Back Issues | Current Issue
August 1997 Home
On the Road:
-- Madrid
On the Road:
-- Barcelona to Lyon
Kitchen Table Tasting
-- Spanish Edition
The KQED Beer Festival by Cathy Beaumont
Click on any of the book covers below to get ordering information.
 |
Stephen Beaumont's Brewpub Cookbook |
 |
A Taste For Beer |
 |
Great Canadian Beer Guide |
 |
A World of Beer |
On the Road: Barcelona to Lyon
On the surface, there is relatively little that Barcelona in Spain's northeast has in common with Lyon, France. Barcelona's endless nightlife has made it a popular tourist stop while Lyon is known to most as the city you pass through on the way south from Paris; Barcelona's sunny Mediterranean beaches contrast with Lyon's pair of rivers; and where Barcelona is the home of light tapas dining, Lyon offer five-course, three-hour lunches that can easily serve as your sole meal of the day.Where beer is concerned, however, Barcelona and Lyon are on common ground. While neither city could truly be said to have a beer culture per se -- wine is by far the dominant drink in both locales -- good beer is as easy to find in one city as it is in the other. For Barcelona, that means wandering the Eixample district north of La Rambla, which is the city's main road and prime people-watching pasture, and for Lyon, it means crossing the Sâone to the old city.
Despite or perhaps because both of these areas are high tourist traffic zones, decent to good beer selection seems to be pretty much the norm for the bars and restaurants that populate them. Without much effort at all, Christine and I were able to find a nice white beer (the increasingly ubiquitous Hoegaarden) to quench our thirsts in Lyon, and also a very fine Trappist ale (Chimay Red) to complement our lunches in Barcelona.
(It is interesting to compare this experience with those I have had in most tourist hubs of major North American cities. In places like New York City, Toronto and Chicago, for example, you normally have to leave the tourist zones to find good beer, where in Barcelona and Lyon,the selection just seemed to get better.)
Beneath this good beer news, however, lurked a bit of a disappointment. In each region of each city, the more interesting beer available was uniformly imported, with nary a drop of the local stuff falling much outside of the boundaries of the commercial lager. And while this is perhaps to be expected in Spain where craft breweries are not exactly all the rage, it was particularly sad to see in France where many excellent family breweries have been in operation for generations in the northeast of the country, producing many wonderful, complex ales.
But then again, the Lyon I visited two years ago offered much less beer selection that it does today, and I even understand that a brewpub is planned to open in the city for next year. So maybe the next time I find myself in town, I'll be able to enjoy fine French ales as well as imported Belgian, German and British fare.
World of Beer Update
The World of Beer changes so quickly that it can be almost impossible to keep up! But that challenge just got a little easier. Register here and on or about the 15th of each month we will e-mail you a short update on articles from the previous month's World of Beer and provide details on stories we're following for future issues.
So don't get left behind. Register here to receive the Stephen Beaumont's World of Beer
Update each and every month. It's free!
Sign up for Stephen Beaumont's World of Beer Update.
Stephen Beaumont reserves all rights that pertain to the text of his articles, in any form that it appears.
