Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Evening in Bruges
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
15 December 2025 – Evening in Bruges beer
Would you trust a man with a clip-on black beard, wearing a dark bowler hat with a cherry stuck on top? Oh, you would. Well, actually, I did too, or else I wouldn’t have sampled this beer with him as its trademark.
Do you know, I’ve drunk some strange-named beers in my time, including Watney’s Party Seven, beer products which end in the word ‘Best’, when clearly they aren’t, or if they are, God help us, and a nice little number which you couldn’t take home to the vicar called Bollock Twanger, but I’ve got to hand it to the Belarus brewery, Lidskoe Pivo, beer names don’t come more Gregory Peck or Cary Grant than an Evening in Bruges. It sounds a lot better than a wet weekend in Scunthorpe.
Although I had a friend at school who went by the nickname ‘Cherry’, on account of his having a larger and more bulbous nose than the American actor Karl Malden, I am never going to Bruges in the evening or at any other time of the day if men with bigger ones than mine – beards – are going to run around looking fruity with cherries in their bowler hats. It’s bad enough in the UK, come every election, when imbeciles wear Labour rosettes and on no-pride days when the streets are infested with scantily clad, suspect, rainbow-flag wearers with extremely tight or no pants. They might not be any relation to the Bee Gees; thus, their pants may not enable them to sing those very high notes, but they’re typically in the same club as those who change their avatars when they are told to do so.
“We know you are there! Come out from behind that nose with your trousers up!” That’s the sort of thing we would cry at Cherry when we were at school. Yes, we actually were at school sometimes! Not often, but it occasionally happened. Who was that who said it shows?
Beer review links:
[Butauty] [Kanapinis (light)] [Kanapinis (dark)]
[Keptinis Farmhouse][Bistrampolio] [387 Osobaya Varka][Double Mother T.]
[Tapkoc Belgian Blond Ale]
I didn’t shout any such thing at this cherry-flavoured bottle of beer, not because I am more mature than I was when I obviously wasn’t, or could be accused of growing up, but because I was sitting there on my Jack Jones, sat there in the attic, not forgetting Ginger the cat, but he considers me stark-raving human anyway, whilst anywhere else I might have succumbed, it did not seem appropriate, so what you could say, if you cared to, is that I deferred to my better judgement. Hah! You didn’t know I had one of those, did you!
I am not one – no, indeed, I am not – who generally, or whilst being any other rank, goes bananas over fruit beers. To paraphrase that in beer-speak, I am not an additives or adjunct man. But, occasionally, when I’m less myself than usual, pretending, for example, that I’m the famous Simon Templar, I steal across the threshold of caution to acquaint myself with something that could even be outrageously new, although adventures of this nature are by virtue of discretion mainly confined in my later years to beer.
So, Cherry he was; and cherry it is.
Rather pleased with myself that someone else had bought this beer for me, so I didn’t have to pay for it, I nevertheless took off the top in a less than cavalier fashion, and moving my nostrils gingerly (Sorry, Ginger, ‘meow’), as though they had become instruments for taking out a bomb fuse, I lowered them rather gently in order to sample the scent within. And, you’ll never guess what it smelt of – it smelt this beer of cherries!
Evening in Bruges Beer: what’s it like?
I don’t believe that I am violating any brewery secrets by revealing that the reason why an Evening in Armston, sorry, I meant to say Evening in Bruges, releases a cherry bouquet is because it contains real cherry juice, which is good, because it would be a poor look-out and no mistake if a bottled beer with a man on its label holding a cherry in his John Steed bowler was found to be full of apple pips.
Was it strong? Was Charles Atlas? He must be. He’s flying around in space at the moment pretending to be an alien spacecraft disguised as a boring comet?
Back here on planet Earth (where we are all so glad to be), let out like the genie from its bottle, the cherry aroma lingered, and the flavour was strong enough to make me say involuntarily, “This beer I am drinking tastes of cherries.” And who could argue with that!
The cherry taste is flavoursome but also rather sweet.
It isn’t tart, for if it was, it would then be cherry tart. And it wasn’t, and it isn’t.
Evening in Bruges Beer: what’s it like?
I am not entirely sure whether the grain dilutes the cherry or vice versa, but one or the other waves the white flag and surrenders to the one that doesn’t. I suppose I’m trying to say, using a cack-handed beer-connoisseur impressive and smug type of lingo, that the two components are balanced, or I simply could be saying, purely on a subconscious level, that the taste of an Evening in Bruges is like playing a game of baseball with one or two bases missing.
My defining take on this beer is that it is a pleasant enough novelty brew with an eye-arresting label, but that it has neither the taste nor alcohol strength to firmly polish your cherries or blow them off the tree. However, with a strength of 4.4%, it should not give you the pip, or should you be the pernickety type, please feel free to change that remark to it should not get you stoned; that’s quite enough for me – 4.4%, I mean. However, there are those who move in more lordly circles than the ones I casually spin in, who hold fast to the conviction that if fruit juice is to be added to hops, then the end-resulting beverage is in need of greater strength and density.
Shrug! Shrug! And lastly, Pofik!
It could be worse, I suppose. I would rather an Evening in Bruges, cherry or no cherry, than losing it in Bedford’s Brewpoint drinking pints of Charlie at six or seven quid a pop. In fact, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir, I believe that if push came to shove, I would rather drink a pint of pop than Charlie’s!………
Life may never be a bowl of cherries, but it can be what you make it: all you need is an Evening in Bruges.
😊BOX TICKER’S CORNER
Name of Beer: Evening in Bruges
Brewer: Lidskoe Pivo (Lidskoe Beer)
Where it is brewed: Belarus
Bottle capacity: 0.5 litre
Strength: 4.4%
Price: 130 roubles (£1.20)
Appearance: Dark with a reddish hue
Aroma: Cherry
Taste: Cherry
Fizz amplitude: 3%
Label/Marketing: A man with a large cherry in his hat
Would you buy it again? Never say never
Beer rating
The brewer’s website has this to say about Evening in Bruges:
It is the first beer in the Kalekciya Maistra product line, which has been available since 2014. It is a dark beer with a subtle cherry hue and distinctive flavour. The beer has a nice smooth taste with rich cherry tones complemented by a caramel sweetness and a slight hop bitterness.
Website: https://lidskae.by/en/
Wot other’s say [Comments on an Evening in Bruges beer from the internet, unedited]
🤔🤔There aren’t many people out there saying much about this beer at present, possibly because it is still waiting to be discovered, sampled and reviewed, but this is what Mr Artificial Intelligence has to say:
😉It’s a dark beer from Lidskoe, likely styled to taste good in a Belgian-themed setting, rather than being authentically Belgian. [Comment: So, presumably, according to Arseofficial Intelligence, you must only drink it after a vist from the Belgian film-set designers.]
A competition for those too young to know much: who are these people?:
*Gregory Peck
*Cary Grant
*Karl Malden
*Ginger the cat
*The Bees Knees (clue: tight pants)
*John Steed
*Charles Atlas
*Charlie Wells
and what about Arthur J. Pye?*******
👉Name the films and TV programmes in which they starred and their favourite beer.
👌First prize for the correct answer, an Evening in Hemington
