Beer #59 - The Black Turtle IPA Beer #60 - The Black Turtle Blueberry (FYR Special!)

Having finished with sight-seeing in Belgrade for the day we decided to seek out another Black Turtle location for a pre-dinner drink. We set off in search of Black Turtle III which is near the fortress in the city. I obviously hadn’t been playing close enough attention when marking the location of the pub on the map, as having walked the full length of the street (we thought) the pub was on we couldn’t find it. Having wandered around for a bit I realised that we were looking for it on Gospodar Jevremova when it was in fact one street over on Gospodar Jovanova. I’m usually pretty good with the cyrillic alphabet but I let myself down on this one. Unlike Black Turtle V, III was on a nice quiet side street. On this occasion I sampled the IPA and another fruit beer, this time Blackberry flavour. The IPA is a reasonable stab at a hoppy beer, particularly for the area. As far as I can ascertain there aren’t many places producing beer like this in the Balkans. In comparison to what you’d find in the UK or USA it was fairly unexciting but by no means terrible. The Blackberry arrived with a thick purple head that evoked the hundreds of pints Snakebite and black (Snakebite is a half/half mix of lager and cider, often then mixed with blackcurrant cordial) I’d drunk in my student days. This was a reasonable step up from the lemon beer I tried earlier in the day and was reasonably tasty. I probably wouldn’t recommend it though. All in all the Black Turtle pubs offer some half-decent beer and a good alternative to drinking crap lagers all the time. In addition to the beers posted they offer a stout, a couple of Belgian-style beers and a variety of seasonal specials and are worth checking out if you find yourself in Belgrade.

Black Turtle IPA

Brewery: Black Turtle
Country: Serbia
ABV: 8.0%

Black Turtle Blueberry

Brewery: Black Turtle
Country: Serbia
ABV: 4.6%

Beer #57 - The Black Turtle Limun (FYR Special!)

Alongside my Svetlo at Black Turtle V I also tried the brewery's lemon beer. The brewery currently offers three fruit flavoured beers, based on their Pils 'with the addition of prepared fruit juces during the conditioning period'. The lemon flavour was...quite strange. It tasted soapy, for want of a better word, kind of like some sweet, lemon flavour washing up liquid had been added to it. I can't really think of much to recommend this one to be honest, I also tried the blueberry flavour which will feature in a future post and was a bit better. Probably best to stick to the regular beer rather than this though. If you want something that tastes of lemons, get a lemonade!

 

Brewery: Black Turtle
Country: Serbia
ABV: 4.6%

Beer #56 - The Black Turtle Svetlo (FYR Special!)

The Black Turtle brewery was established in northern Serbia in 2010 and owns a chain of pubs in the capital Belgrade. As far as I can ascertain Black Turtle is the closest thing Serbia has to a craft microbrewery. Its pubs are all within central Belgrade and are simply numbered, Black Turtle II – Black Turtle V (Black Turtle I is now closed). The pubs are well worth checking out if you’re in Belgrade and offer a decent alternative to constant euro lager. Whilst I was there I visited Black Turtle III and Black Turtle V for a few drinks, a 300ml glass of beer comes in at around 75p (or approx. US$1.25) which is pretty good value especially for the stronger stuff which is the same price. The first beer I had was the Black Turtle Svetlo. I don’t really know why I chose this given the interesting array of stuff on offer, for the first time in a week I could try something that wasn’t lager and I picked a lager. Good one. Thankfully this was nothing like what I’d be been drinking up to this point, indeed it was like manna from heaven in comparison to most of the fizzy crap I’ve detailed in previous posts. It’s therefore hard to write a decent review. I really liked it, it was hazy and had some depth to it, but I’m not sure whether I liked it because it was better than anything else I’d been drinking in Macedonia or because it was actually good. I guess you’ll have to go there and try it yourself.

Brewery: Black Turtle
Country: Serbia
ABV: 4.6%

Former Yugoslav Republics Special!

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.

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.

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).

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..