Tuesday 13 March 2012

Belated Happy Beer Day

Beer researcher extraordinaire that she is the lovely Lisa came home from work with a fascinating fact the other week. March 1st is Beer Day in Iceland.

As this sounds like an excellently themed celebration we wanted to join in. And I had a plan about how we could ...

Amongst the spam that I get sent because of the blog I recalled something about Icelandic beers from a few months back. So I searched through my inbox and found an email from lovedrinks about Icelandic beers. It seems you can get them from Harvey Nichols or online here. I can't say I'm one for shopping at Harvey Nicks, or buying beer online for that matter so it was looking like our celebrations would be a bit of a flop.

Then another press release from lovedrinks arrived in my inbox and I noticed the interesting words samples are available at the bottom. This sounds like it's worth another email I thought, so I tried a bit of online blagging shortly before going to the lakes for a week's holiday.

As we were heading up in the day first stop was Booths and what do I see there? A range of Icelandic vikings looking up at me from the beer shelves.

We were a day late by this point but we got to have a belated beer day celebration with Icelandic beer.

The beers from Einstok brewery have the slogan Drink, Conquer, Repeat which sounds a little aggressive for a country annexed by Operation Fork. Anymore of that talk and we'll launch Operation Spoon I thought, but on looking closer I see they don't want to conquer so they can pillage, but to leave things better. Which is nice.

The beers are all well crafted across a range of beer styles and brewed by a fellow Heriot-Watt graduate. The wheat beer was perhaps a little sweet, but pleasantly drinkable. The pale ale reminded me of White Shield in it's recent actually worth drinking incarnation. The toasted porter didn't have the smoked flavour I'd feared and went down far too easily for something at 6% ABV.

And when we got back from holiday I found the last in the set, the doppelbock waiting in the post. I can't say I've drunk many doppelbocks but it had the syrupy goodness I'd expect so another well done to Brewmaster Baldur.

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