I’ve just returned from an excellent week-long holiday in
Macedonia as well as a day spent in Belgrade before my flight home. Naturally I
took the opportunity to try as many beers as I could for the blog and managed
to sample beers from Macedonia as well as Slovenia, Serbia and Kosovo.
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| Skopso ad, downtown Skopje |
Variety is not something that Macedonians seem to appreciate
when it comes to beer and I was only able to try a few from Macedonia itself.
Pivara Skopje and it’s ubiquitous Skopsko dominates the market with its only
real competition coming from Zlaten Dab, brewed by Prilepska Pivarnica.
Fruit-flavoured lager shandy seems to have taken a hold in that part of the
world with German-style Radler available in a range of different flavours.
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| Zlaten Dab ad, Bitola |
I’ll be posting eleven or so different beers over the next couple
of weeks from that part of the world. I also ate and drank so much that I feel
like a need a detox so expect the blog to be dominated by Balkan lagers for the
foreseeable! Annoyingly my phone went kaput so I lost pretty much all of the beer-related photos I had taken for the posts so most images will be lifted from the internet...(images in this post are my own).
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| Spotted outside a bar in downtown Skopje |
In other, unrelated news Wetherspoons have released the beer
list for their October 2013 beer festival and you can find it
here. The list features
some interesting stuff from American craft brewers as well as 40 real ales
including decent sounding offerings from Bath Ales, St Peter’s and Purity that
I’ll be keeping a keen eye out for..
This one
caught my eye in a supermarket in Ohrid, Macedonia owing to it’s cheap,
supermarket own-brand appearance, to me it almost looks like a parody of a beer
can. I only saw this once so picked up a can and to my pleasant surprise noted
that it was brewed in Kosovo thus giving me another country tick. I can’t
really find much mention of the beer online, a couple of website attribute it
to Birra Peja, a Kosovan brewery, although their own website makes no mention
of Grün Braü. Anyway this was fairly crap and didn’t lend any credence to the
phrase ‘appearances can be deceptive’. A weak-tasting and flavourless lager.
