Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)
Article 24: Taurus
Oh, come on! Even those of you who are far too rational to have any truck with mystic nonsense know that Taurus is an astrological sign and, for what it’s worth, the second astrological sign in the modern zodiac. No, not the Ford Zodiac. Who remembers those long bench seats and that tricky column gear stick?!
The zodiac sign for Taurus is the bull. Zodiac people are said to be hard-headed, down-to-earth, tenacious, reliable, loyal, and sensual. I wonder if the latter quality is why so many wear the cuckold’s horns?
Reviewing Taurus Beer in Kaliningrad
So, this beer that I am reviewing today, this pilsner, is named after the second sign of the zodiac. It has a bull’s head on the label, so it must be so, but we won’t know if the label stands for zodiac sign or something else until we attempt to drink it. Well, they ~ the brewers and distributors ~ are hardly likely to adorn the bottle with a hefty pile of bull droppings, are they?
Now, I’m not a pilsner man … blah … blah … blah …. Yes, you’ve heard it all before, but that does not mean that I am not afraid to try it. I once tried a liberal girlfriend. At least, I think she was a girl? Maybe, she was a feminist.
There are some out there who say yes, but … and they don’t get any further because they are drinking a good strong ale, but others say a pilsner is a pilsner is a pilsner, and most of them are me. But what the tongue doesn’t taste the tum can’t grieve about, so whilst you can’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs (why would she want to?), you can occasionally, on a hot afternoon, get a real-ale drinker to forget his religion and sip an ice-cold lager.
And if that lager is pilsner, make sure that it is ice cold, or it could taste like the bull I am hoping this pilsner will not be.
So, off we go with the top and up to the nostrils: ‘Dull, sour smell’ ~ make a note of that.
I pour it into the glass, and it looks light. I am relieved about that; don’t want to be asking, what did you do with the water that you washed the bull’s hind quarters with?
I sip it; I taste it; I swig it: Dull metallic taste. “Just as I thought, Watson!”
“Well, you silly bugger Holmes, why on earth did you buy it?”
“Why, because I have this ‘Year of the Bull’ tea towel, which I knew would make for a very interesting photograph even if the bull’s head attachment makes it a very inconvenient tea towel.”
“What a load of bullocks!” In the farmer’s field opposite. {Watson is looking out of the window into the farmer’s field opposite.}
The strength of the beer is not OTT. It weighs in at a very respectable 4.6%, which in the hereabouts, Kaliningrad, would be seen as lightweight but in the UK regarded as A-OK. For example, a matador could drink it and still not be incapable of waving his little red handkerchief.
As with many lagers, iced over from the fridge as if imported from a Siberian winter, pilsner is nothing to do with taste but all to do with coldness and getting it down your throat, hence the expression ‘Lager Louts’. Obviously, no regard for taste and quality equals no regard for decorum.
Drinking Taurus Beer in Kaliningrad
Some pilsner lagers evade the spell checker and by the time you have finished drinking them, let alone writing about them, they have turned into something else. I am relieved to say, however, that Taurus does qualify as a pilsner, not a pisner. It has all the ~ we won’t say qualities, but we will allow ourselves to use the word usefulness ~ of an alcoholic drink that comes in handy on a hot sweaty day.
And that was the penultimate sentence, which leaves you wondering how exactly, given the Taurus-bull connection, I resisted including a word like bullshit.
😀TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: Taurus Brewer: Kalnapilis Brewery Where it is brewed: Panevėžys, Lithuania Bottle capacity: 1 litre Strength: 4.6% Price: It cost me about 127 roubles (£1.38) [at time of writing!] Appearance: Light Aroma: Dull, sour Taste: Typical pilsner Fizz amplitude: 4/10 Label/Marketing: A load of bull Would you buy it again? Hmm, debateable … Marks out of 10: 4.5
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
Illustrations of classical architecture attempting to convey the innate quality and time-honoured grandeur that we associate with ancient Rome, together with heraldic symbols are not necessarily the certified hallmark of either a good or barely drinkable beer that we might be beguiled into thinking it is. And thus, we have a case in point: Hemeukoe Pils.
The packaging of Hemeukoe (Nemetskoe) Pils reminds me of a house I know in Northamptonshire made singularly unmissable by a pair of concrete horse’s heads squatting on its gate posts. Are such embellishments an admission of, or indeed an admission to, the aristocracy of quality? No, and they never have been. But from their ostentatiousness you do get a whiff of something else.
That whiff, once the top has been removed from the Hemeukoe Pils’ bottle, reminds me of a lot of things, none of which belongs to beer. I am not going to tell you what it is exactly, because exactly doesn’t come into it, but try to imagine something pungent strained through a pair of unwashed gym shorts.
Urban gentlemen of the road, those who doss down on the forecourts of London’s mainline stations, could feasibly conclude that the smell is not unlike that damp sheet of cardboard they rescued from Asda’s bin last month and on which they have slept every night since.
The smell improves in the glass but doesn’t become a bouquet of roses. It is rather like opening the window of a sleep-in-late hormonal teenager’s bedroom. And that’s as good as it gets.
Hemeukoe Beer in Kaliningrad
It does say ‘Pils’ on the bottle, but very soon I got to thinking that perhaps they spelt it wrong, when what they intended to print was not exactly ‘Pils’ but ‘Really Peculiar’.
Ambiguity in the smell was repeated in the colour. At arms length, it looked yellow and slightly hazy in the glass, but on closer inspection neither here nor there nor even anywhere. It was as it was and what that was, was strictly not what I thought it would be: Pils.
The colour was like nothing I had ever seen; the taste like nothing I have ever tasted, wished I hadn’t and would never want to again. In both respects, it even excelled the Baltika 3 taste problem. And that ~ as The Velvelettes once warbled ~ is ‘really saying something’!
Sweet and buttery with a chemical twist, the latter usurping the former and occupying the aftertaste like 1940s’ Germans in Paris, this was my first taste of Hemeukoe Pils; was it trying to tell me something?
For a moment I thought that this something had something to do with identity and was something to do with Kvas, but before I could completely trash the dynastic reputation of a soft drink which in Russia is regarded as a national institution, the taste had turned to strong, rank tea, heavy on the tannin.
Hemeukoe Beer in Kaliningrad
Whatever you may say about its taste, there is a lot going on in Hemeukoe. It is just not going on in a very complementary or remotely satisfactory way.
There is an ascending scale of sourness in the aftertaste, which in its unexceptional way hangs on the back of your throat and leaves you wondering, anxiously, whether come the morrow, you will still be on good terms with your digestive system and bowels.
It was late at night when I was drinking Hemeukoe. It was the only beer that I had in the house, so even had I spotted the clue secreted in its name ~ Hemeukoe ~ the anagram would not have, could not have, saved me from indulging in what was without exaggeration quite simply the most appalling brew I have ever had the misfortune to sabotage my vitals with, and one which I ardently hope I will never experience again.
I am tempted to say that you could do worse if offered a glass of this than to politely refuse and remain an onlooker. Never mind the prejudiced cliché that innocent bystanders always get hurt, refusing to drink Hemeukoe Pils might well just prove to be the exception to the rule.
A friend of mine who considers himself to be something of an expert where beer is concerned disputes the taxonomy of Hemeukoe Pils, claiming that HP is not so much a beer as an alcoholic infusion, and it is this that makes it taste like nothing on Earth and more like something imported from the planets Heavy and Oily.
Even without empirical evidence I might be inclined to agree, but I was busy jotting the name of the beer onto a piece of paper and committing it to memory in order to ensure that even if my life depended on it, I would never make the mistake of buying Hemeukoe Pils again.
TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: Hemeukoe Pils (Nemetskoe ot Bochkarev (German from Bochkarev) Brewer: Heineken Where it is brewed: Saint Petersburg Bottle capacity: 1.35 litre Strength: 4.7% Price: It cost me about 137 roubles (£1.54) [at time of writing!] Appearance: A washy brown colour Aroma: It doesn’t smell like beer Taste: It doesn’t taste like beer Fizz amplitude: 4/10 Label/Marketing: Bold to the point of misleading Would you buy it again? Read the review! Marks out of 10: 2
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
The important thing is that we wouldn’t be allowed to drink it in the UK, at least not unless we wrapped the bottle in a flag of a different country, as the Union Jack has been radicalised by oversensitive ethnics operating under the auspices of liberal-left self-culture loathers.
Recalling how racist it was to fly the national flag during the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I wasted no time in removing the cap from the bottle, took a quick whiff, made a couple of notes, decanted it into my beer glass and hid the bottle behind a nearby chair. And then I remembered that I was not in the UK but drinking beer in Russia, where, oddly enough, nobody seemed to mind if my bottle displayed a Union Jack or not.
I must say that whenever I see bottled beers which are flag- or otherwise-affiliated with countries of distant origin, particularly western countries and more specifically England, I tend to avoid them or, failing that, buy them out of curiosity but rarely make the mistake again.
Thus, I remind you that it was not I who purchased this ‘anglicised’ beer, but my wife. Not that I am complaining: Wives who buy husbands beer are why they are wives in the first place, not left on the shelf like Watneys; they exhibit a finely tuned awareness of the status quo and a responsibility to it that makes anything, even anything vaguely feministic, almost acceptable and often excusable. But as redeemable as such commendable actions are, what wives don’t know about beers you couldn’t fit into Biden’s mind, so let that be an end to the matter.
Relying on the same nose that I was born with, rather than a sex-changed appendage, whilst making allowances for its toxic masculinity, it had me know that the Beer that I was smelling was a hoppy thing overly mixed with blackberries and infused with the essence of Vimto.
The mixture poured into the glass rapidly. I was thirsty. It gave a froth and then quickly took it back again, like a present I didn’t deserve, and what was left on the sides of the glass couldn’t be bothered to stay.
The first sip was like thrusting your head into a mixed bag of fruit in search of hops ~ “Come out with your hops up, we know you’re in there!” And sure enough, after some coaxing the hops came out, yet not with a white but purple flag. Can you drink a colour? The chemical fruit intensifies as it descends in the gullet, yet although the hue is a faint light amber your mind is fixed on purple. I believe it’s what’s called a trick of the light.
Bochkarev British Amber Beer in Kaliningrad
At a very sensible 4.3% OG, alcohol content can play no part in delivering the firm impression that you are consuming a very sweet energy drink packed with glucose and fructose or that, whilst you were looking the other way in search of a real beer, someone snuck up behind you and stuck a stick of rock in your glass. Similar things can happen, I’m told, if you turn your back in Brighton.
With this exception noted, I have to say that Bochkarev British Amber is possibly the most unBritish beer that I have ever tasted, and if this is Heineken at its best then thank the lord that they have Fd off from Russia (ie, Finally decided to go).
I do not pretend to speak for everyone, since your taste is probably different to mine and mine is probably better. Nevertheless, Bochkarev British Amber could explain why certain Russian celebrities took European holidays at the coincidental times that they did and that when Heineken took a similar holiday they returned to the safety of a decent beer. Like the death of Freddie Mills in 1960s’ London, Bochkarev British Amber ~ what it is made of, why they bother to stew it and why they call it British ~ may forever remain a mystery.
😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: Bochkarev British Amber Brewer: Heineken Brewery Where it is brewed: St Petersburg Bottle capacity: 1.35 litre Strength: 4.3% Price: It cost me about 187 roubles (£2.53 pence) [at time of writing!] Appearance: A shade amberish Aroma: It doesn’t smell like beer Taste: It doesn’t taste like beer Fizz amplitude: 4/10 Label/Marketing: Counterfeit British Would you buy it again? No Marks out of 10: 2
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
Mick Hart reviews the London Pub (Pub London) Kaliningrad
Published: 14 August 2022 ~ London Pub Kaliningrad Best Pub not in London
My first encounter with the London Pub, or Pub London as it is known in Kaliningrad (note the crafty way the Russian language confuses us!), took place in the summer of 2015. Let me say from the outset that I was not attracted to it just because I used to live in London and it calls itself the London Pub.
Thankfully, whenever I visit a foreign country the need to hotfoot-it to the nearest British themed bar to cry wistfully into my beer in demonstrative affection for the native land I have left behind ~ even though I may only have left it yesterday ~ is a failing I have yet to cultivate, and one I suspect may forever remain a singularly Irish phenomenon. For wherever you go in the world, you can always be sure to find, usually when you least expect or want to, shamrock, porter and diddley dee.
No, what appealed to me about the London Pub, forgoing for the moment the historic building in which it is housed, was the layout, interior décor and the atmosphere bestowed by both; a combination which was “a tad unfortunate” as this entry in my diary, dated 8 March 2020, shows: “upon our arrival [at the London Pub] we found that it had undergone a complete and startling refit.”
Incidentally, on that day, which would be the last day I would drink at the London Pub until the ‘all-clear sirens’ sounded on the two-year coronavirus blitz, we got our first glimpse of the new-look world. For it was in the London Pub that we were introduced to what was destined to become that global, or rather globalist, absurd coronavirous fashion accessory, the never proven to be effective but still mandatory mask.
The London Pub staff were wearing their new regulation uniforms ~ black waistcoats, bow ties and black bowler hats (and other things, I hasten to add) ~ which were excellent in themselves as they suited the London Pub ethos ~ but teamed with coronavirus muzzles?! Laugh, of course we did, little knowing at the time that this sinister remake of Clockwork Orange was a prelude to our future.
Right>>: London pub staff kindly poses for our camera. This photo taken in May 2022, post-coronavirus mask era >
When I say our future, I mean to imply the world in general, as Olga and I only ever wore masks in situations where we had no choice, such as when travelling on public transport or shopping in the supermarket. As soon as choice resumed, off the silly masks came.
We returned to the London Pub in May this year (2022), which is when the photographs used in this post were taken. The observations, however, have been borrowed from my diary, written on the day when we discovered that the London Pub had been dramatically refurbished, which was 8 March 2020.
Above: Mick Hart enjoying a ‘hair of the dog’ at the London Pub, circa summer 2015
The London Pub that is not in London
The ground floor of Kaliningrad’s London Pub, accessed as it is by a flight of steps, is effectively an elevation above street level. It consists of a large room divided in two by a crook-shaped bar, which is a copy, albeit an inaccurate one, of the ubiquitous horseshoe bar with which many a London Victorian pub is typified.
To the right of the bar, at the point where the loop curves, the narrower portion of the room no longer imitates the British convention of pubs divided into two social halves, the ‘public’ and the ‘lounge’, where the public bar was often more basic in fixtures, fittings and furnishings and the lounge, as the name implies, more comfortable and upmarket, attracting, in terms of class taxonomy, a better clientele. The old London pub was never exactly this, but I think it is fair to say that one side of the room, the narrow side, was less cushion-filled, textile based and given to reclining in than its more spacious counterpart.
Before the refit, the bar area was furnished with an assortment of tables, each seating between four to six people, some of which were separated if only to a symbolic degree by the inclusion of chest-high snob screens. The dominant colour, not just of the bar area but the entire pub, had been mid-blue; in keeping I suppose with the contemporary trend in British pubs for light and pastel painted interiors
Above: London Pub bar-side, circa summer 2015 Below: London Pub as it is today (photos: May 2022)
To justify the London Pub’s eponymous connection with England, stenciled references to traditional English idioms, well-known sayings such as ‘My cup of tea’ and the ‘Apple of my eye’, guested on the beams and walls together with quotes from British literary figures, men of letters and arcane wit, such as the famous and equally infamous Oscar Wilde with his ‘Moderation in all things, including moderation’.
London Pub Kaliningrad
From the looks of things, it appeared that whoever masterminded the pub refurbishment had borrowed from Oscar’s irony, since no moderation was apparent neither in the extent nor dramatic character of the changes.
Gone are the high stools in the alcoves, the circular tables and padded bench seats. The minimalist wall décor and the traditional British slogans have also been axed, substituted by an enormous profusion of curios, collectables, memorabilia, vintage and retro items of an exceedingly English nature. They proliferate on walls where no expense or imagination has been spared in the interest of procuring that tatty-torn, disheveled look which aspiring interior designers and Sunday-magazine supplement editors like to call ‘distressed’.
I wrote about distressed décor in my piece on the Georgian bar Kavkaz but the effect therein is far more restrained than it is in the London Pub.
The London Pub employs the same ageing technique of peeling wallpaper and fading paint. Like Kavkaz it seeks to create the impression, and succeeds, that fragments of old wallpaper and patches of former paint schemes are seeping through more recent layers, but the mat green and dull orange hues favoured by the London Pub are hauntingly subtle and a few extra trowels worth of rough-surfaced rendering spattered with differing tones conveys an authenticity that enticingly raises the question why if neglect is so deucedly comfortable should we ever go out of our way to improve on its virtue?
Above: How to make a wall distressed and then scatter it with memorabilia
The alcove to the customers’ right of the bar has been taken a step further into the world of designer neglect by plastering various parts of it with three or four scraps of newspaper, all belonging to bygone eras and which, by their torn, wanting and dog-eared state, pass as having been stuck to the wall for years rather than the few weeks it has taken to present them.
On top of this imaginative scheme of fading colours and random pages torn from British newspapers (By the way, The Three Kings pub in London’s Clerkenwell Green also favours newsprint walls.) no restraint has been exercised in turning back the clock to earlier times in Britain: framed prints of 18th century classic architecture, silk cigarette cards, film advertisements, decorative wall plates, pictures of celebrities, brassware, hunting horns and you name it and you’ll probably find it have found a home on the London Pub’s walls.
On the pier between the windows behind me hung a vintage English naval jacket with corresponding visor hat next to a British army officer’s cap and dress jacket. Other uniform combinations of a British military nature adorn the walls on the opposite side of the room; all familiar items to us, as many passed through our hands whilst running our vintage and antique shop in England.
Above: Vintage British military uniforms adorning the ‘aged’ walls of the London Pub
Each of the London Pub’s window piers have been fitted with a shelf enabling all manner of collectable items shipped to Russia from England to accumulate ‘naturally’ in a perfectly haphazard way. Neither my memory nor my imagination struggled with this concept, as the clutter and its variegation closely resembled a place I once called home, where junk and I co-existed in harmonic correlation.
Some of the London Pub’s shelves have become resting places for old books, diverse in topic but indefatigably English by origin, their covers turned to face the room for all the world to see. For example, behind me there was a book on the Royal Navy and at the other end of the same shelf one about Queen Elizabeth II (Gawd bless ‘er!). On other shelves nearby there was a book on England’s Home Guard (WWII) and a second on the Royal Navy but harking back to a different era. Above these books hang two ancient tennis rackets both constructed of good honest wood ~ none of your carbon-fibre nonsense here! ~ obsolete in themselves but appearing even more archaic slotted inside their square wooden braces.
Above: Clutter against its natural backdrop
Looking back from the bar towards the entrance of the London Pub it struck me that something rather exciting, even magical, had happened since I last drank here. The door surround had turned into a Tudor-Bethan fantasy. Thick, curved oak pilasters ~ or so we are led to believe ~ stepped cornices profusely carved and scrolled, rise above an elaborate entablature to an impressive second tier containing a grand, baroque, armorial crest, which speaks to us in medieval tones of the dynastic power of barons and earls, whilst a couple of coal buckets either side of the uprights speak in brass of a giant fireplace. Whatever you want it to be, it is only disappointing when exiting under its lordly lintel, the fantasy dissolves and you are back on the streets of the 21st century. And yet it could be worse, much worse, for at least the 21st-century streets on the other side of the door are not the ones that the Pub, if it was in London, would put you out on ~ streets that you walk in fear and at your peril! But you should have stayed for another pint, so it jolly well serves you right!
Above: The coal buckets on either side imply exiting into the real world via the fireplace
In the old London, the London Pub before the refit, we would have been sitting on plain, high-backed bar stools. Now, we were sitting on not-so-plain new-old bar stools, in other words stools antique in appearance but not so antique in age. At first glance, every other glance and a prolonged unfaltering stare, these ‘prop you up at the bar’ devices have more about them than just a touch of Louis. They have near heart-shaped backs and deep blue silver-trimmed frames. They incorporate a classical shell motif. Their front legs are sweeping sabres; their back legs pad-feet cabrioles. They are, of course, like the fireplace door, strictly fantasy pieces.
The bar top, which was rather plain before the refit, is now a satin polished light wood with a feature-distinctive grain. The choice of seats, either open armchairs or rectangular tubs, has been rescinded, replaced with the accent on uniformity. The new kids on the block are back-to-back button-down leather-look seats capable of accommodating six people comfortably around rectangular tables.
London Pub Kaliningrad refurbishment
The opposite side of the pub has also undergone a startling transformation. Gone is the design concept of no two seats or tables the same, and out with the low (far too low for comfort) chairs, which either put your knees around your ears or rested your chin on the table ~ an anomaly in restaurant seating that may by its regular recurrence be construed as peculiarly Russian. Gone also are the open-backed sofas sprinkled with various cushions that started off as comfy but at some point during the evening slid quietly and unreasonably away, off out through the latticework backs. In their place the same pitch-black, button-backed vinyl seats lining the walls and sitting at right angles to the windows in the ‘bar’ march along the room like two brigades of German stormtroopers. Whilst these seats might work in the smaller area as space-saving maximisers, they do not work for me in the larger portion of the room. They are much too regimented and just too much. It is hard to imagine any true London pub trying to get away with this, although put such seats in an American diner and Bob’s your uncle and Earl’s your aunt, no question!
Above: Seats very plush but also very regimented. However, also very comfortable
As I mentioned in my piece on the Kavkaz Restaurant and in my article Kaliningrad Art Exhibition, lighting is everything. The old London Pub could not be faulted in this respect and neither can its newer namesake.
Lighting in the London Pub Kaliningrad
About an hour after we had taken our seats at the bar, because every other seat was reserved (more about that at the end of this article), the lights went down a notch causing everything around us to turn seductively atmospheric. I had already noted that in the bar area a series of ceiling-recessed spotlights shone down on the mosaic floor, forming round circles of slowly changing colours. These had worked well when the lighting was up, but seen in the muted half-light are really quite spectacular.
The wall lighting bar side is augmented by long-reach Anglepoise lamps bolted in series along the wall. As my photos taken in 2015 reveal, similar lamps existed in the London Pub’s previous life, but they have multiplied since then and the poles on which they are mounted allow in addition to the angling of the shade a retraction or extension option. Smaller lamps of a similar type have the practical advantage of directing the light on the walls to illuminate the wornout theme and the eclectic items that live there. Taken together in sequence, the lamps add a touch of steampunk to the London Pub’s unique aesthetic.
Staying with lighting, in the old London, there had been a hanging structure, a sort of raft framework suspended from the ceiling on which lights were attached and sundry knick-knacks supported. This feature has been retained but cased inside a decorative unit, its segments of coloured glass echoing the stained-glass mosaics popularised in Victorian pubs. The glass work is predominantly green, profusely decorated with stylised floral motifs and geometrical patterns in pink and blue. The dimmed light shining through the casework receives a second tonal effect, a lightly suffusive overlay. The mood-conditioning aura that this creates is repeated in the curved translucent border that runs around the wall’s perimeter at the point where wall and ceiling meet. It is a continual convex band of Tiffany-patterned, luminous coving, which is subtle and highly effective.
Above: Uniforms, angled lamps and an illuminated coving screen of exotic abstracts
The London Pub’s lighting mix is such a fabulous orchestration that it is difficult, virtually inexcusable, to single out a centrepiece, but should I ever be pushed to do so I would probably opt for the pendant lights that float around the bar and dangle from the ceiling like so many gossamer Chinese lanterns. Large, floaty, bell-shaped silken balloons that would not be out of place in Alice’s Wonderland, these extraordinary, extravagant lamp shades are infinitely more fascinating than the screen of your mobile phone and make excellent, in every sense, dreamy light diffusers.
Above: Forget about the telly! Look at those delicious lanterns!
I liked the old London Pub, but I did not like it any better or any worse than the new one. Admittedly, before embarking on what must have constituted a not inexpensive design programme, the proprietor of the London Pub could have consulted the idiom ‘If it ‘aint broke don’t fix it’, but had this been the case we would have been deprived of the current iteration and forgone the concept of culture-linked vintage as a versatile, and if I may be so bold as to say not entirely conventional, idiomatic design approach.
There is no doubt in my mind that refraining from fixing unbroken things should have been the lesson taught to those corporate young men in suits employed by Britain’s breweries, who shoulder much of the blame for vanadalising and continuing to vandalise British pub interiors, showing scant regard for history and even less appreciation for atmosphere and taste.
Have you booked?
If I have one criticism of the London Pub ~ and to be fair, this is something that you come across in various Kaliningrad drinking establishments ~ it is the ‘all the tables are reserved’ trick.
Our visit to the London Pub in 2019, the day when I wrote the notes for this post, had been the third time we had stopped for a drink there in as many weeks, and each time we had been turned away as we had not reserved a table. On that occasion we were allowed to drink at the bar, although had we not explicitly asked to do so, we would have been asked to leave.
Above: It’s the only way they’d let me stay. I hadn’t booked a table.
We sat and drank in the London pub for over an hour, during which time five tables in the bar area became vacant and three of the reserved tables remained unoccupied. Being told to leave when you have not reserved a table, seems to me bad business sense. Surely, if a table is reserved for, let’s say 9pm, and someone without a reservation comes into the pub at 8pm, would it not make sense to permit paying customers to use that table for the duration that it is empty?
The psychology behind repeatedly turning people away who have not booked in advance might be that they will book in future and, if they have taken the trouble to book, will prolong their patronage throughout the evening.
If so, then this is a fallacy. Turning customers away results in resentment not patronage, and I can think of no pub in London that would entertain the notion. I am not suggesting that the London Pub or any other drinking/eating establishment in Kaliningrad try to emulate the ‘stack ‘em high treat them cheap’ model adopted in UK city pubs, pampering the customer never hurt anyone, but it is advisable to remember that modern-day Kaliningrad hosts an awful lot of competition, which is growing all the time, and that customer loyalty is predicated not only on atmosphere and commendable service but also reliability. Not everyone wants to plan ahead, and regular casual trade, ignored, deterred, is money lost to somebody else’s bar till and customer loyalty possibly lost forever.
Here endeth the lesson.
Having got that off my chest, I can say without fear of contradicting myself that the London Pub continues to be one of the most atmospheric, ingeniously designed, relaxing drinking and eating establishments that anyone could wish for. In fact, I am prepared to go so far as to say that any guide to Kaliningrad’s bars that does not include the London Pub in its ‘best of’ top-10 line-up either does not know his quality from his dross, is mathematically challenged or both. It really is that simple.
✔ The London Pub, probably the best London pub not to be found in London!
The London Pub in Kaliningrad, Russia, is a unique and charismatic venue vying for top place in Kaliningrad’s bar, restaurant and entertainment scene. It bills itself as a ‘real English pub’, and I have to admit it comes very close. Boasting a choice of 35 draft beers, if you can’t find something to suit your palate at the London Pub then you should urgently switch to drinking something else. As with the interior décor, ambience and beer selection, the menu is varied, surprising and reputedly tasty. Something that I have not touched upon in my review is that lurking below the London Pub there are two extremely atmospheric late-night/early morning music clubs called, respectively, the ‘City Jazz’ and ‘Piano Bar’. I can reveal that I have frequented both, but since they are endowed with their own distinctive ambience, they deserve to be treated separately from the assessment of the public bar and restaurant. Hopefully, we will get together soon and chat about them at our leisure.
Note: Many thanks to Mr … er, I think his name was Mr Sober, who wrote to inform me that the bottle photographs originally included in this post bore no connection whatsoever to the beer that I was writing about. What better recommendation for Lidskae Staryi Zamak beer could you ask for!
Needing an excuse to drink beer is not an affliction from which I personally suffer, but with all these articles in the UK media obsessing on the possibility of WWIII and nuclear strikes, I thought it would be prudent of me to take cover in my local shop and dodging incoming sanctions come out with a bottle of beer, or two.
Leonard Cohen named his valedictory album, You want it darker. But I didn’t. I was looking for a light beer, which is to say a light-in-colour beer. The strength was of no importance, but I did want something with taste.
Having enjoyed the Belarus-brewed beer Lidskae Aksamitnae, I opted to try the light version, Lidskae Staryi Zamak. If I had wanted a strong beer, I would not have been disappointed, as Staryi Zamak weighs in at an impressive 6.2%, which is higher in alcohol content than its ‘black as the ace of spades’ brother.
They tell me that this is a bottom fermenting beer, which could mean different things to different people, but for beer afficionados and brewing types, this information has important implications, which neither you nor I will dwell on because we are far too busy taking off the bottle top and smelling.
“Hello, is that Nose?”
“Hello, Nose here.”
“Tell me Nose, what do you detect?”
“Beer!”
“Yes, well, that’s a good start. Anything else?”
“It’s pungent …”
“Still talking about the beer?”
“Yes. No, wait a minute, it’s grainy; yes, definitely grainy. No, hold hard, its … it’s fragrant, a teeny-weeny bit fragrant … Oh, what a to do! It’s so hard to smell anything with the wokist stench of fear rising from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter …”
“What’s that, Nose. You’re cracking up. Did you say musky or melon?”
“Bottom fermenting …”
“We’ve done that one. I know, what about all three?”
“Ay?”
“Pungent, grainy and fragrant?”
“If you like. But he’s still a transphobe!”
Hmm, must be a liberal-left nose.
We won’t ask liberal-left tongue about taste. It will be far too busy in the coming weeks now that Elon Musk is taking over Twatter.
Lidskae Staryi Zamak Beer
To recap: here we have a 6.2% pale-straw coloured, bottom-fermenting lager, with a pungent, grainy, fragrant liberal-left nose.
Moving on to taste, all these things are present (except the liberal left, thank heavens). Lidskae Staryi Zamak is an interesting blend of flavours, sweet and bitter at one and the same time but rhapsodically blended with no ragged edges. The finish is light and hoppy, although the aftertaste becomes, owing no doubt to the strength, substantial, not heavy exactly but mature and rounded ~ shaped largely like most women after they’ve gone through the menopause.
Corsets nice to drink with food, but have you noticed how irritating some beer reviewers can be in this respect? It’s all very well to say that this beer or that beer goes well with whole roasted peacock, stuffed venison and absent McDonald’s but unless you are Henry the Eighth such lightweight delicacies may not be at hand (which is especially true of McDonald’s). I’ll settle for saying that you won’t go far wrong with a big bag of nuts, a packet of flavoured crisps and a bowl of olives.
Lidskae Staryi Zamak, not to be confused with You Big Hairy Wassock, which is a beer that is drunk in the North of England whilst wearing a pigeon and fancying flat caps (latterly scarves more likely), is a good strong and full-bodied beer but not so overpowering that it does not possess the potential to bring out the best in good-flavoured foods and selected piquant snacks.
Lidskae Staryi Zamak Beer
I like this beer as much if not more than I liked its black sister (or was that it’s black brother?), Lidskae Aksamitnae. I enjoyed it. It clung to the glass, as I did, and after a couple of bottles I also clung to the stair rail.
I was head over heels, with delight that is, which is a big improvement, I’m sure you’ll agree, on the alternative arse over head. And the overheads are by no means bad at 197 a bottle (we are talking payment in roubles, of course!).
😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: Lidskae Staryi Zamak Brewer: Leedska piva Where it is brewed: Lida, Belarus Bottle capacity: 1.5 litre Strength: 6.2% Price: It cost me about 197 roubles (2.20 pence) [at time of writing!] Appearance: Pale Aroma: Subtle mix of grain and herbs Taste: Full bodied, rounded Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: Traditional Would you buy it again? I am quite sure I will Marks out of 10: 8
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)
Published: 30 March 2022 ~ OXOTA Beer in Kaliningrad
Article 19: OXATA
I have often seen it, but I’ve never tried it, but when I saw a chap in front of me paying for two bottles of it at the local supermarket checkout, I decided that it was high time that I did. I’m talking about Ohota Krepkoye beer (OXOTA beer), a strong Russian beer from the Heineken Brewery* in St Petersburg with an OG of 8.1% and a label affirming real men, and now me, drink it.
The bottle looks as though its 1.5 litres, but when you check the small print you find that it is 0.15 litres short of the full 1.5. I know a lot of people like that.
The label tells you straight away that this is no namby-pamby, Nancy-boy brew. The bold shadow-highlighted 3-D typeface charges across the bottle against a deep red sash and above it is a man who has an awesome chest with a rifle slung over his shoulder. If you have ever harboured a secret desire to appear really incongruous, try carrying a bottle of this beer whilst attending a gay parade!
Before I had taken my first sip, I knew instinctively that this was the sort of beer that you could very easily get pissed on but not take the piss out of. Excuse my professional beer critic’s language.
The aroma struck me initially as though possessing a spicey, citrus twang, but, before decanting into my trusty Soviet glass, I paused a moment, a little affectedly I thought, took another whiff and changed my mind. It was now, I opined, decidedly sweet and disconcertingly antiseptic.
It poured into the glass with a disappointingly weak head which dissipated rapidly. Once out of the bottle, I was relieved to find that the clinical smell had gone, replaced and overpowered by the sweeter notes.
Not the dark, deep colour I had anticipated but a mid-amber, the beer had, I was surprised to find, not a rich sweet taste but a sweet tart taste laced with a touch of burnt charcoal.
OXOTA Beer in Kaliningrad
The quite glutinous finish gives way to a strong throaty aftertaste, which is not at all unpleasant, and, whilst you secretly wonder how it received a World Beer Award in the ‘Silver’ category, as the medallion on the front of the bottle signifies, there is no doubt in your mind, and also in your mouth, that the brew is persuasively moorish.
Affirmation that this is a real man’s drink is not backward in coming forward. I could feel my liver shrinking and my ego getting bigger with each successive sip.
The heady aftertaste taps into your long-term memory, summoning vague recollections of cautionless drinking sessions undertaken in the first flood of youth. How much of that memory would survive intact should you overdo an OXOTA session really does not bear thinking about.
One thing’s for certain, OXOTA is a good buy if you want to say goodbye and rather quickly to that irritating condition otherwise known as sobriety.
Footnote:🦶 I picked up the rumour from somewhere that the Heineken Brewery is one of those companies that virtue signalled their allegiance to the United States-led globalist war on Russia by buggering off. But take heart, Hart, I said. Buggering-off breweries mean a larger share of the market for those that are smart and don’t budge and a chance to expand and diversify for those that seize the initiative.😁
😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: OXOTA (Ohota Krepkoye) Brewer: Heineken Where it is brewed: St Petersburg Bottle capacity: 1.35 litre Strength: 8.1% Price: It cost me about 137 roubles (1.06 pence) Appearance: Mid-amber Aroma: Predominantly sweet Taste: Tart, not excessively sweet Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: A big strapper with a large rifle Would you buy it again? If the need so takes me Marks out of 10: 6
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)
Published: 19 January 2022 ~ Cesky Medved Beer in Kaliningrad
Article 18: Cesky Medved
What’s not to like about a bear drinking a pint of beer? It’s so Russian. Look at him there on the label, that big cheeky grin and that foaming, frothing tankard. But wait! There’s something not quite right! It’s nothing to do with the bear. We all know that bears have big cheeky grins and drink beer. No, it’s the big beery head. Not the big beary head, but the soap-sudded head on top of the beer.
You see, Cesky Medved does not pour like that. It has no gargantuan head, in fact, it has very little head of which to speak. In fact, it’s as flat as your hat.
Ahh, that explains it, both the grin and the froth: our loveable old bear is not drinking Cesky Medved at all, he’s supping away at something completely different.
Here is a quote about Cesky Medved that was posted to a beer-review website. The website is Russian and (surprise, surprise) most of the comments posted there are in Russian. This comment may have lost something in its Google translation, but I am sure you get the drift:
“The aroma [of Cesky Medved] is artificial, candy-fruity. That’s what cheap fruity beer drinks smell like. (Malt extract?) … the same, sweet with sourness and notes of hop extract or oil … I don’t know what they use there, but the beer is very bad.”
To be brutally frank, this beer smells like … I don’t know what? When I first lifted the bottle lid and attempted to whiff it, I thought for a moment that I had forgotten to take off my face mask. (Please don’t mock. I am certain that there are some of you out there, and you know who you are, who live in your masks day and night!) But gradually, with the bottle shoved up my hooter as you would a decongestant, a pungency filtered through.
I would not describe the smell of Cesky Medved as sweet or ‘candy-fruity’, but rather more on the sour side with an indiscernible back-twang, the sort of thing you sometimes get when you are offered a drink of something and the cup that you are drinking out of has not been washed up properly.
What had not smelt strong in the bottle, however, had an accumulative effect as it was served to the glass. Thereupon, the more subtle scents evaporated, leaving in their wake a certain lingering muskiness.
As the beer poured hazy and as flat as a road-killed rabbit, the appearance and smell conjoined to produce a disconcerting thought, that of a cobbled-together recipe strained through last week’s gym sock. It did not help any that, with this thought in mind, just as I was about to take my first sip, there was Jimmy Saville peering at me from Google Images all sweaty in his track suit. “How’s about that, then?”
What was it that he had carved into his gravestone in Scarborough before some well-meaning soul scrubbed it out? Ahh yes, I remember, “It was good whilst it lasted”! I am sure that this reference was to life in general and not to a glass of Cesky Medved.
I must say that with no head, medium fizz, a dish-water haziness and the smell of Saville’s socks, somehow Cesky Medved managed to be drinkable. Certainly, for the nominal amount that I paid for the pleasure, 110 roubles (£1.06) , I was not about to complain. No, I thought, I would save that for later, when, for example, I write this review.
My last word on the subject is that there are exemplary beers, excellent beers, good beers, satisfactory beers, tolerable beers, insipid beers and bad beers. This bear wasn’t that bad.
It’s a bear-faced lie!!
#########################
😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: Cesky Medved Brewer: Baltika Breweries Where it is brewed: Yaroslavl, Russia Bottle capacity: 1.35 litre Strength: 4.6% Price: It cost me about 110 roubles (1.06 pence) Appearance: Light, unfiltered Aroma: You could call it that Taste: Acquired Fizz amplitude: 4/10 Label/Marketing: A cheeky, grinning bear Would you buy it again? Never ever say never Marks out of 10: 3.5
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)
Article 17: Amstel Bier
Published: 21 November 2021 ~ Amstel Bier in Kaliningrad
So, if you don’t like pilsner what are you doing buying it? That’s easy. It was on special offer at my local supermarket, and as I am saving money to buy myself a ticket to Anywhere before the whole world is renamed Vaccination to make sense of the universality of the Vaccination Passport, at 90 roubles, less than a quid, as Abba used to say, ‘how could I resist you!’
Amstel Bier’s marketing strategy relies for its gravitas, if not its gravity, on that ubiquitous word of the beer-drinking world ‘premium’. Next to ‘love’, it is probably the most overused, abstruse, misunderstood and misappropriated word of all time. Although it occupies many a ‘premium’ slot, if not an entire chapter, in the Beer Posers’ Dictionary, it would not, in its day-to-day marketing application, be permitted as much as a footnote in the Dictionary of Truth (which is not published under licence to any of the Davos set).
Gold labels and award-winning medallions are often used in conjunction with the word ‘premium’, and it does not hurt any to lend to the product a date in antiquity, thus enabling it to draw from the not-so mythical notion that everything that was produced in the past that did not need a Vaccination Passport or be stamped with a QR code was quality or, to define ‘premium’, was of ‘superior quality’ ~ as was life itself ~ once. Thus, Amstel’s bottle incorporates the lot: the gold label, the word ‘premium’ and a date when the world was real ~ 1870.
The Carlsberg Company saw the funny side of this marketing coin many years ago. They flipped the irony of it into their award-winning marketing slogan, ‘Carlsberg, probably the best beer in the world,’ proving to the world that at least they could laugh up their sleeve, which is more than can be said for Watney’s, with it’s disingenuous, ‘Roll out Red Barrel, Let’s have a barrel of fun!’ ~ which drinking it was anything but.
When you see a product labelled in this way, especially a beer, the ‘premium’ promise first supposedly sells it to you and then, before you take the top off the bottle, influences your opinion, so that, unless you are really studying it, when swilling it back with your mates, this little gold word keeps ringing around your taste buds, going ‘Premium! [yum, yum] … Premium! [yum, yum]’.
Amstel Bier in Kaliningrad
With an introduction of this nature, you could easily jump to the wrong conclusion that I am now going to say that Amstel is crap, but that would be too easy.
Let’s take the top off first and check its ‘nose’, as the pretentious like to say.
My first reaction was to reach for my NHS Do-It-Yourself Coronavirus Testing Kit, because I couldn’t smell a thing. No, that’s not altogether true. I could smell something. I think it was a rat. I am not saying that the beer smelt like a rat, because I have never snorted rat. I use the term loosely, as I might, if I was a brewster, use the word ‘premium’. In other words, I could smell nothing, no rat no premium, and certainly nothing that could justify anything approaching the notion of ‘superior quality’.
I sniffed the top of the bottle with the cap off for such an inordinate length of time that Ginger, our cat, thought he must be missing out on something and tried to get in on the act. But after the briefest second, he walked away in disgust without so much as a ‘buy it again’ or just a ‘meeoww’ for that matter.
I didn’t want to end up with the bottle stuck to the end of my nose and be rushed off to hospital in one of those little white Russian ambulances with the siren blaring ‘snout stuck, snout stuck, snout stuck’, so I gave up after five minutes, concluding that I had detected a faint something or other, an intriguing cross, you might say, between musk and tinniness.
When I eventually poured it into my glass, I found myself staring at a pale amber liquid, with very little head, which, as soon as it saw me, made a fast exit. I think this is what is known in beer reviewers’ speak as ‘having two fingers’, or should that be giving two fingers?
Most people who occasionally drink pilsners but usually drink something else, tell me that pilsner appeals to their taste in summer because served cold ~ how else? ~ it is light, crisp and refreshing. From that statement, let us extrapolate the word ‘crisp’. Amstel Bier isn’t. No matter how you drink it ~ swig, gulp or roll it around your mouth ~ crispness doesn’t come into it, so, if that is what you are looking for, you won’t find it in Amstel. Make no mistake about that! (Oooh, he can be so manly when he talks about beer!)
However, Amstel is not without flavour: it is mellow, smooth, rounded and gives the lie to the notion that it is all about tininess and not about taste. Some beers, especially some lagers, go down like a lead weight, but the Amstel finish is not unpleasant. It doesn’t really justify the self-presumptuous handshake of the two chums on the front of the bottle leaning out of their stamps of approval ~ perhaps they have just been vaccinated and are about to open a Facebook account ~ but thin and wishy-washy beers never have an aftertaste (think Watney’s!), and this one certainly has.
In fact, Amstel has a two-phase aftertaste: the first is surprising and seems to hit the spot, but as it Victor Matures it does not so much as sock it to you as socks it to you. In Amstel’s defence, pilsners tend to do this to me generally, so it is by no means unique in this respect either, but in this particular case after five minutes had elapsed, I found myself looking for words to describe the after-aftertaste in my cockney rhyming slang almanac, where all I was able to find was something to do with Scotsmen.
I am not saying that Amstel needs to pull its socks up, as I hear tell that if it is not a popular lager on the other side of Hadrian’s Wall, the Greeks can’t get enough of it. This may have something to do with the fact that the Athenian Brewery in Greece is now owned by Heineken and as Heineken brew Amstel, well, work it out for yourself.
Amstel was originally brewed at the Amstel Brewery in Dutchland. It has a proud heritage, going back to 1870 (you can see the date on the Amstel bottles). However, it was taken over by Heineken International in 1968, who moved production of Amstel to their principal plant at Zoeterwoude in the Netherlands.
I am not sure whether the Chief Brewer, Jock Strap, still works for them or not.
😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: Amstel Bier Brewer: Heineken Where it is brewed: Zoeterwoude, Netherlands Bottle capacity: 1.3 litre Strength: 4.1% Price: It cost me about 90 roubles (91 pence) Appearance: Pale-amber Aroma: Faint Taste: It does have some Fizz amplitude: 4/10 Label/Marketing: ‘Premium’ Would you buy it again? If the price is right! Marks out of 10: 4
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)
Article 16: German Recipe
Published: 25 October 2021 ~ German Recipe Beer in Kaliningrad
On 26 April 2021, purely in the interests of writing these reviews and not because I have a drink problem ~ our local shop is well stocked with beers, is only a short walk away and is the same distance coming back, so no problem there ~ I wrote about Czech Recipe beer from Russian brewers, Lipetskpivo.
Finding it to be a zesty, hoppy beer with a refreshing aftertaste, I decided to improve my geographical knowledge by unscrewing the top on its sister beer, German Recipe. Disappointed that the 1.3 litre bottle did not come with a free moustache or the original helmet worn by the Kaiser, nevertheless, I was not deterred. There is something so German about drinking German beer or a beer with a German name in an old German house in Königsberg, and, although I was not expecting the taste to be earth-shattering, as I had enjoyed its sister so much, not to drink it would be bunkers.
I had already swotted up on the background of its brewery and the claims its brewers were making. They say that in 2005 the brewery underwent a large-scale modernisation programme and that, with the assistance of technologists from other parts of the world, they were able to fine tune their production to meet world-quality standards. An important end result from this investment was that it allowed them to produce beers to a microbiological excellence that negated the need to include all of the preservative gubbins often required for extending shelf-life, which, let’s not be coy about this, can only be a good thing.
My one wish is that I could find a way to extend my shelf life, but as I was drinking German Recipe in 2021, not August of 1944, at least I could drink with the relative confidence that, unless history was about to repeat itself, I would not have to grab my bottle and glass and hurry off to the shelter.
German Recipe Beer in Kaliningrad
So, settled in the attic, I ‘cocked a deaf ‘un’ to the air-raid sirens, which, thankfully, I was not around to hear 77 years ago, and boldly unscrewed the cap. No sooner had I done so than a strong whiff gave vent to the air. It was malty, peaty and definitely robust.
Putting the gas mask away, as it did nothing for my Tootal cravat or ties, I braced myself for the penultimate moment of truth and poured the liquid into my glass and then held it up to the light. Yes, I realise that this was inexcusably pretentious of me, but you must understand that in the UK real-ale devotees always do this sort of thing to elevate themselves in their own minds, whether at bar or at beer festival ~ particularly at beer festivals. Fortunately, after three or four pints they are forced to drop the ritual, partly because of alcohol-induced amnesia and also because by this time and quantity, they can no longer tell their glass from their elbow, and even if they could they are in no stable condition to prosecute the pretension further for fear of falling over. This, of course, is not the reason why I only hold my first glass of beer up toward the light, and then quickly leave it at that.
Anyway, drinking sensibly, as they say, having noted a light-brown haziness looking like the mist lifting slowly above the Curonian Lagoon, and a good dissolving head ~ beer drinkers get a lot of those, especially in the mornings ~ I went for the ultimate test: the first sip.
German Recipe Beer in Kaliningrad
The first thing I noticed from the first sip about this ‘German beer’ brewed in Russia was (shock, it’s Germanisation!) that the smell was stronger than the taste. This differential did not phase me, as the second and third sip were like ‘papers please’, and this brew had all its credentials. In fact, it could not have been more convincing had I been drinking it with my QR code tattooed on my buttock. Nothing counterfeit here! This German was surprisingly bright and fragrant (I once worked with someone like that; he was as bright and fragrant as a rainbow.) and, just like its Czech sister, was well zesty with a refreshing finish.
The after taste, and here I really mean the after-after taste, mirrored its appearance in the glass: it was a little bit clingy. It reminded me of the type of women whom I never knew but thought I would meet one day as I had often seen them in films.
With an OG of 4.7%, I felt confident that if I drank a couple of bottles I would not be clinging on to things to keep myself upright, except for the glass itself, which proved to me by the end of the session that my palate must have approved.
To be a little picky ~ I said ‘picky’ ~ after my third pint It did occur to me that the clinginess was becoming a trifle galvanised, and I hoped it would not go further so that the roof of my mouth would feel as if I’d been drinking Anderson Shelter. But the apprehension passed almost as swiftly as a low flying Messerschmidt and, before you could say the end of the war, I knew that I had enjoyed it.
So, thumbs up and chocks away. Buy a bottle of German today.
😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: German Recipe Brewer: Lipetskpivo Where it is brewed: Lipetsk, Russia Bottle capacity: 1.3 litre Strength: 4.7% Price: It cost me about 165 roubles (£1.72) Appearance: Mid-amber Aroma: Full bodied, hoppy and malty Taste: Fragrant, bright Fizz amplitude: 7/10 Label/Marketing: Suitably Germanic Would you buy it again? I have done Marks out of 10: 6
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)
Article 13: Czech Recipe Beer
Published: 26 April 2021
Hitler may have referred to England as a nation of shopkeepers, but back in the day when England was England, before it became what it is today (R.I.P. England), I, and many of my contemporaries, considered England to be not only a nation of beer drinkers, but the nation of beer drinkers. So, it might surprise you to learn that it is in fact Czechoslovakia that holds the official title of being the most beer-sodden country in the world.
According to official beer-drinking records, the boozy Czechs knock back more beer per capita than anybody else, anywhere else. But take heart dear Brits! As beer in Czechoslovakia is, like everywhere else on the opposite side of the Channel, lager, and in Czechoslovakia dominated by Pilsner lager, we Brits can still claim with pride and satisfaction that the UK is the only country in the world in which two great institutions, real ale and the public house, have come together over the centuries to form a unique drinking culture. (Spirit-lifting background music of ‘Real Ale Britannia, Real Ale rules the craves, thanks to Fox and Farage Brits will never be PC slaves!’)
“Good evening landlord, a pint of Farage please.”
“Would that be a pint of ‘Farage Best He Made Them Bitter’ or a pint of ‘Farage Patriot’?”
But we are not here today to talk about national institutions, history and how the unholy trinity, Politics~Globalism~Pandemic-scare, are out to eradicate them, or to dwell forlornly on poor cold, wet and shivering Brits sitting in pub beer gardens six feet apart from one another sipping ale through a useless mask. No, we are here today, in the here and now, to consider the merits/demerits of a Russian beer known as Czech Recipe. Whether the recipe is Czech or simply called Czech Recipe, as Czechs and beer go together like volume and ringing cash registers, I will leave to your discretion.
Nowhere near as exciting by name as Farage’s ‘EU Looking at Me!’ bitter, or BLM’s ‘Churchill Still Stands’ jet-black porter, Czech Recipe might sound like a cake mix, which comes in a bottle just short of 1.5 litres, has a green label and the name in olde worlde script, but contrarily this light, filtered, live beer produced by the Lipetsk brewery is quite a tasty brew.
Green in colour, until you take the top off the bottle and pour it into your glass, Czech Recipe has a pale golden hue, a faint aroma of no particular kind (so forget about all those pretentious beer reviews that compare it to Elton John’s piano, with ‘notes’ of this and ‘notes’ of that) and a foamy head that could not recede faster were it wearing a loose-fitting toupée.
Sip ~ it’s zesty.
Sip ~ it’s tangy.
Gulp ~ it’s crisp.
Gulp gone ~ it is very refreshing …
Czech Recipe is all these things, and it is also 4.7%.
The aftertaste, which is so important whatever beer you are quaffing, because it is this that keeps you quaffing, is dry. In fact, it is very dry. ‘Nuts!’ you say, and you are right. The dry, crisp aftertaste is what makes it the perfect complement to nuts and other snacks. It teases the palate, without raping it, and offers a flirtatious relationship free from guilt ~ even though it is not real ale. It is, in fact, the sort of Czech you could easily take home to meet your mum. Strong to a degree but, as Leonard Cohen sang (I don’t know whether he drank it?) ‘It’s light, light enough to let it go …’
Czech Recipe Beer in Kaliningrad
The world’s perception of Czech beer is Pilsner and, since I am no great fan of Pilsner, I get all suspicious and cautious about buying it. Usually, I will stand there in the shop staring at it, thinking ‘dare I’? Czech Recipe could have been a recipe for a taste disaster, but it bucked the trend (yes, I have spelt it right) and once sampled left me feeling as happy as a pig in … a large grass field.
A lot of the beers that I have been drinking in Kaliningrad ~ not that I have been drinking a lot, you understand, it’s just an expression ~ is much stronger than the 4.2 percent I would normally go for was I drinking in England (voice in the two and six pennies, “Yeah, leave it out …!”). But, I have found that often the lighter strength beers here are light on taste and flavour, and you need to buy something with a bit more welly to compensate (same voice, “Strewth, I’ve ‘eard it all now!”).
Czech Recipe fills the gap in the market and fills it nicely. It is a reasonably strong beer, but one that is more concerned with delivering taste than with blowing your pants and socks off ~ and that’s fine by me, for the last thing that I want is to be left standing there with a Czech in my hand wearing nothing but my cravat.
Well, my bars nearly open, so note the essentials below, put your trainers on and hot foot it down to the shop. Buy yourself some of the Recipe and see for yourself.
If my appraisal is wrong, I’ll let you buy me a bottle.
😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS Name of Beer: Czech Recipe Brewer: Lipetsk Brewery Where it is brewed: Lipetsk, Russia Bottle capacity: 1.42 litres Strength: 4.7% Price: It cost me about 147 rubles (£1.41) Appearance: Pale golden Aroma: I haven’t decided Taste: Zesty, refreshing, hoppy with dry aftertaste Fizz amplitude: 6/10 Label/Marketing: Old School Would you buy it again? I have done Marks out of 10: 6.5+
*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.
