After an exhaustive search, accounting for some 60 different beers in 9 countries (although Germany is not finished yet, they can join next section of the search) we found beer heaven in the wee town of Loket, in the west of the Czech Republic. The beer is a from the Svatly Florian brewery, and is a special dark smoked beer that they call Speck Beer. And it is truly, truly delicious.
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| Speck Beer. Golly. |
Now I'm a bit of a smoked beer fan, so they had an unfair advantage in that respect, but there was some stiff competition from a couple of Italian brews, in particular those from the del Borgo brewery and the brewpub Mostodolce's pilsner, also from the Human Fish IPA which hails from Ljubljana.
The Speck Beer was a malty, gently bitter, liquid version of smoked bacon. And it was divine.
But I was impressed with Italian craft brewing and also, as a real surprise, how good Pilsner Urquell is. The beer culture is very different too from NZ and Australia. You see women at lunch together drinking beer, old ladies with pints of dark beer, women running brew pubs. The attitude in the Czech Republic was that most bars only had one or two beers available, and many brew pubs only made two - a light and a dark, with no concern to classifying them. Lots only served Pilsner Urquell, but they served it extremely well.
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| Delicious. At Altstadt brew pub, Nuremberg. |
In general we found too many lagers and not enough ales, so im looking forward to good British ales at a more appropriate temperature for actually having flavour.
And I can't wait to get brewing again!
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