Beyond Tigers

Off on my travels again, and I paid a flying visit to Singapore, calling in at two of its microbreweries. Brewerkz is a monument to the faux industrial school of brewpub architecture: a huge converted riverfront warehouse. It does a sizeable range of beers across several genres.

On the lighter side, their Golden Ale is a typical grainy microbrewed lager, slightly cloudy and quite light. Unusually, also, they do a Fruit Brew which was made of strawberries on my visit but which apparently changes. I found it quite bland: too warm and with a touch of ale hops neither of which should feature in this kind of beer. The strawberries were barely identifiable.

Moving on, they do two IPAs: the plain one being very similar to the mainstream English IPA and the Xtra IPA having a subtle malty foretaste followed by a serious hops afterburn. It's 7.2% and tastes it.

Other dark beers include a bock lager, which is cloudy rather than properly dark and carries a delicious smoke and burnt caramel flavour which reaches parts of the nose other beers don't reach. They also do Hopback, which claims to be in the real ale style, and is indeed complex and bitter like the best of them, but is a tad too fizzy to be counted with proper real ales, in my opinion. There's also the inevitable stout, this one being made with oatmeal. It has a strong roasted grain flavour and is very heavy and satisfying.

All in all, the range and style of Brewerkz makes it one of my favourite brewpubs and definitely worth a visit should you need something other than Tiger or a gin sling.

Less worth the effort is the Singapore branch of the Paulaner brewhouse chain. I had to cross a ring of steel put up for the World Bank conference to get to it and I don't think it was worth it. They produce a helles and a dunkel, both rather insipid and neither as good as the mass-produced mainstream Paulaner. This is the first of this chain I've been to and I suspect it is just pointless big-brewery gimmickry of the highest order. You don't have to be independent to make great beer on the premises, but it helps.

Oktoberfest

I'm just back from a week in Munich, including quite a bit of time loitering within tents at the Wies'n, the world's biggest folk festival, known in these parts as Oktoberfest.
It's often referred to as a beer festival, but given that the whole shebang is governed by a closed shop of four brewing giants, and that only six kinds of beer are available, it's much more a festival of drunkenness. The beer is merely a contributing factor.

It was tremendous fun, though, mostly thanks to some careful planning. The beer tents fill up early in the afternoon (even earlier on weekends) so I found the best strategy was to go early and have one or two. At noon, generally, the tent was filling up, the atmosphere was building, the music was playing and things were at their best. I tended to leave soon after, since by two it became crowded, noisy, smoky and unpleasant. So I put the work in: I made it to all twelve tents, and managed to have a beer in all but one (I got to the Augustinerbräu tent at 9.50 yesterday morning and there was no space left, consarnit). So what about the beer?

Each of the six brands makes an Oktoberfest beer especially for the festival, which are sold at the shops and pubs around town as well as in the tents. They are roughly of the märzen variety: slightly stronger and sweeter than ordinary lager. Spaten was the best of them, in my opinion: dark gold and rich tasting. Second I'd place Löwenbräu which is much lighter and easy to drink, which is a clear advantage when trying to get through a litre of it. Augustiner is very smooth, but this tends towards a lack of flavour, which puts it in third. Very close behind it, and for similar reasons is Hacker-Pschorr. Hofbräu is fifth: I found it the fizziest and thus the hardest to drink. And bringing up the rear the mighty Paulaner brewery which seems to have put very little effort into adjusting their ordinary helles lager recipe into something special for the festival.

So that was the festival. Further notes on other beers of Munich and Bavaria to follow.