Stephen Beaumont's World of Beer

An unapologetically opinionated view of what's brewing
across the continent and around the globe.

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

For July and August and September, SBWoB is on the road in Europe. This second instalment will take you with me and Christine and my notebook computer, affectionately known as "The Beast," to Barcelona and Madrid in Spain, Lyon in France, and through the pen and palate of my sister, Cathy Beaumont, back to North America to the KQED Beer Festival in San Francisco.

Cheers!

On the Road: Madrid

The last taste of Portugal I had before boarding the train for Madrid was a can of contract-brewed Carlsberg purchased from a vending machine. And while there was still to be plenty of mass-produced lagers in my future, from that point on, things on the beer front were to improve considerably.

Madrid is hardly poised to become a beer mecca on its own, but compared to the poor brew selection available in Portugal, our arrival in Spain certainly felt like a breath of fresh air. The first place Christine and I stopped for a beer -- after we had found a hotel and cleaned up after the long, overnight train ride --offered three taps, which was at least one more than we ever saw in Lisbon. True, they were still commercial lagers, but at least there was a bit more hop in them and, of course, there was some selection.

Nonetheless, the degree to which we had changed our beer environment did not fully hit home until that evening. For it was then, while we were wandering about doing the tapas tango, that we lucked upon Naturbier, Madrid's downtown brewpub.

Even though the brewery is located at the back of Naturbier's spacious interior, there was something about the place that just screamed "brewpub!" to me, and so we ducked inside to pay it a visit. What we found was a very large and very packed (at 10:30 on a Monday night!) tapas bar that just happens to brew its own beer -- much different, I should note, from a brewpub that just happens to serve tapas.

That difference was very much in evidence once we had a chance to sample the house beers; a blond and a brown ale. With their fairly mundane characters, neither ale managed to catch our rapt attention, with Christine giving the blond a slight nod over the brown due to its more balanced composition. Personally, I faintly favoured the brown because of its more chocolaty taste, but had to allow that neither beer had any great degree of complexity or fullness.

Of course, the hoards of people in Naturbier didn't appear to at all agree with my assessment, as glasses and pints and pitchers of the beer -- mostly blond --was being consumed at a rapacious rate all around us. So perhaps apparent success of this brewpub concept will spark further interest in the idea in Madrid. And perhaps next time, the beer will receive as much attention as the tapas.

To link to more articles from this month's World of Beer go back to the top of the page.

Coming in September

The voyage is not yet complete! Travel further through Europe with me and Christine as we visit French Flanders, Belgium and Amsterdam. Beer-wise, the best is yet to come...

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