The Wellington Arms Bedford - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)

Preface

Published: 21 June 2020 ~ Bottled Beer in Kaliningrad

Prompted by no other motivation than a love of beer drinking, I have decided to review some of the bottled beers I am drinking here in Kaliningrad, Russia, whilst the bars remain closed due to social distancing rules. This is the preface to a series of posts on that most hallowed of subjects, beer. It places my own beer-drinking experiences in a biographical and historical context and is a precursor to explaining how I am surviving without real ale in Kaliningrad, the alternative beers available and a personal review of the quality and marketing success of the bottled beers that I have sampled. As they say, it’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it!*

Bottled Beer in Kaliningrad

When I told fellow Brits that I was moving to Russia, three responses stick in my mind. The first, and the most obvious, was aghast amazement that I was leaving behind the most celebrated democracy in the world (Ha! Ha!). The second, a rather cynical comment on the number of times I visit the doctors, was made by one of my brothers: “It’s a long way to travel to see Dr Kelly each week!” And the third, “How are you going to survive without real ale?” The last one worried me.

I was a victim of the first wave of lager drinking, which infected the UK back in the 1970s. I will not call it a love affair, it was more like sex for sale. In those days, the UK pub industry was dominated by the Big Six ~ six major breweries that had consolidated their monopolies by buying up many smaller regional breweries and their tied houses and incorporating them into their business portfolio. Real beer had long since been challenged, and in many public houses replaced, by what CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) pejoratively dubbed ‘fizz’, keg beer, which was spearheaded in the 1960s by the now infamous Watneys Red Keg Barrel, both brewer and beer having since become a cipher for poor quality, mass produced.

Watney Mann in Bulk — A former Watney’s brewery tanker reincarnated as a water tanker for farm use.
**(Photo credit: Roll Out Red Barrel;**
cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Michael Trolove – geograph.org.uk/p/1028498)

It is an irony of fate that the beer and the brewery which set out, and partly succeeded, in changing the drinking habits of the nation ended up as the beer-drinkers’ pariah.

Remember the Firkin pubs?

Of the many insults levelled at Watney’s, possibly the quintessential one, certainly the one that I remember best, was when the Flamingo and Firkin in Derby, one of the David Bruce-inspired craft-ale chain of pubs, refitted the gents toilet with an oversized water cistern masquerading as a Red Barrel. The barrel design, shade of red and even the Watney’s name emblazoned across the front in a typeface identical to the one that Watney’s used, was the pièce de résistance of piss taking, and in that respect it was in the right place.

Whilst no one can defend with any credibility the instigatory role that Watney’s played in the fizz revolution, Red Barrel was not alone for long. Who can forget the dubious delights of such mass-produced keg mediocrity as Ind Coope’s Double Diamond (‘Double Diamond Works Wonders’ ~ it didn’t) Whitbread Trophy (‘Whitbread Big Head Trophy Bitter the pint that thinks it’s a quart’ ~ well it would; it was all head, no strength and as inflatable as a hydrogen balloon) and Charles Wells’ Noggin (its bar-top beer-pump head made of wood to look like a nautical mooring post complete with rope wrapped around it, presumably to remind you that the 15 pence you had just spent was ‘money for old rope’).

The bland and sterile taste that these truly revolting beers left in one’s mouth was gradually, but then meteorically, replaced by something not dissimilar. It, too, was gassy, bland and sterile but sold well, thanks mainly to the money thrown at it in mass advertising campaigns that succeeded in hiding its meretricious nature behind a macho, blokey image, similar in aspiration to the rugged sexuality exploited by aftershave brands Brut and Hai Karate and enlisting the same flared trousers, tight-fitting tank tops and downturned droopy moustache approach.

Make way for lager

Initially, the lager market was aimed at female and young mixed clientele, but its rapid uptake quickly recommended it as a manly alternative to keg, escalating sales into brand warfare as brewers vied with one another to gas-tap their product into the number one slot.

My lagers of choice at that time were Lamont, Tuborg Gold and Tennent’s Extra. But the gold standard in lager for myself and my drinking confederates was undoubtedly Stella Artois, which, unfortunately, we could only seem to find in freehouses, and in our area these were few and far between.

My return to beer drinking and my induction into real ale is a vivid memory. It was 1979 and I was on a pub crawl in Norwich with a fellow student from the University of East Anglia, a chap called Clive. We had not known each other long, but long enough to know that we both liked beer. We met in the student’s bar on the then Fifers Lane campus. It was a full house that evening and a group of us were sitting on the floor surrounded by beer cans. Clive had just rolled in from a late game of squash. “A fitness fanatic,” I thought. I revised my opinion six pints later, but I have to say it was beer at first sight.

Clive was a Londoner and as such, insofar as beer-drinking trends were concerned, he was far ahead of the game than folk like myself who hailed from the sticks or from small provincial towns, places at that time where the only escape from the big brewers and their bog-standard fare was the occasional hard-to-find freehouse.

It was Clive who introduced me to real ale. We were in a pub overlooking Norwich market when Clive asked if I would like a pint of Director’s. As a lager drinker, used to less esoteric names, such as ‘Extra’, ‘Gold’ and ‘Red Stripe’, I remember thinking ‘what a bloody silly name for a beer’. Moreover, I had not drunk anything from a wooden handle pulled at the bar since my light and bitter days. Gas-tap beer was typically dispensed through a little plastic box with a light bulb behind it, whilst lager frothed and foamed worse than the liberal-left from out of conspicuous chromium taps, large, brassy and brazen things which over the years have become incredibly more stupid. Where does the light and bitter fit in? We were young when we started drinking in pubs, about 14 I think, but even then we eschewed Charles Wells’ bitter, which, unfortunately was a staple brew in most of the pubs in our area. We could drink it, but only ‘half-and-half’, that is a half pint of Charlie from the handpump diluted with light ale from the bottle.

Silly name or not, Directors was my first pint of real ale, and to me, at that time, it tasted like nectar. I was hooked from the first sip. Here, at last, was something different; something which had flavour!

All praise to CAMRA!

It was CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) which revived the fortunes of real ale and put the final nail in the keg-bitter coffin. CAMRA launched a relentless campaign throughout the 80s and 90s, encouraging small and later micro-breweries to experiment with and increase their beer type and range and as the ‘cold tea’, as my cockney friend called ale, caught on the major brewers were forced to follow suit and up their real-ale ante to keep pace with the craft-beer experts.

Local beer guides and national Good Pub Guides coinciding with the arrival and development of the soon to become ubiquitous beer festival, which ranged from large-scale events featuring scores of brewers from around the country, fast-food outlets and live music to mini-festivals held in pubs, compounded and accelerated what for real legacy Britons such as myself is a unique and treasured part of our national heritage: proper beers and British pubs! No wonder that our saviour from the European Union, the indefatigable Nigel Farage, is himself a beer connoisseur!

Opening time at the Rushden Cavalcade beer tent c.2017

But these are troubled times, comrades. Coronavirus’s New Normal is sweeping across the land like an out-of-control temperance league and ideological agendas threaten British life with a rehashed version of British heritage. Our only hope is that beer-drinking patriots stand firm in the face of adversary. Keep the beer-drinking faith and stamp the virus out! Pubs are a national treasure and beer the jewel in its crown.

It is not ‘Time Gentleman, please’, yet gentlemen!

Bottled Beer in Kaliningrad

In the next astonishing instalment of Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers in Kaliningrad, we will see how exactly Mick Hart adjusted to the New Drinking Normal of no real ale!

*If you make your obsession your profession you will never work again ~ so some clever fellow once said. Well, I was fortunate to make one of my obsessions, beer, my profession for a while, and yes, if I had not moved on to something else, I might never have worked again! I was fortunate enough in my publishing career to work on and contribute to various licensed trade publications, hospitality titles, pub guides and drinkers’ manuals, which also gave me the opportunity to interview brewers, publicans and report on real ale and cider festivals. Consequently, I can vouch for the fact that you can have too much of a good thing, so I switched from drinks’ publications to medical ones, thus exchanging the fear of becoming an alcoholic for becoming a hypochondriac.

NEXT ARTICLE IN THIS SERIES: Variety of Beer in Kaliningrad