Ohhh... My Head... - Spring travels and festivals '05

The Stockholm pubs Akkurat and Oliver Twist organized "Sour and Bitter in Stockholm", where lambics and and American IPAs were served. Among many superb beers the new fantastic lambic developed by Akkurat and Cantillon, Goldackerl received top score, as did De Cam's unblended kriekenlambic. Sadly for the Americans they were beaten by the only Swedish entry in the bitter part of the festival. The new Double IPA from Närke Kulturbryggeri, served cask conditioned, walked away with the honours.

In conjuction with this festival we also tasted some Japanese beers together, that had been sent to us by Dan (IslandHaole). It was very interesting to get the opportunity to taste such a lot of new microbrews from Japan, and the overall quality was very high. The winning beers in our books are Baeren Ursus, apowerful, fruity beer that tastes like I imagin that a a rye bock would taste.

Lars visited Stile's beer fest in Southampton, and the best scoring beer from this festival was the smokey Beowulf Dragon Smoke Stout.

Yours truly also went to Denmark to explore the exploding beer scene down there. Together with some other beer enthusiasts we drank our way through Copenhagen and our own bottle collections. This is where the overall winning beers comes from: the very rare trappist beer Achel Extra Blond. I also got to try the much sough after Imperial IPA from Nørrebro Bryghus: North Bridge Extreme, and it was worth the hype it has. Another good(?) thing with this tasting was the number of new countries sampled. After drinking beers from places such as Mozambique, Algeria, Benin, New Caledonia and Uruguay the country count is now above 150. Is 200 even possible?

Hungary is not a country with a very exposed beer scene, but after much searching I stumbled across a list of Hungarian brewries (available at http://www.sorlap.hu/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=20. Ata brief visit I tried to find some of the breweries, which was a bit hit and miss. But several of the breweries listed existed. The best brewpub (or rather restaurant brewery) in Budapest is IMO Mister Sörház. The food there is excellent, the prices non-touristic, and their one beer is pretty good.

Also Czechia was honoured with a visit from us. The brewpub in Detenice makes bvery good beers, and the setting is bizarre. It is definitely worth a visit. As is the suburban Prague brewpub U Bulovky (Richter), with it's great beer and genuine atmosphere. Pivovarsky Dum in central Prague is also a must stop, if only to taste their adventurous nettle beer Dum Koprivove. However if one stop is all you can afford in Prague the beer store Pivni Galerie is what you're looking for. Sit down, relax and taste some beers from various Czech microbrewers.