Tag Archives: craft beer Kaliningrad

Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant in Kaliningrad

Hats the way to do it! There are uniforms, but there’s nothing uniform at the Uniform Museum Restaurant

15 August 2026 -Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant Kaliningrad

What is it about hats that wants to make you plonk one on your head? Perhaps it’s because if you plonked one anywhere else, it might look suspicious.

Suffice it to say, when we owned a vintage warehouse, we had a lot of hats, and, of course, people tried them on. We didn’t mind that, as long as they were doing so with a real intent to buy. But some people came to the shop to try them on and try it on, simply because they wanted to take photos and selfies and stick them on social media. Very often, as they handled the genuine vintage merchandise, which they had no more intention of buying than I have of voting Labour, and may I say, handled it in a cavalier fashion, including the cavalier headgear, I felt as though I could stick one on them. Such was my annoyance that I could have very easily cast myself as the Basil Fawlty of the antiques world. Indeed, I am fairly certain there were some who believed I was.

Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant Kaliningrad

Cozy industrial cafe with warm lighting, wood tables, and a long bar lined with stools on the right. The Uniform Museum Restaurant in Kaliningrad.

In Kaliningrad, where there is no shortage of one-off bars and restaurants, a quirky venue exists which resembles a giant wardrobe, hung with historical military uniforms and hats from bygone eras, allowing patrons, as they see fit, and even when they do not fit, to try on at their leisure. No Basil fawlty there!

Cunningly catering to the selfie and social media crowd, this dine, drink and dress-up emporium located on Gorkogo Street stands recessed from the thoroughfare, its large glass-fronted prospect belying the formal municipal image which people of a certain age freely ascribe to venues traditionally charged with the responsible task of curating, preserving and presenting the remnants of former epochs. I would say that its modern appearance works in an opposite way to mine, in that on the other side of purported modernity, when you become familiar with it, lies a sanctuary for the old and interesting, the curious and the antiquated.

Bar half-lit, with stools in the foreground. Scene inside the Uniform Museum Restaurant, Kaliningrad.

Furthermore, in keeping with the adventurous proclivity exercised by today’s museums to fully embrace modernity, turning to all that interaction can bring to the minds of those that cannot live without it, the Uniform Museum Restaurant does not attempt to confine itself to merely encouraging admiration for selective obsolescence, which is something, for example, that Kaliningrad’s London Pub has got off to a fine art. By contrast, this unusual restaurant, because remember that this establishment is first and foremost a place to eat and drink and not a vintage clothes emporium, is an open invitation to see, touch and then try on any clothing that takes your fancy, be it any one specific garment or multiples thereof, which, for those whose lives are ruled by the constant need to nurture social media, is an opportunity made in heaven; nor is it one to be discouraged by the restaurant-bar itself should you naturally have the inclination when posting yourself in their attire to name the location that made it possible.

The number and the variety of uniforms on display combine to produce a rather staggering prop piece, and whilst, as one might not unreasonably expect, the majority of the uniforms are rooted in Russia’s Soviet past, interspersed among them, spanning several Soviet-era decades and covering all of its three main military services, together with law enforcement clothing, are equivalents fetched from further afield, from countries that spark the dealer’s question, “I wonder who they sourced those from?” This consideration makes for a quiet sport; convenient, pleasant and erudite in the distraction it affords, as you wait to receive your orders from the bar, which, unlike certain orders, are ones you will want to act upon with relish and with gusto.

Cozy bar and cafe with a row of colorful jackets on a rack behind the bar, string lights overhead, wooden tables in the foreground.

As I was waiting for my beer to arrive at the table appointed for that purpose, my observations had yielded examples of various military uniforms pertaining to, I estimated, several different nations. The compulsion to leap out of one’s seat in defiance of the natural instinct to honour one’s drinking fidelity and to do so with an alacrity that might dangerously suggest one wasn’t nearly as old as the uniforms surrounding one, was not, for all its magnetism (bygone clothing has this effect), a powerful enough enticement to waylay enjoyment of the restaurant’s beer, arguably the best of which is brewed there on the premises. Forbearance in this matter was not induced by mind over matter but rather by what mattered most; as beer outranking the highest office projected by the most powerful uniforms mustered in that place commanded unstinting obedience and called for immediate respect. This was indeed a ceremony I honoured to its utmost, raising my hand several times in a dignified salute, which just happened in the process to have a tankard grasped within it.

The restaurant’s onsite brewery centres its craft on brewing beers Germanic in style and origin (Quick! Put that German helmet on! And now, just as quickly, take it off!) offering connoisseurs the loyalty incentive which a regular rotation of fine premium beers never fails to recruit.

I was slurping my way through one of these beers when some battered mushrooms and smoky cheese straws as limp as an evening without Viagra requisitioned my mouth, whilst other diners in my vicinity resourced the pleasure of choosing fare from a rather more substantial selection of European and Russian dishes or, staying strictly within the rigid framework of masculine convention, organised their eating campaign around a manly well-done steak or tactically mapped out a safer strategy by enlisting burgers and chips.

“Tell me,” a voice enquired, heavily tinged with exasperation, “do you ever eat a proper meal?” The gap from where the voice ensued was wrapped around the very thing that the adjective ‘proper’ qualified.

“Only when I do,” came my guarded reply, “but if I were wearing that suit of clothes –” I pointed my hand in such a way as to suggest the arrival of reinforcements, which, pursuant to my gesticulation, were at the bend of the stairs – “I’d do it 18th-century style. ” For that was my conclusion.

Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant Kaliningrad

Of all the garments arrayed that day in the Uniform Museum Restaurant (like many Russian names of restaurants, the translated version can be a bit of a mouthful), there was none among the myriad that recommended themselves more strongly than those that adorned the turn of the stairs, garments which, in their masterful cut and sparing no expense in the tailored art of procuring embellishment, were all that elegance could possibly wish for. And here we have reached a stage convenient in our encomium on the triumphs of a restaurant interior second only in bygone clothing to the renowned costumeries of Angels and Bermans’, where nothing can deter us longer from digressing into a proverb that will, I ardently promise you, return full circle in later paragraphs.

The proverb ‘Manners Maketh Man’ must surely, at the didactic level, a place where virtue and morality superintend its every attribute, be underwritten by the observation that the part played by sartorial elegance underscores the doctrine and, whenever elegance is commendable – and when feasibly can it not be? – attends to the spirit of that attainment that William of Wykeham most properly endorsed, his being the sort of opinion that one would expect from the Bishop of Winchester installed as such in the 14th century.

In today’s world, however, anywhere in that portion to which the conceit ‘developed’ can be pinned, clothes, and not just they alone, reflect our fall from grace; but the former in loss of style and finesse stands as our greatest reminder of the miserable depth to which relentlessly we are descending because visually clothes so boldly demonstrate how cattle-minded we have become.

Try to imagine, for example, how liberated you would feel if you caught yourself in the act of casting aside those ruddy awful, oh-so-ugly work-like pants hung with unsightly cargo pockets, or divesting yourself and your tortured image of that ‘Ee-mon!’ thuggish hoody, or burning those nasty cheap tracksuit bottoms, like those pitiful, sad, ill-advised and now quite droopy feminists did back in the 1960s, who were made to look so very daft by burning their bras in public; and you, having reclaimed yourself by shedding those awful clothes like the skin of the snake or the caterpillar, with an independence beyond your experience, attire yourself instead in such an elegant livery of bold exquisiteness as that depicted faithfully on the unassuming stairway wall of the Uniform Museum Restaurant. (See, I told you we’d get there in the end!)

UNIFORM MUSEUM RESTAURANT

… garments which, in their masterful cut and sparing no expense in the tailored art of procuring embellishment, were all that elegance could possibly wish for.

Imagine the dash you would cut, the Beau Brummell you would unfurl, and how, on a scale of 1 to 10, effectively transformed and influentially transformational, you and your image would become; better by far than any sex change, if not more controversial, the outcome of such a wardrobe shift would be marked with approbation, your own, of course, for yourself included.

Three ornate, embellished coats on display under studio lighting, with white wigs above them on mannequin heads above the rack. Some of the vintage clothes in the Uniform Museum Restaurant.

On the feasibility of this exercise I leave you to ponder thoughtfully, examining the 18th-century styles that hang on the bend of the stairs, as, thinking it proper between pints, I venture now to reconnoitre the restaurant’s upper quarters with a wish to observe the scope and nature of the uniforms it holds and to assess the ambience that dwells therein.

To me, that is to say, to my particular way of thinking, which, I most humbly own, is not the way of everyone’s or, to tell the truth, of anyone I’ve met, the restaurant’s extensive room upstairs is a low-lit, smoochy, mood-infusing, clubby kind of a place, whose snob-screened and comfortable encompassing cushioned booth-style seats make the prospect of assignations an almost mandatory ritual, whether in your own mind you consider yourself to be one of a kind with Leslie Phillips, that is to say, an old-school romantic, or are one half of a typical pair of timeless canny canoodlers.

Cozy dimly lit cafe with wooden beams, string lights, and coats hanging on wall racks.

Mick Hart and Olga Hart posing for a mirror selfie in a costume shop with racks of red and black jackets behind them ."The photo shows a man and woman standing close, taking a selfie in a costume boutique, which is actually a Russian restaurant.

Dimly lit dining area with a wall of colorful military-style jackets displayed along the wall, above seated diners.

Both the ground and first floors of the Uniform Museum Bar in Kaliningrad are bathed in a uniform dimly lit style, which brings out the best, I feel, in drinking and dining ambience if liking it darker is your thing, whilst allowing the spotlights to do what they do at their most effective, which is to highlight and illuminate the thematicising principle donated by the vintage attire.

It would not be based on empirical science should I venture the suggestion that the upper echelons of this most eccentric, most unusual bar and restaurant are more replete with uniforms than its contemporaneous downstairs cousin’s; possibly yes, possibly no, but whatever the final reckoning, the amount of such is prodigious and wants for nothing in great variety; moreover, the lower ceilings of the upstairs room and the lowered lighting framing the spot-lit clothes lend something familiar to its character, which, I would bet my best cravat on, is akin to a boutique feel, as though the venue in its entirety would not be out of place should it be lifted and transported back to the days when Carnaby Street in London was incontestably chic, that is, back to the 1960s, before London became a migrant warehouse (I did mean ‘warehouse’, didn’t I?). This is an image also bolstered by hat stands full of hats – what else! – and where military visors in abundance are contrasted here and there with civilian and vernacular headwear, which, like those in the shop I used to own, immediately tempt you to pick them up and plonk them on your head. I said so, did I not, in the opening sprint of this post?

Museum-style display of assorted military hats mounted on a dark wall, with a beige dress coat hanging to the right.

Older man with white beard sits at a wooden table in a dim room with navy military jackets and hats on display on the wall. It's Mick Hart, author of expatkaliningrad.com at the Uniform Museum Restaurant.

Black ceremonial military hat with gold embroidery of an eagle and laurel leaves.

Woman in a black captain's hat sits at a wooden table, chin resting on her hand, in a dim cafe setting. Olga Hart at the Uniform Museum Restaurant in Kaliningrad.

Trying it on at the Uniform Museum Restaurant Kaliningrad

I was most surprised, and may I say not only a little impressed, to find displayed among these hats a traditional British coppers’ helmet, one of those Noddy-like pointy things, sometimes called the ‘custodian’, which sadly Britain’s ‘bobbies’ wear less and less these days because life on the streets has become too dangerous and nothing short of a reinforced bucket, painted regulatory police force blue, would do the job intended of it.

Museum display of a medieval suit of armor with a red-and-black shield and a dark British policeman's helmet on a wooden stand.

It is only the second of these helmets that I have witnessed in Kaliningrad; the other is known to me, as it was the one I carried from England, circa 2007. I gave it as a present to artist Victor Ryabinin, later to be told by him, with a grin lighting up his face, that of all the many and interesting items dotted around his studio, the one that intrigued his art students most was the British policeman’s helmet.

But let us now put our helmet away and make that significant move from anecdotal reverie to ponder on the nitty-gritty that makes a restaurant and a bar, and, where they still exist, a UK public house, the particular place you think it is, and go there via our intuition with a word or two on personality.

The selection process by which we nominate any one person for membership to our private club of liking and appreciation, an individual whom, from the moment of introduction, stands unambiguously out from the crowd, is one that sifts computer-style through numerous character attributes, sometimes instantaneously, at others with measured deliberation but certainly decisively, all but for the exception of those who are wanting in judge of character, before approval can be stamped. Yet, deeper qualities notwithstanding, the mostly initial yet often sustaining credentials by which these fellows gain admittance to the inner circle of ourselves are defined intuitively and subjectively by that all-appealing influence that goes by the name of personality.

You may ask, or if you won’t, I may ask it for you: what is there that makes one place more memorable than the next, assuming that nothing too bizarre or rather out of the ordinary happens to exert a disproportionate influence over recall and reflection, be such as they are thought good or bad? What is it that attracts us to one particular bar and restaurant to the full and obliging extent that with the first visit now completed, we vow to return and do? The perceived quality of beer and food, of course, plays a major part, but there is never not at least something persuasively more in addition, the absolute magic ingredient, unless you are a cheapskate whose only seduction is less to pay, and that extension to delight is synonymous with, or no different to, our reaction to personality.

Personality, when ascribed to objects other than strictly human, is typically, generically and often loosely defined by the substitution of atmosphere. We often do not say that a venue has personality when, in actual fact, we do, for personality is what we mean when we talk of a somewhere or something which, according to our sentiments, is endowed with attractive, positive qualities to which we are receptive and of which our senses firmly approve.

An example here in Kaliningrad would be if I were asked to judge which of the two, the London Pub or the subject of this post, the Uniform Museum Restaurant, tops the personality league. And the winner, ladies and gentlemen, but only by a narrow margin and perhaps because the building itself is old, is to pull no punches or wriggle from under the clinch and to honour honesty without reservation none other than the London Pub.

The reasons for this evaluation are beyond the scope of this current post, but a word or two in explanation should make the distinction clear enough, for what the Uniform Museum Restaurant surrenders in personality to its charismatic competitor, apart from and including an excellent range of beers and, I am told, a competent menu, it more than advances positively with a gimmick that stamps its mark not casually, nor sufficiently, but with a lasting indelibility, like the backstamp on a fine piece of Minton, except that in this case, on the ledger of your memory.

By building itself around the theme of vintage military clothes, it guarantees by power of novelty, uncontested as the restaurant is by any Kaliningrad equal, a retentive, singular character trait more than considerably capable of rescuing its reputation from run-of-the-mill obscurity. This leitmotif of archived military clothing, which, when it is shared with others, both by word of mouth and inevitably via the techie-grapevine, will encourage those that learn of it and feel they are missing out to hurry along there double quick to try on those lovely tunics and hats. They may also, whilst they are doing this, purchase food and drink, thereby making the circuit complete.

And when you acknowledge the unholy alliance forged between the ubiquitous smartphone camera and social media’s inducive drug-like fix, linking that manipulation to the irresistible urge to bedeck oneself with vintage clothes and to plonk on a vintage hat or two, which I did, mark my words, and with no less care for restraint than I appear to have for hypocrisy, then Wallah! Look no further! Your restaurant-bar has a winning formula.

Smiling man with a gray beard wearing a captain's hat in a dim room, standing beside vintage red and leopard-print sarmorial plaques with brass accents. It's Mick Hart in Kaliningrad at the Uniform Museum Restaurant

Of course, the litmus test for any bar or restaurant worth its weight in food and beer is, after having drunk and dined there, will you recall the holistic event as one of quality and with affection, and will you have the will, or even better, a great desire, to make yourself no stranger to the venue? If the answer to both is ‘yes,’ and recommendation by word of mouth asserts itself with no hesitation or obstructive second thought, then all the right boxes have been ticked. Apropos of which, I think we can let on here that the Uniform Museum Restaurant has all the vital boxes covered and has therefore lost little of that which otherwise could exert itself to impactful lasting detriment; its only concern, maybe, is that the presence of all those vintage clothes, should this review be appraised by moths, attract the opposite of the right clientele, the sort of clientele that any keeper of ancient textiles would rather do without. About which I am able to speak with no less of a lot of authority, having, as I undertook to mention in this wise post’s prologue, been once the proud and insufferable owner of a vintage clothes emporium. So, that is where we’re going to leave it now: trying them on, taking them off, and generally enjoying the food and beer at the Uniform Museum Restaurant, Gorkogo Street, Kaliningrad.

Vital Statistics

Uniform Museum Restaurant
150a Gorkogo St, Kaliningrad 236029 Russia

Tel: +7 963 350-73-09

Opening times
Monday to Thursday: 12pm to 12 midnight
Fri, Sat and Sunday: 12pm to 1am

Food – International Cuisine
German, European, Russian, Eastern European, Ukrainian

Evening in Bruges Beer: what’s it like?

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.

An Evening in Bruges beer. Cherry flavoured. Reviewed by Mick Hart.

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

Beer glass review scale for Mick Hart's reviews of Kaliningrad beers

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

Variety of Beer in Kaliningrad

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

Introduction

Published: 30 June 2020 ~ Variety of Beer in Kaliningrad

Everybody knows that vodka is Russia’s national tipple, but it may come as surprise to learn that the second favourite is beer. From personal observation, I would say that here in Kaliningrad young people tend to favour beer over vodka, which would explain why the variety and availability of different beer types and brands have mushroomed in pace with the numerous new bars, restaurants and hotels that have opened in recent years.

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

Gone are the days when if you felt like a beer you either went to the billiard hall or stopped off for a jar and a chat with friends at the side of the road. The little yellow two-wheeled tankers that provided this service have since been pensioned off, as far as beer is concerned, but can still be seen today now dispensing another traditional Russian drink of the non-alcoholic variety known as Kvass.

The increase in on-licensed premises since I first came to Kaliningrad in 2000 is nothing short of phenomenal and, coronavirus willing, may it continue to be that way. To service this industry there is not just a greater variety of Russian-brewed beer but also many international imports, both mainstream brands and interesting lesser known products, offering plenty of scope for exploration.

The craft beer bar has also made its debut in Kaliningrad. I believe there are five such outlets, the most popular and well-known being the Yeltsin Bar. These fairly small, but magnificently well-stocked beer bars, are reminiscent of the UK’s micro- or pop-up pubs but offer a substantially greater quantity and variety of beers at any one time sourced from around the world and purveyed on a rotational basis.

Variety of Beer in Kaliningrad

The brewed-on-the premises concept is also well established, with brew bars producing their own house brands and proudly displaying their brewing equipment for all to see on the premises. A good, large and exciting example of this would be the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery just off Victory Square in the centre of Kaliningrad, where the rows upon rows of deep copper brewing kettles and those mounted monolithically behind the bar are nothing short of magnificent

British ales are obtainable in Kaliningrad, such as Fuller’s ESB and various IPA varieties, most conspicuously in the Sir Francis Drake English-style pub, the first of such bars in Kaliningrad, which was certainly functioning when I first came here in the year 2000. But, as might be expected, the British ales that are served here are the keg export equivalent of their real-ale counterparts. But hey! ~ you did not travel all this way to drink a pint of Charlie Wells, did you?

Bottled British-brewed craft ales are also no stranger to Kaliningrad. You can expect to find both mainstream and more exotic brands in Kaliningrad’s specialist beer shops, and some supermarkets, both small and large, often stock a surprisingly diverse range of British beers.

Imported beer is, not very strangely, more expensive to buy than home-grown varieties, whether bought for consumption in restaurants or bars or as an off-sale from specialist beer shops. The typical price of half a litre of British beer in the Sir Francis Drake, for example, would set you back 250 to 360 rubles, which is between £2.90 and £4.18, whereas a half litre of Russian beer in one of the Britannica bars (a chain of British-themed ale houses along the lines of Wetherspoons) will leave your pocket a lot less stressed at around 130 rubles (£1.51).

Naturally, beer purchased from supermarkets can be obtained at more economical prices. My favourite Kaliningrad bottle beer, Ostmark (strong), which weighs in at a not inconsiderable 6.7% alcohol by volume ~ rather too strong for my normal preference of 4.5% max, but with more taste than most lager beers ~ costs between 160 rubles and 136 rubles for a 1.35 litre bottle, the price differentiation can be explained by the presence of two small supermarkets close to where we live, one of which is cheaper. In the cheaper supermarket, special offers occur on a daily basis, and I have seen good quality beers in 1.35 litre bottles going for less than a quid. Incidentally, this same supermarket does a good discounted range of quality vodkas as well, from around £2.80 for a 75cl bottle.

Another must for the beer connoisseur and further testimony to the take-up of beer in Kaliningrad specifically and Russia overall are the well-patronised specialist beer-dispensing shops. These establishments offer a wide selection of Russian and imported speciality beers on tap, which once purchased are conveniently decanted into screw-topped 2-litre plastic bottles.

Surprisingly, given its relatively small size, one of our local supermarkets incorporates an outlet of this nature. It stocks around 10 different beers on tap as well as some bottled varieties. The beer is good, both in terms of variety and quality, and is also competitively priced, making this venue a particular favourite of my brothers when he visited us last summer.

Variety of Beer in Kaliningrad

In Russia, beers tend to be grouped into categories determined by their hue: light, red and dark. In restaurants or bars, you will also often be asked whether you want a particular beer to be filtered or unfiltered. Simply translated this means that you have a choice between cosmetic surgery or beer in its natural state.

As the articles which follow deal exclusively with beers that I have been buying at random from our local supermarkets in 1.35l bottles, the light, dark, filtered and unfiltered taxonomy is only relevant insofar as appearance is concerned, and you can only really determine this once the bottle is open and the contents have been poured.

These beers may not be the crème de la crème in the sense that they are supermarket bought, not purchased from craft-beer outlets, but they do have something very important going for them: they have helped to sustain me through the isolating process, and during social distancing have become a much appreciated part of my personal New Normal in the wake of closed bars whilst the dreaded spectre of Coro continues to stalk the land.

😏 Feature image: Mick & Olga Hart enjoying a beer on the terrace at the palatial Residence of the Kings, Kaliningrad, in the pre-coronavirus summer of 2019