The Huge Western European Beer Haul

Bamberg beers: Bamberg in Franconia in northern Bavaria is something like a capital of lager beers. You get all kinds of styles from the nine breweries in this picturesque little town, including the famous smokey rauchbier. The bestscoring beers from Bamberg was however a plain, but very stylisticpilsner brwed by Keesmann called Bamberger Herren Pils. But even here in lager paradise they know how to make top fermented beers, as Klosterbräu Bamberg Braun's Weisse got second place...

Other German beer: Most of them were bought at Maruhns Hetränkemarkt in Darmstadt. They included a number of bock beers, plenty of kölschs and altbiers and quite a few wheat beers.best of them according to OMH was Hopf Eisweissbier, thirst quenchng ligh t bodied but flavourful hefeweizen.

Imports at Maruhn: Maruhn also has a lot of imports. Here I found a new country: Samoa, as well as several beers from New Zealand, including the surprising overall session winner Pilot Bay Scottish Wee Heavy, a very malty scottis style ale.

Beers from Lombardy (Italy) In Lombardy, around Milano there exists quite healthy number of good microbreweries. The best scoring of the Italians were Le Baldin Super Baladin, a belgian style golden ale from a microbrewery in Piozzo. Another outstanding beer is Forst Sixtus Doppelbock. We also sampled beers from two brewpubs that couldn't really be done justice on our ratings, as they had lost a lot of their freshenss in the take away bottles. Birrificio Italiano serves outstanding srught lagers and wheat beers, and I'm hard pressed to come up with a better pilsener than the Tipopils I had from tap at the brewery. Also th e beers from Birrificio Lambrate are worth a better fate than in our listings. They are complex and experimental top fermented brews.

A visit to the beer store A Tutta Birra in Milano is highly recomended, and this is where I found both a lot of Italian beers as a lot of good imports. Even though most of the imports we got from here were Belgians the OMH favourite was a hearty strong Czechis porter, Pernstejn Pardubický Porter.

The Swiss beers sampled here are a mix of beers bought in Switzerland and gifts from Bov and Sandro Regusci. The best scoring of them are La Tana del Luppolo Weizen from a brewpub near Bellinzona in the very south of Switzerland.

Beers from France are often overlooked, except for bière de garde from the northeast of France. In Brittany there is quite an interesting beerscene with lots of interesting beers from various breweries. The best scoring one is a Belgian style golden ale from Brest called Tonnerre de Brest Cuvée 2000, but also the more bitter and British style ales from Brasserie Coreff in Morlaix and more excentric ones from De la Soif in Nantes are weil worth mentioning.

Jersey: Yes, they brew beer here too. The local brewery is called Jersey Brewery, and they brew a full rnage of decent ales as well as a lager.

North American beers: As usual friend in North America has sent us som good beers. Best of show this time was the well balanced Fish Tale Trout Stout from Washington. Another highlight was Spinnaker's ESB, one of Canada's finest ales. Yet another highlight was New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red, an excellent cherry beer based on a Flemish style red ale. It is so far the best specialty beer of the year.

Other highlights: One rare beer here is Trappist Achel 8 we found at a local Stockholm Pub (Akkurat). Our country count went all the way up to 110 countries, after having added not only the already mentioned Samoa and Jersey, but also Ethiopia (gift from Yuusuf Faarax), Mongolia (gift from Sandro Regusci), Isle of Man (gift from Peter Jones), Mauritius (gift from Bov) and Martinique.