Knut Albert's Beer Blog

Subjective ramblings about beer, pubs and associated topics

About me

Name: Knut Albert
47 year old, living in Oslo, Norway. This blog is mostly for my own enjoyment, documenting my beer encounters across Europe, but if you find this interesting or entertaining, you are welcome! Feel free to leave comments - all feedback is welcome! I can also be reached on knutalbert-at-gmail.com.

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Tuesday, 29 May 2007

Hear, hear!

She's in favor of joy but she feels it's under attack. She wrote the book as a protest against the decline of social drinking and the rise of broccoli, exercise and Starbucks.

"I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym," she says. "All of a sudden, we've got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness." She pauses. "I'm not really in favor of health and fitness."

Booze, she writes, is "the social glue of the human race." As soon as humans stopped wandering around looking for berries and settled down to raise crops, they started creating wine and beer and, not coincidently, civilization.

Interview with Barbara Holland in the Washington Post. She's just published the book The Joy of Drinking.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 13:58 | link | comments
beer

Monday, 21 May 2007

German beer travel

Other obligations means I won't go to Berlin this year, and the excellent story on a German beer hunt in The New York Times makes this even harder to take. Well, I will get there eventually.

The article also covers Cologne, Leipzig and Bamberg. I am impressed by the coverage of beer in the big US newspapers. The photo, showing Gose enthusiasts in Leipzig, is from their site, too.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 11:59 | link | comments
beer, german

Wednesday, 16 May 2007

They have their problems in Argentina, too!

Google turned up this for me, a guy called Ricky Skelton writes at www.gringoes.com:

You can't imagine how baffling it is for gringoes the first time they go into an Argentinean supermarket, fill up a basket with food & grab a couple of beers out of the fridge. They have no cans, just litre bottles. On my first time, the checkout girl asked me some question that I didn't quite understand but she clearly had a problem with the beer. I thought 'Does she need ID? For me? It's been a while since that happened.' No. Showing her my driving licence didn't appease her. What then? Somebody waiting in the queue pointed out the empties. You need to bring some to buy some. They won't let you buy beer without empty bottles! It is impossible for anybody to buy beer for the first time! You would have to buy empty beer bottles first! Amazing. I didn't know where the shop was that sold empties so I left my food behind as well and walked out chuntering angrily.

Lovely. Now, go and read the rest. He has a blog, too.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 10:47 | link | comments (4)
beer, brewers, argentina

Tuesday, 15 May 2007

The good neighbour

I went to Trondheim for the weekend, with a family gathering the main reason. I managed a few hours on my own, however, walking the streets of my youth in the fairly decent weather. Most of the shops and cafes are gone – I bought a pair of shoes at one of the few remaining old fashioned stores next to the fish market in Ravnkloa.

Nostalgia aside, the town has become better in many ways. The city centre, which was dying out a few decades ago, does not have empty shop windows any longer. Despite the climate, it is much more bicycle friendly than Oslo. And they have made a lovely area out of the once very run down neighbourhood Bakklandet, just across the bridge from the centre.

Here at Bakklandet you find the most interesting pub in town, Den gode nabo - The Good Neighbour. It started as a fairly humble place, but it has now expanded into the next door premises, so it can seat hundreds of guests. Lost of nooks and crannies, though, so you can have a private chat as well.

The Neighbour is located in one of the old wooden warehouses on the riverside; it is nice to see this part of the architectural heritage being used in such a way. And, for the smokers and for the rare sunny days, they even have a barge in the river where you can get fresh air with your beer. The menu is limited, you may have pizza and burgers, but there are also some selected dishes available from the more upmarket restaurant next door if you want something fancier.

The beer list is very extensive for Norway, being far better than, say, Beer Palace in Oslo. They are experimenting with cask ale from Nøgne ø, and they have a wide selection of beers, both imported and from Norwegian micros. They have even had Nøgne ø ales on cask, which is truly a rarity in this country.

I had a very nice chat here with fellow beer blogger Anders, whom I have only met virtually before. We were also joined by his wife Magni for a while. Good beer and pleasant company. To a large extent we discussed strategy for how to modify the Norwegian legislation stopping micro breweries and pubs from listing their beers online. I will come back to that later.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 15:24 | link | comments (3)
beer, norway, trondheim

Monday, 14 May 2007

Spam attacks

I am sorry it can take a few days before your comments appear on the blog. I have to moderate them, as there are large numbers of spam comments every day.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 10:18 | link | comments

Thursday, 10 May 2007

Irish pubs are losing ground

No, not the fake Oirish pubs you find everywhere from Heathrow's Terminal 3 to the farthest corners of the globe. The Irish countryside pubs don't attract as many customers as they used to, according to the Beeb. They blame the smoking ban, they blame the police with their breathalyzers and they blame the youngsters for staying at home drinking cheaper booze.

The only solution they can see is better public transport for unsteady rural customers. I'd say lower prices and a better range of beer could be tried out as well.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 10:50 | link | comments (5)
beer, ireland

Wednesday, 09 May 2007

How to waste a day in Cyprus

Professional obligations led to me spending a few days in Larnaca, Cyprus some weeks ago. A bit of online research had shown me that there is a brewpub in Cyprus, in the seaside city of Limassol. As I had half a day with no plans, I decided to take an excursion to check this out.

Public transportation is not up to much on the island, but they have a system of service taxis, which are minibuses picking you up where you want them to and then driving you to the next town. I asked the reception to order one for me, but I was informed that there would be an extra charge for the pick up, as the hotel was located too far from the centre.

Never mind. I was picked up at the hotel about 10 in the morning, we drove on to downtown Larnaca where some more passengers and parcels were added. Most of the passengers were locals, I suppose there are more tourists in high season. After zigzagging through the outskirts of the town, we picked up an old man outside his house and we were on our way.

The motorway goes partly inland and partly along the coast, and it was a pleasant way to see a bit of the country, with the spring greenery not yet having turned brown by the summer sun.

Arriving in Limassol I booked a return trip two hours later and set out to find the brew pub. The map I found on the web was not the most accurate, but after circling around the area for a bit I found it. The place has a splenid setting, on a quiet side street with a fine view of an old castle. At noon it was totally deserted, but the place is probably crowded in the evenings.

The interior is like brewpubs tend to be, with a row of gleaming copper kettles and the usual trimmings of reproductions of beer and whiskey commercial of bygone days.

There were several beer taps, including both domestic macros and imported beers as well as their own beers.

I picked up a menu, found a sidewalk table in the sun and ordered a salad with grilled vegetables and feta cheese. The menu mentioned lager, pilsener, wheat beer and ale. I asked the waiter to bring me a half pint of all their own beers. He seemed a bit bewildered, but soon arrived with a mountain of a salad – and a glass of pale lager.

The salad was great – they seem to share the kitchen with several other establishments in the same building complex. The beer was just as pale lagers are everywhere, if I had been served the same beer elsewhere being told it was a Carlsberg, I would not have objected.

I finished my beer, and motioned the waiter to come over.

- I would like to try the other beers you brew here, pleas. May I have a glass of each?

- I am sorry. The lager is the only beer we have on. We only brew one beer at a time. You can have a draught Leffe. Or Guinness.

- So you don’t have the ale? Ot the wheat beer?

- No. When this is finished, we will have another beer for sale.

Being a polite guest in a foreign country, I bit my tongue, before ordering another half pint of the lager. I asked for the bill and walked back to the minibus.

I have to admit the return was a bit gloomy. £ 20 in taxi fare. Three hours of driving which I could have spent by the pool. All this for a pint of pale lager.

Next time I’ll probably call the pub before setting out on such an expedition.

But, since you ask, the salad was great.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 14:50 | link | comments (1)
beer, microbreweries, cyprus

Sunday, 06 May 2007

Back to the roots

In the rural areas of Norway, there are long traditions of home brewing. Traditionally, farms in the barely-growing areas of Norway used to brew their own beer for different seasons – for the hay harvest, for Christmas, for baptisms and for funerals. There are even laws from medieval times giving fines for those who did not brew the appropriate beer.

The home brewing has dwindled until recently, with serious brewing only taking place in Voss, near Bergen, and in the Stjørdal area in the fertile landscape along the Trondheim fjord.

While commercial brewing has grown, with the big brewers eating the small ones and closing them down, the distance between the local brewers and the commercial brewers has gron, decade by decade. Luckily, there are those who want to make their craft beer available on a slightly more commercial scale, though, given the tax regime and other regulations it is not too easy.

Ølve på Egge brewery is located in Steinkjer, some kilometres from Stjørdal, and the brewer has been bottling his beers for a few years. They are very hard to come by, though. My brother in law smuggled a bottle out for a pub some time ago to give me, but, alas, he finished it off one evening before it got to me.

Last week there was a message on a Norwegian beer web sites that some bottles were available at Fenaknoken, an ole fashioned food shop in Central Oslo, dedicated to traditional food from all corners of the country. I went there during my lunch break to pick up the tow beers available.

The beer, which has been brewed for a few years is called Ølve på Egge, the name giving echoes of beer referred to in the Norse sagas of a millennium ago. This region is thick with history from the Viking age, and it is appropriate to refer to this when you brew a beer according to traditions that have been handed down through the centuries.

This is a pre-Reinheitsgebot stuff, brewed with juniper twigs. It is a cloudy, malty beer that tastes of the malt that is the main ingredient, with no fuss about hops from faraway places. (Well, the hops would be from faraway places, but they are not of any extreme variety.)

It has a full, rather sweet flavour, with some hints of summer fruit and even some spices – pepper and cinnamon comes to mind. There is some smokiness here, too, which I think is appropriate to how the malt has been traditionally processed.

This is a dark brew, with a low carbonation from the maturation in the bottle. It is no surprise that this beer is not pasteurized.

The outstanding feature here is the finish, which is crispy dry. The hops may do their thing here, but it mainly the juniper in the mash making a dry, tongue-curling feeling lingering in the mouth which shows that this is a beer that is a very distant relative from the standard Norwegian watery lager.

This is a beer for Norwegian traditional food. Smoked and cured rib of mutton, cured ham, fermented fish or smoked salmon. This is a beer that should have a more general release.

The Jubileumsøl is brewed on the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of Steinkjer as a township. This is a lighter and brighter brew, but it is certainly not your average pale lager, either. It has a sweet malty, soft flavour. Under pressure, I would say it is a bit too sweet, perhaps. It is related to the German or Austrian old fashioned zwickl or kellerbiers , and I am happy to see a beer of this style available – this is far better than the similar brew from the Atna micro.

Now, where can I get my hands on a bottle of Ølve Bokk? The regulations here in Norway say it cannot be sold in a grocery store, and it probably is no sold in quantities large enough to be distributed at Vinmonopolet. A pub in the region of the brewer, perhaps?

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 21:36 | link | comments
beer, norway

There is a review

in today's New York Times, of a book called The Joy of Drinking. Which should not pass unmentioned here. When I get around to ordering the book, let alone reading it, I might review it myself.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 19:47 | link | comments
beer

Friday, 04 May 2007

Murder by review

A A Gill is at it again. This week he is dissecting Suka, a Malay restaurant in London's West End. A sample sentence:

Nastiest, and most memorable, was the oyster omelette, like fried lung cookie in emphysema.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 15:23 | link | comments
london

A Swedish mild

Jay over at the Brookston Beer Bulletin is the hub in a coordinated beer blogging effort, this month focusing on mild ale, and this is my contribution:

Pumpviken påskøl is the Easter offering from the Nynäshamn Steam Brewery. I have written about beers from this brewery before, as I had the pleasure of trying out two of their draft beers when I was in Stockholm last year. They brewery is located in a coastal town an hour south of Stockholm by commuter train – an excellent starting point for exploring the Stockholm archipelago.

Their stout and IPA are fine examples of a micro with a focus on quality. Until recently, their beer was only available on cask in a few select pubs in the area, but luckily they are bottling some of their brews now.

It was very convenient that their Easter beer this year was a mild, as beer bloggers around the worlds are focusing on mild today. So, what is a mild? Today this style is rather hard to find, but some decades ago, this was the standard cask ale in the British Isles. The usual cask ale nowadays is a bitter, and in the nearly 30 years I’ve been drinking ale in England on my yearly visits, I have rarely encountered it. It is most often a low alcohol beer, a type of ale I associate with coal miners and farm labourers wanting a fairly neutral and a fairly weak beer they could enjoy in quantities without getting totally wasted before last orders.

So, a cask mild would typically be 3.0-3.5 % ABV, while the bottle in front of me lands at 5.8%. Yet, I think the taste profile is true to the type. It is less bitter than a bitter, and more flavourful than a (standard) brown ale. It is nutty, with lost of sugar from the malt, which is not subdues by dryness from the hops. There are hops, sure, bur they add more of a flowery full flavour. There is some dryness in the finish, though.

This beer reminds me of a good schwartzbier or bock, using the same caramel malt to give it a coca-cola colour. It is pleasant enough to sip, but it is like those Austrian lagers – the low level of bitterness ends up a bit boring on my palate, not really refreshing enough.

I’m happy to raise my glass for those – inside or outside CAMRA – who struggle to keep this style alive. But I can understand why this has gone out of fashion.

These ramblings about the style are from the top of my head. For more accurate information, you should read the posts of the other bloggers!

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 09:59 | link | comments
beer, sweden, mild

Thursday, 03 May 2007

Truly vintage

Charles Campion writes in his blog at thisislondon.co.uk about a tasting of vintage ales in Burton. The oldest was the 1869 Ratcliff Ale., followed by:

1902 King's Ale

1977 Jubilee Strong Ale

1978 Princess Ale

1982 Prince's Ale

1990 Worthington White Shield

2002 Queen's Ale

2002 Duke's Ale

2006 Worthington White Shield

He does not have much in the way of tasting notes, though.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 14:20 | link | comments
beer, england

Some useful science at last

Mathematicians have come up with a formula that predicts how the head on a pint of beer will change after pouring.

This could explain why the foam on a pint of lageThe walls of these bubbles move as a result of surface tension. The speed at which the walls move is proportional to the curvature of the bubbles. r quickly disappears, but the froth on a pint of Guinness sticks around.

The research could not only provide tips for better brewing, but could also have applications in metallurgy.

Beer foam, as well as metals and ceramics - for which the formula also works, is a cellular structure comprising networks of gas-filled bubbles separated by liquid.

As a result of this movement, the bubbles merge and the structure "coarsens", meaning that the foam settles and eventually disappears.

This story is nicked from BBC online, who found it in the journal Nature. The original article is named The von Neumann relation generalized to coarsening of three-dimensional microstructures, in case you really wanted to know.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 12:32 | link | comments
beer

Wednesday, 02 May 2007

Copenhagen beer festival

Yes, it is on this year as well, but I won't be there. May is the month for family obligations in Norway, and this year is no exception. But I am sure all of you who plan to go will have a great time.

There are special brews from the major players on the Danish craft beer scene, raters and tickers meet up, there are special events on at several breweries. And more than 1000 beers, which means there will be something for everyone.

Envious? Nah....

But they could have made a new poster design instead of just changing the dates.

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