First dispatch from the field

I'm in Athens for the next few days. Currently I'm collecting information on the standard beers hereabouts and I'll make a full report on them in due course. Yesterday, however, I visited the city's only microbrewery: Craft.

The decor is in the mock-industrial brewpub style, rather than the Anglo-German light-wood-and-hops motif. The beer is excellent. They do two fairly basic lagers: the pilsner is classic brewpub lager with that coarse, grainy microbrewed taste: backbone of the industry. Then they do "Athens Lager" which is a more refined, bittersweet, Austrian style beer.

Craft Red Ale is a Belgian-Abbey-style beer: aromatic, fruity and complex. The oddly named "Black Lager" is just like a light stout, sparkling rather than creamy, and full of the burnt caramel flavour that sets it apart.

The Weiss at Craft is a fairly good imitation of Erdinger, right down to the banana aroma, though perhaps a little lighter and softer.

My big find, however, is Craft Smoked Lager. As the name suggests, this is made with smoked hops for a real smoke taste: something akin to drinking a pint of smoky bacon crisps. It is marvellously strange and I look forward to finding another smoked beer to compare notes.

Craft, then, is a first-rate brewpub, and a real find here in southern Europe where beer is not taken as seriously as it should be.

Czeching back

I went on my first beer-hunting excursion abroad back when I was 20. Prague was the destination, and there I discovered the wonderful Czech lager Krušovice. I hadn't seen it in a number of years since, so I bought a bottle recently to check if it is really as good as I remember.

It is. Czech beers, for the most part, are characterised by their rich full malty taste and relatively dark colour. Krušovice is lighter in colour and milder in taste but by no means lacking in character. It is one of the very few lagers that manages to be smooth and easy-drinking without tasting as though all the goodness has been brewed out of it. Krušovice is quality to the last drop. It's kind of gratifying to know, several years, many pints and thousands of miles after that first trip to Prague, that back then I knew good beer when I tasted it.

Ultra vires

Cider is, strictly speaking, outside the remit of this blog. That's generally a moot point since you won't normally catch me drinking the stuff. However, Maguire's current seasonal is an organic cider called Blossom and I feel obligated to make a report.

Speaking as a non-cider-drinker, Blossom is not half bad. It has an extremely pale yellow colour and carries a very sharp, tangy, acidic flavour that is quite invigorating and refreshing. It certainly isn't sickly and cloying the way ciders often are. The biggest let-down is that it becomes difficult to drink when its temperatures rises above the icy coldness at which it is served. I found myself rushing to the end of the pint, and at 5.6% alcohol, that's not something I'd want to be doing several times in a session if I hoped to get out of the pub upright.

Blossom, I'd say, is ideal for sunny summer afternoons in the beer garden. It's just a shame that the only pub in the world serving it doesn't have one.

All spit and no fire

Spitfire is a quite ubiquitous ale in England, but I never got around to trying it until recently. I was a little disappointed. It is a very very light beer, very easy to drink but lacking the robustness I expect in a bottled ale. Fine for the pub, I guess, but not one to take home.

The alternative is Ruddles County, which is stronger and more full-flavoured. However, for all its up-front robustness it is still missing something vital. Hops dominate the flavour, making it somewhat bitter but not enough to give it a firm character. The result is a beer that grabs your attention but doesn't quite know what to do with it.

White Russian

Number 8 in the Baltika series was not a beer I had seen before, so naturally I had to buy it and try it. It is the Russian brewery's wheat beer, and is unfiltered and cloudy with a fair bit of yeasty sediment in the bottle. Tastewise it tries to emulate its German rivals, and comes closest to Franziskaner. The sediment makes it a more bitter experience, though, lending overtones almost reminiscent of a northern European witbier, but not quite. Falling between these two stools, I can't imagine that anyone would prefer this slightly rough Russian to its more refined western neighbours.

For the day that's in it

The supermarkets have knocked a few cent off the price of the Carlow Brewing Company's three beers, so I thought a reappraisal was in order.

O'Hara's is their stout: a straightforward, easy drinking, traditional black beer with no fancy texture or flavour. It's quite pleasant and refreshing for all that, very much a pint of plain and your only man.

Moling's red ale is the best of three, and a contender for Ireland's best ale now that Revolution is sadly out of the picture. It has a caramel-candy sweetness coupled with a mild smokiness adding up to a complex and interesting flavour that keeps you turning it over on your palate the whole glass through. Porterhouse Red probably still has the edge on it, but in the take-home stakes, Moling's is the bottle to beat.

Finally, Curim Gold is the brewery's wheat-beer-in-place-of-a-lager. It certainly is gold: a deep amber hue and slightly cloudy. Like its red brother, Curim has a complex taste, with hoppy bitterness to the fore, but tempered by a soft wheat flavour. It's a little bit cloying, and therefore maybe not the best session beer, but ideal as an accompaniment to spicy food.

So that's the round-up. Support your local small brewery and happy St. Patrick's Day.

Ale and Arty

On a recent trip to the UK I conducted a selective raid on Sainsbury's and came away with three new finds:
Theakston's Old Peculier is a familiar name, but I hadn't actually tasted it before. I'm a big fan of the normal Theakston's and was very interested in trying the premium product. It's very good and has the wonderful round warmness of England's best ales.
Duchy Original is a bit of a gimmick: an organic ale made with ingredients which may (or may not) have come from the Prince of Wales' Highgrove estate. The label is striking and of a very high quality. The beer, alas, is not. When it comes down to drinking, this is a very ordinary bitter. I'm generally in favour of organic produce on principle, but I have yet to encounter an organic beer which is better than its non-organic competitors: sad but true.
Lastly, Meantime Chocolate from the Greenwich Brewery comes in an interesting ship's-decanter-style bottle and, as the name suggests, is a chocolate beer. It's not a stout, though. It's a strong ale with an equally strong concentrated chocolate flavour - rich and bitter, with coffee overtones. Not something one would get through lots of, but an interesting variation on the usual chocolate theme.