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 #58 - Krali Marko Svetlo Pivo (FYR Special!)

Krali Marko is seemingly the cheap option for lager drinkers in Macedonia. I was pretty excited to see a beer that bares my name and my hosts translation of ‘Krali’ as ‘King’ (King Marko) only heightened my enjoyment of the label. Disappointingly the lager is seriously bad. It’s produced by the same brewery, Prilepska Pivarnica, that brew the relatively superb Zlaten Dab. Krali Marko has been brewed since 1924 and is the company’s original beer. I can’t really think of anything positive to say about this as it was about as bad as a lager can be and I ended up pouring most of the 1.5 litre bottle away.  






Brewery: Prilepska Pivarnica
Country: FYR of Macedonia
ABV: 4.5%

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%

Beer #55 - Grün Braü (FYR Special!)

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.

 

Brewery: Birra Peja
Country: Kosovo
ABV: 5.0%

Beer #52 - Zlaten Dab Svetlo Pivo (FYR Special!)

Next up on the Macedonian beer list was Zlaten Dab, brewed in the south of the country by Prilepska Pivarnica. By my reckoning this must be the second most popular beer in the country (although that is solely based on my own perception alongside the knowledge that Skopsko is number one). I much preferred this to Skopsko and indeed it was my favourite Macedonian beer. It’s very light and therefore very drinkable, lacking the bitterness of Skopsko, and it’d be my recommendation for anyone looking to try a Macedonian lager.








Brewery: Prilepska Pivarnica
Country: FYR of Macedonia
ABV: 4.5%

Beer #51 - Skopsko Radler (FYR Special!)

So according to my highly detailed research a Radler is shandy-style mix of beer and a soft drink that originated in Germany. The name translates literally as ‘cyclist’ which apparently stems from it’s popularity as a sports drink(?!). Radler seems to be a big deal in the Balkans, as well as this lemon variety from Pivara Skopje I spotted a variety of other flavours (grapefruit, red orange) from other breweries. This one I actually liked. It’s unsurprisingly rather sweet and tastes a lot like cloudy lemonade (which I’m a big fan of) with a hint of beer. It’s certainly more soft drink than beer but I’d rather drink this than say, a Smirnoff Ice or whatever the current British alco-pop equivalent would be, although at 2% ABV you’re probably as well off with a class of lemonade. The take home point is that this wasn’t anything like what I expected and was actually quite enjoyable.

Brewery: Pivara Skopje
Country: FYR of Macedonia
ABV: 2.0%

Beer #50 - Skopsko Svetlo Pivo (FYR Special!)

It makes sense to start my posts on Macedonia with Skopsko. The beer is the dominant player with (according to wiki) a 64% market share in the country. It is brewed in the capital at Pivara Skopje which became part of the Heineken group in the 1990s. As with most of the forthcoming posts it’s a ‘svetlo pivo’, a light beer, or to you and me, a fairly crappy European lager (I don’t really know how I’m going to find enough to stay about most of these beers as they all taste more or less the same to me!) Skopsko is served pretty much everywhere in Macedonia, I found it quite bitter in taste for a light lager and therefore not quite so quaffable/inoffensive as most beers of this style. It was okay but, where possible, I went for an alternative option.

  

Brewery: Pivara Skopje
County: FYR of Macedonia
ABV: 4.9%

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..

Beer #9 - Nikšićko Pivo

Nikšićko Pivo is a Montenegrin beer from, produced at the Trebjesa Brewery in the town of Nikšić in the centre of the country. Trebjesa is in fact the only brewery in Montenegro (according to Wikipedia) and was founded in 1908. I didn’t really enjoy this beer, especially compared to the delightful Sarajevsko Pivo, but having discovered that the brewery is owned by Molson Coors this is little surprise. The town of Nikšić itself got a bit of a bad rep in our guidebook but having driven through this seemed a little unfair and the surrounding countryside, as with the rest of Montenegro, was beautiful. Another beer from my recent trip to the Balkans (if I’d known I was going to start this blog I’d have tried more stuff!).

 

 

Brewery: Trebjesa Brewery

Country: Montenegro
ABV: 5.0%

Beer #3 - Sarajevsko Pivo Beer #4 - Sarajevsko Tamno

In order to kick-start this blog I’ve been looking through past holiday pictures to find any beer shots, so the first few posts will probably feature an inordinately high number of foreign beers. Anyway, in June I visited Bosnia & Hercegovina and got to sample the wares of the Sarajevska Pivara for the first time. Sarajevsko Pivo is the breweries signature brew (pictured right), a delicious pale, strong lager that is extremely drinkable. The beer pictured on the left is Sarajevsko Tamno. This dark lager is available in a select few locations in and around Sarajevo (our guide book stated it was only available at the brewery, but internet searches suggest it is available elsewhere). It was my first taste of a dark lager of this kind and I enjoyed the dark malty flavour in a beer that wasn't too heavy. The picture was taken at the brewery itself in its excellent brewpub/restaurant, which is well worth a visit. The site has an interesting history and during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s was one of the only places inhabitants could get water. A Serb shell hit the brewery in January 1993, killing eight people as they queued.

 

Brewery: Sarajevska Pivara

Country: Bosnia & Hercegovina

ABV: 4.9% (Pivo), ?% (Tamno)