Nefiltrovany

Filtering and pasteurising is of course the worst thing you can do to a beer, so when I spotted this fella in the supermarket I bung a couple in, as you don't have to speak Czech to work out what 'Nefiltrovany' might mean.

The bog standard Staropramen which I tried was very uninspiring; the only one of the ten or so Czech beers I've tried from the supermarket which I wouldn't get again.
This one was way, way, better though; nice and cloudy, with spices and fruitiness. Why exactly would they make the crud ones when they can make this? At about 60 Euro cents I bought another 6 today.

It's always encouraging when a pub / restaurant has brewing equipment on display in the window, and when the menu is headed 'we serve unfiltered and unpasteurised beers' then that's even better.

I went for the mixture of pale and dark lager and it was a reminder that lager can be as flavoursome as any beer when it isn't buggered with.

Lager is the beer equivalent of pizza; abused, defiled, misrepresented and misunderstood.
There's lots of beery snacks to keep you going, such as 'beer cheese'.

They also do their own fruit beers; I went for a 'nettle' and a 'sour cherry'.

The nettle one had just the right combination of beer and fruit flavour; the sour cherry one was much more oriented to the sour cherry taste but was still worth drinking. You even get a real sour cherry at the bottom...

Pivovarsky Dum, may your beer stay nefiltrovany.

Fruity whoppers

Galeria in Munich is getting slightly more adventurous in its selection of non-German beers. The other day I spotted a couple of Samuel Smith beers I didn't know existed - organic fruit beers.

They seem to be some sort of collaboration; on the blurb on the back it says the base beer is brewed at Melbourn Bros', a Stamford brewery, using organic barley and wheat, and then Sam Smiths add the fruit juice and mix it with more beer in Tadcaster.
The bane of most fruit beers is excessive sweetness - far too often they taste like some shitty alcopop. I don't even think the better lambic based ones are worth bothering with.
With these fellas the first thing you notice is the massive whiff of the fruit which bludgeons your nostrils into a pulp. That's followed up by a massive fruit burst all over your tongue, finished off with the maltiness of the beer. Clearly this started off from a decent foundation for the fruit to work on. There's a tiny bit of sweetness but it doesn't at all feel contrived.
At 4 euros a shout I won't be making these regulars, but they would be awesome on a hot summer's day, and certainly raise my expectations of what a good fruit beer can be like. Nice one Galeria, Melbourn Bros and Sam Smiths.