Category Archives: France

Revisiting old haunts

Unfiltered lager at Naturbier in Madrid

When I went on my travels a couple of years ago around Spain and France, I didn’t have a huge number of amazing beer experiences to report.  Nonetheless, there were a couple of interesting places  to which I was keen to take Baileythis time round.

The first was Naturbier in Madrid,  a friendly brewpub in the heart of the city. I was interested to see if Bailey would agree with my positive opinions and he did, although we both agreed that this time the “rubio” (blonde/pale) beer was better — almost as good as some unfiltered lagers we’d had in Germany.

The second was the Frog & Rosbif (Paris St Denis branch) which seems to have quite a bad reputation as an expat dive.  I loved it last time and was almost a bit nervous to take Bailey there… Would it be as good?

Yes and no.  The wheat beer and lager were a bit odd tasting, and the waitress warned us off the stout (“It’s not so good today.  Why not try something something else?”).  But the two ales were fresh and the atmosphere and service were great.  What’s interesting about this place is how it manages to be so popular with the locals: we didn’t spot any obvious ex-pats. It’s certainly not because it’s cheap…

Boak

We're back (with a short beer review)

Wendelinus Abbey Beer from French brewery Meteor

We got back from our hols yesterday and have a few beer-related bits and pieces to report. For starters, though, we’ll mention the very first halfway decent beer of the break — Wendelinus Biere d’Abbaye, from the French brewery Meteor. They’re based in the not-very-French sounding Alsation town of Hochfelden. It’s done up to look like a cheap knock-off of Leffe.

Our bottles came from the train’s buffet car, and were served in plastic tumblers. It actually tasted pretty pleasant — some honey flavours and spiciness — but that might be partly because we were bored stiff stuck on a train in the south of France waiting for a smashed up lorry to be removed from a level crossing up ahead. We thought it as good as the blond beers from Leffe or Grimbergen, at any rate.

More basque beer, this time from the French side

patxaran.jpgWhilst in Biarritz, I went beer hunting. I was actually after some Akerbeltz, as I’d spotted an advert for their brewery in the tourist office. However, they couldn’t be bothered to respond to my email to tell me where to find the stuff, so I had an amusing afternoon going into every wine shop and off-licence that was open and baffling the locals with my quest for more biere artisanale. More fun that way, and I found a couple of other basque products instead.

Firstly, the intriguingly titled “Etxeko Bob’s beer” — unfiltered, unpasteurised etc.. The brewery is just outside Bayonne, and has a half-built website here. The beer itself was inoffensive but not that exciting. Quite a lot like the other beers I had in the south of France that I generalised about yesterday. That said, I had shaken it up quite a lot before drinking it, so I probably wasn’t drinking it in peak condition.

I was expecting Oldarki Patxaran beer to be revolting – it is beer mixed with Patxaran, a basque spirit made from sloe berries. However, it was actually very tasty. It wasn’t particularly sweet, just fruity and very refreshing. It was copper-red coloured, with a light body. It reminded me a little bit of Meantime’s Raspberry beer, but also of a strawberry beer I had in Belgium once (but not as sickly). Very hard to pin down the flavour – as their website says,

“it is a very specific beverage and can’t be compared to any other beer; the Patxaran-based recipe is exclusive”

I’m not a huge fruit beer fan, but I really liked this.

Boak

Generalisations about artisan brews in the south of France

A couple of months back on the way out to Spain, I blogged to express my surprise that there was a micro-brewing scene in the south of France, and several helpful commentators provided useful links to find out more.

Using these links, I managed to track down products from at least five breweries from the Midi – nothing on tap, unfortunately, but bottles can be found with a bit of searching in the off-licences, supermarkets and “regional produce” shops in the bigger cities such as Montpellier and Toulouse. Ask for “biere artisanale”.

beer_bottle.jpgSo why nothing on the blog about the exciting brewing scene? Unfortunately, all of the beers I’ve tried have (literally) been nothing to write home about, ranging from dull homebrew to actively unpleasant.

They always look promising – attractive packaging, reminiscent of small Belgian breweries. They’re usually unfiltered, unpasteurised, and “refermented in the bottle”. Unfortunately, they all have a similar flavour profile (or lack) – little or no malt taste, and what hops you can taste usually have a fairly astringent grassy flavour.

In fact, the tastes were so similar that it made me wonder whether they were attempting to brew like that, whether it is a specific “style” made for the Midi market. Or perhaps it’s due to having poor quality primary ingredients. Or maybe it’s just that it’s early days, and they’ll get better. I hope so.

I don’t want to list the culprits here because I don’t like slagging off small brewers, and I promise that if I have a good one I will log it here!

In the meantime, if you’re a French microbrewer and reading this (unlikely, as my experience tells me you’re unlikely to even respond to direct emails asking where to find your beer), get yourself to the Frog and Rosbif in Toulouse to see how it should be done.

Boak

The Frog and Rosbif, Toulouse and Paris

frogandrosbif.jpgFrogpubs are a chain of brewpubs in France; they have four outlets in Paris, one in Bordeaux and one in Toulouse. (According to their beermats in Toulouse, they have a new one in Pau, too, but this doesn’t seem to have made it onto their website.)

Each pub brews six beers to the same recipe, although they have slightly different names depending on the pubs. I had the pleasure of visiting the Toulouse branch and the St Denis branch in Paris on consecutive days, and both were great, although slightly different.

Firstly, the beers. One of the many clever things about the business model is that they make both lagers and ales; there is something for everyone. The “blonde” is a beautifully crisp and clean lager, unpasteurised and unfiltered, which tastes like a revelation in the context of all that bloody Heineken. Reminded me of the Helles you get pubs in southern Bavaria.

Next up is the “blanche”, with orange peel. I only had a taster of this in Toulouse, and it the overwhelming flavour for me was lemon.  Would be nice in the summer, I think, but wasn’t for me at that particular time. To complete the lagers, there is a “ginger twist”; as you might imagine, this has ginger in it. I like ginger beer in small quantities, and a half of this was pleasant enough, but I was keen to move onto the ales.

On the ale front, Frogpubs offer a paleish ale (called “Aeropost’Ale in Toulouse, and “Inseine” in Paris), a red-brown ale, and a stout. These were all very interesting, not lease because the taste varied from pub to pub. The Aeropost’Ale was my favourite in Toulouse; it had nailed the English summer ale style absolutely perfectly (if I can generalise about styles like that…) Hoppy, fruity and homesickness-inducing.  In contrast, I preferred the red-brown ale (“Brew de l’Industrie” in Toulouse, “Parislytic” in Paris) in the Paris branch, where it tasted not unlike Fullers ESB. The stout was good in both locations.

Both pubs had a similar mix of international students, locals and expats – I spotted at least one German party in both. The Frog in Toulouse doesn’t have a kitchen, but has the great business idea of hooking up with two local restaurants – one of which is a curry house – to keep the punters fed. The Frog in Paris offers fancy-looking pub grub which seemed to be very popular with French and expats alike.

Notes

Locations of Frogpubs, descriptions of beer and other fun stuff can be found on their website. You can read about the history of the company and even buy someone a drink online.

Belgian Beer in Biarritz – La Tireuse

I seem to be having a lot of luck with my stopovers.

As Sunday tends to be pretty dead in France, I had been wondering whether choosing Biarritz as a stopover was wise. However, it turns out to have considerably more life on a grey November Sunday than many other French towns.

It also has “La Tireuse”, a bar with 20 handpumps loaded with Belgian beer. They’ve gone for a selection that avoids the usual, featuring a range of styles from the bigger “independent”* breweries – which you don’t often see outside Belgium, particularly not on tap.

So from Brouwirij Leroy they had Leroy stout (not my kind of thing – too sweet) and Yperman (described as an “ambree” – lovely stuff). From Bocq there was La Gauloise Ambree, St Feuillien Bruin, and from Van Eecke there was Watou’s Wit, Kapittel Triple and an old favourite, Poperings Hommelbier.

Also intriguingly, they have a beer called “La Tireuse special” – I can’t find reference of this beer on the internet. They told me it was brewed in Belgium, but I don’t have enough French to find out if it was brewed especially for them. It’s a “light” blonde, 5.6%, with quite a strong hop flavour. It was very tasty.

The bar staff are extremely friendly and happy to provide tasters, descriptions and recommendations. There is also food, with a nod to Belgium and Germany in the menu (Flammkuechen, Spaetzle, and great big hunks of meat and potatoes).

Fabulous.

Notes

*I’m not sure what independent means in the world of Belgian beer – independent of what? – but all of these breweries are classified as independent on various web forums, as well as in their own publicity material.

La Tireuse is on Rue Mazagran, at the top of Place Ste Eugenie, in the centre of Biarritz. Photo to come.

Boak

Adelscott and Desperados — eugh!

beer_bottle.jpgAdelscott is a golden (orange) ale made with whisky malt (although many bars mistakenly advertise it as containing whisky). Desperados is a Mexican-type beer with a shot of tequila in each bottle (or, rather, “aromatised” with tequila). They are brewed by Fischer (Heineken) in France.

Both beers are available in almost every bar there. They cost a euro or two more than ordinary lagers, and are pushed as “specialty beers” or “beers for tasting”.

We thought Adelscott might be interesting — Boak’s boss had raved about it. We weren’t expecting much from Desperados. But, just to make sure, last week we sat in a bar in Montpelier and ordered one Adelscott and one Desperados.

And guess what — both are foul. Desperados tastes like a particularly sickly lemonade; Adelscott tastes like Lucozade. Both are full of flavourings and unfermented sugar, so taste like alcopops. They are also quite strong, at nearly 6% each.

Avoid ‘em. We’d rather drink Heineken — and that’s saying something.

Image: interesting detail from an entirely unrelated beer bottle.

Bailey is back in the UK

“I was so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up for months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a sort of paradise. There are, indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable hops — they are all splendid, if you can pay for them.”

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)

What they think of the English Pt. 1

Screaming monkey, Nimes Natural History Museum

You can’t turn on the TV in the UK these days without seeing a report about binge drinking, accompanied by footage of girls rolling around on the floor; young men fighting; and people vomiting or urinating in public places.

Well, it seems they’ve seen that footage in France, too. We asked for a second 250 ml bottle of beer to accompany our meal in a very nice Chilean restaurant in Nimes and the owner/chef/waiter nodded sagely, before saying sadly: “Yes, I hear you have problems with drinking in London these days.”

Irrelevant photo from the vast cupboard of stuffed monkeys at the Natural History Museum in Nimes.

Interruption to your service

Boak is in France. I’m off to join her tomorrow, for three weeks. So, updates might be a bit less frequent than usual.

But don’t despair — we already have a post written for the Session, and we’ve got plenty of ideas for beer-related expeditions and experiments in France and Spain.

And I gather computers and internet connections are now very common on the Continent…