was dark and wholesome-looking, and an approachable 5.5% ABV. It begins well, offering heady aromas of coffee and cola but follows it with quite a lacklustre flavour, giving mostly porridgey cereal with a token dusting of chocolate. The texture is unforgivably thin for an oatmeal stout, and the finish unacceptably quick, so they really haven't used the glutinous grain to the proper extent.

I had made short work of my shot of triple IPA and moved on to Kokiri, a New Zealand-style IPA by Sofian brewery Cometa. Though claiming to be double dry-hopped there wasn't much of an aroma from the hazy orange glassful, just a slightly unpleasant vegetal or sweaty note. At least its flavour had a decent dankness to it with a burst of pithy bitterness and a lacing of Germanic grass and spinach. That all fizzled out quickly again, and again I found myself wondering how long it had been in the bar. If the aim was to be unexciting then it accomplished it, but I somehow doubt that's the case.

It says something about the choice of bars available that we were back in High Five a few days later. Switching up the nationalities, I picked Valeksander from Estonia's Anderson's brewery, a pils. I like a dry pils but this was too dry for me; husky and earthy, with a rustic grainsack roughness. "Crisp" tends to be a positive term when it comes to pale lagers but this was too crisp, drying out the saliva ducts like a cream cracker. It's only 4.7% ABV so the brewery may have intended it for quenching thirsts, but for me it did the opposite.

For the final beer here, I returned to Sofia Electric for Electrolyte, canned from the pub's self-service fridges. It claims to be a gose, though an unorthodox one, brewed with juniper and cucumber but no salt or coriander. Despite this, there's a definite briny quality to the aroma, while the flavour is all sweet pickle and cucumber skin. It is, of course, a shameless novelty beer, but it's a very well-executed one and it did do the job of a proper gose, even if it's not made like one nor tastes like one. 4% ABV refeshment is what it's about, and it delivers a fun set of flavours as well. My faith in Sofia Electric was restored.

Maybe I chose unwisely, but I came away with a feeling that you're better sticking to the packaged beers at High Five instead of the draught.

Not far away is another specialty beer bar: Crafter. This is much roomier with modern Scandi-style décor and furniture. On a Wednesday evening there were ten beers on the menu board, the music was pumping, and there was not a single other customer in the place.

Another gose and another Cometa beer for me: Fat Mosquito. This is a tad stronger, at 5% ABV though the same hazy yellow as the Sofia Electric one. They don't seem to have used the extra strength to give it extra character, however. It begins on a very basic lager-grain aroma and has a soft saline texture but little by way of a salty taste. You get a little lemon and lime piquancy, suggesting New World hops at work, but no real sourness or bite. A thirst was quenched but a desire for interesting-tasting beer was left unsated.

The darker beer beside it is another nordic: Kohia Nelson IPA by the Latvian brewery, Ārpus. It's a big and chewy number, all of 6.5% ABV and feeling every bit of it. The aroma is pithy and sharp so I was surprised to find a fruity and fleshy flavour behind it, giving me ripe mandarin and strawberry, with a late addition of apricot jam and some exotic jasmine spicing. It lacks zing and is maybe a little on the soupy and warm side, but tastes colourful regardless. One to chomp through slowly, perhaps.

The next bar excursion was to Bira Bar, an English theme-pub of sorts, with the added novelty attraction of cask ale. It does feel a bit like a proper pub, albeit a rather poky and cramped one, and there was even another drinker there of a Thursday late afternoon.

Cask beer is provided by the Hopscotch brewery, and on the day they were pouring Popivka, a 4% ABV bitter. It's the brown sort, or maybe "amber" if you must. As is too often the way of cask beer outside Britain (and often in it) I got a pint that was murky and a little too warm. This gave it an overall savoury quality that's almost beefy. Struggling to find the good points, I picked out some pleasant dark autumnal fruits -- plum and damson -- but otherwise I found this very much on the twiggy and soapy end of the English ale spectrum, which I guess counts as authenticity. While I don't think keg dispense would have done it any favours, cask really didn't help it here.

That was quite a contrast to the hazy yellow beer beside it: PizzoPivo from local brewery Kazan. Ostensibly, this is another gose, but as the name implies, it has been hacked with pizza ingredients, namely tomato and oregano, a particular novelty I have a soft spot for. And it didn't let me down. Here the gose base is sturdy: clean and tangy with an invigorating seaspray spritz. The herbal side is strong but not overpowering, tasting to me more like fresh basil than oregano. An extra savoury side is brought by the tomato, tasting more of seed than flesh, and that makes it the best of these two soup-like beers, and indeed the less-soupy one.

That stop was on the way to Vitamin B, which Sofia Electric advertises as their official brewery tap. It was tricky to find, in what looks like a converted domestic house: through a gate, up a set of front steps and through a hallway leading to a choice of front or back room. They had just opened for the day, so maybe that's why we had the place to ourselves.

Token Pilsner from Token Brewery is one I had seen in all the craft beer places so here is where I had it, on draught. It's really not a great example. 3.5% ABV did not leave it wanting body, and the appearance is a perfect clear yellow. But the flavour was a disconcerting mix of earth or putty, with a foetid grape skin bitterness and old, musty cereal grain. I don't think freshness was the issue, but honestly I wasn't keen on examining the taste too closely. Suffice to deem it a curséd pilsner and leave it there.

The purple emulsion in the picture is Vishna, a sour cherry beer (sour, with sour cherries) from Sofia Electric. In the way of these things it's not actually sour but smooth and chewy, with lots of warm and stewed sweet fruit. It's simple, but the cherry flavour is big and bold, and that was enough to endear it to me. It's my kind of dessert.

Our final stop in Sofia is a restaurant called Aubergine. This is a little bit of a trek out of the historic centre of the city but is thoroughly worth it. The food is superb and there's a very decent beer list to go with. I only had the one, and a fairly mainstream one at that: Glarus seems to be a large independent brewery, and the oldest. It's based in Varna in the east but I saw its beers everywhere I went. Glarus Pale Ale is 4.2% ABV; clear and golden with a biscuit lager aroma and a perfumey hop flavour. As such, it seems a bit industrial: mass-produced from heavily-processed ingredients and then heavily pasteurised. Clean but dull was my verdict on that, and I never got round to trying any other Glarus beers. Oh well.

So that's Sofia, as I saw it. The beer, like the city, has its good points but ultimately was something of a disappointment. I hope that I just caught the bars during an off-week or something, and that there is a market of drinkers to sustain them. Their hearts are in the right place, it's just the throats which weren't. Next stop was the second city of Plovdiv, where I was hoping things would be altogether more colourful.

Multicultural Munich

It's a return visit to the beers of Camba Bavaria, the Munich-based brewer of some very unMunich beers.

First up today, for instance, is a saison, called Summer Kiss. Despite the pink branding and modern predilections, it doesn't contain any fruit and indeed claims compliance with the Reinheitsgebot. Presumably the inclusion of oats means it's availing of the purity law's wide exemptions for warm-fermented beers. "Refreshing, dry, light and fruity" is the claim on the front of the can, and in the glass it's a pale white-gold shade, fairly solidly hazed over. The aroma is sweet, smelling of sticky apricot and nectarine, though promising some Belgian farmhouse spice too. It's quite thickly textured and the fizz is very restrained for a saison, the whole thing feeling more than its 4.8% ABV. So dry and light it is not, though I'll grant it fruity, tasting of succulent melon and peach, thanks in part to Citra but mostly to Nelson Sauvin. I think it still counts as refreshing too, slipping back without fuss. While it's not quite a perfect recreation of Belgian saison, it's close enough for me.

To follow, Chiemsee Pale, a pale ale very much in the American style: 5.3% ABV and hopped with Chinook, Simcoe and Centennial. For all that that's very traditional, it's a pale one, where I was expecting something more amber. The aroma doesn't give much away, just a very broad lemon and grapefruit kick. It follows that the flavour is quite plain. Yes, the very typically American citrus is there, but I think there's a lack of malt base to support it, so after an initial playful punch, it fades out very quickly. The foretaste is beautifully typical, the grapefruit joined by oilier lime and a dank and piney damp forest effect. But just as you start to enjoy it, there's the abrupt rugpull and it fades out to fizz and nothingness. I guess, as a mere pale ale, it's not meant to be a masterpiece of complexity, but a little more character would have been nice.

They're both decent, if unspectacular, beers. I'm sure I've said it before, but the brewery deserves credit for doing things a little differently in a city where diversity in beer is not a strong point.

Turn on, tune in, Longford

At time of writing, the latest from Wide Street is called Beat Generation and is in the style (is it a style?) called "American sour". I've had sour beers in America, though I don't think I encountered any that were a mere 3.6% ABV. Do they just mean it's hoppy? I checked the can and it just means it reminds them of beer they drank in America. Can't argue with that.

In the glass it's a pale yellow, like the skin of a Golden Delicious apple. That's misted in a very Belgian way, a reminder perhaps that the production process started out with the brewing of a saison. It certainly smells like some American hops were involved too, as there's a clean and zesty citrus aroma, and a squeeze of lemon juice, indicating a complementary sourness to come. And it sure is sour, the Lactobacilius giving it a serious, but delicious, edge of tart acidity. There's Brettamomyces too, and I think it has had a softening effect, adding peach and lychee to the harder sour acidity. The nice fruit doesn't last and it turns a little curdling and vinegary right at the end, but overall it's a beaut.

This has all the complexity of a top-notch mixed fermentation beer, but delivered in a neat, low-strength package. Perfect for that mid-week treat.

A Rocky start

My first time drinking beer from the Franco-Coloradan brewery Outer Range, I thought it was something else. It's not my fault, it's what it was sold as: a 5% ABV pale ale from an Irish brewery. That was surprising and noteworthy because it didn't taste or feel like one, and that's because Swells is actually a 10.5% ABV triple IPA. Happily, the parties involved cleared up the confusion within a day.

On pouring (yes that's a dirty great pint), it seemed a bit beige: murky in an unappetising vomit-like way. But I didn't buy it to look at it. The aroma is spectacularly tropical, blazing with concentrated mango, pineapple, passionfruit and all the rest of them. It's thickly textured to the point of feeling like a smoothie shake, as one might expect given the strength. I'd love to say that the fruit sensation transfers seamlessly to the flavour, but it doesn't quite. The sweet tropical thing is still at the centre, accompanied by a slather of even-sweeter vanilla, and then around the edges there's an unfortunate twang of garlic and stale sweat; a dry savoury quality that interrupts the sweetness instead of complementing it. Azacca, Simcoe and Columbus, in case you're wondering. Before, and indeed well into, the haze era, what triple IPAs I met could be depended on to be cleanly hot, and generally not too difficult to drink. I think this one is for those with a higher tolerance for hazy off-flavours than I possess.

Next, we'll start back at basecamp with a standard hazy IPA, a mere 7.1% ABV, and called Rayon de Soleil. It looks pretty similar to the big lad: an opaque yellow. It's nowhere near as thick, of course, and the aroma is spicy and herbal,  suggesting crisp green cabbage and rocket. To taste, it's sweeter: offering typically NEIPA-esque vanilla given a glaze of honey or golden syrup. Overall it's quite unremarkable and I've tasted plenty of beers just like it, from both France and the USA (these, I'm told, were brewed on the French side). It wasn't so extreme as to test my tolerance for garlicky vanilla murk, though the sweet aspect did get a little cloying on the end. I'm glad they didn't serve me a pint of this one.

Predictably, it's the double to finish: Forever Glades, although it's only a tiny step up from the basic at 7.6% ABV. (I blame the BJCP for putting an arbitrary border between the styles at 7.5%. And the brewery for paying attention to the BJCP.) Anyway: is it murky and yellow, you ask? Hell yes. And while it wasn't too overpowering in the previous two, garlic features massively here, in addition to all the bad stuff about this sorely stubborn genre of beer: too much heat, even though it's unashamedly strong. I will grant that there's a pleasant centre, with mandarin and honeydew melon, but the hot gritty muck around it renders it moot. This is very much a nope from me.

There are so many beers like these. Why is anyone importing them? This is why you rarely find foreign murk on this blog: I could fill it with nothing but if I wanted to but I respect you too much to keep posting the same, valid, criticisms about substandard overpriced hazy IPA.

Fruit, real and implied

It all seems business as usual at Whiplash at the moment, all fruited sour beers and hazy pale ales. Let's take a look at the most recent ones to come my way.

Fruit Salad Days are here again, this time with Watermelon added to the Berliner weisse base. I don't know why I was expecting it to be pink, but it isn't. A lesser brewery might have done that. Instead it's a pale cloudy shade of brass, unsurprisingly without a head: few of this style have those. The watermelon manifests in the aroma as a kind of green vegetal note, very real but very much the rind of the fruit, not the flesh. There's even more of that in the flavour, making it taste very much like biting into melon skin. The base beer provides little other than fizz, and there's a disappointing lack of sourness. The hops are El Dorado, but they could be anything. From the idea and the artwork, I see this as a well-intentioned gesture at solidarity with the Palestinian people but I don't think it really works as a beer, being neither one of the silly-but-fun sweet and syrupy efforts, nor a serious mixed fermentation buffet of bug-derived complexity. Be advised.

On to IPA, and Step Steadier, 6.8% ABV and exceptionally murky, making me fear the burn and the grit that so often comes with. Except, in proper Whiplash fashion, there's neither. It's softly textured and effervescent in the well-made New England style. Its flavour is a fruit salad mélange, incorporating pineapple, apple, grape and peach, suspended in syrup; sweetly fresh with no pointy edges. Bitterness doesn't really feature, and I'm sure that's deliberate. There's a tiny hint of garlic on the finish and a slight alcohol burn which are the only elements of the style's typical problems to manifest, and none of it is problematic. Otherwise it's a very decent take: doing the fruit in a way that haze is meant to. This is why we Whiplash.

The big guns today are Big Fluffy Clouds, loudly billed as an all-Nelson double IPA. Bring it, so. It's another opaquely orange job and the aroma doesn't deliver the huge Nelson hit I was hoping for. It's subtle, with only a mild spicy fruit effect, like clove-studded satsuma, but nothing fancier. Maybe because it was served very cold it didn't taste strong and I had to hold back on drinking it too quickly. Nelson is in its tropical era, bringing lychee, apricot, white plum and ripe pear. The harder mineral side is smoothed out into a mild fresh-milled pink peppercorn sensation. It is well named, being cloudy, fluffy and yet big also. Half way through I could start to feel the 8.2% ABV begin to warm my belly parts; it was understated before that. Overall, it's a beaut. I didn't get the hairdryer effect of full Nelson in the face, which I always enjoy, but complex and nuanced single-hoppers are rare, and this is one of them. Your mileage in can may vary, but the draught version absolutely sings.

Another reminder here from Whiplash that hazy IPA can be wonderful when all the regular pitfalls are avoided. I don't know a brewery that does them better.