I remember walking along a beach in Koi Samui in Thailand with my wife-to-be many years ago, the feeling of cool white sand pushing up between our toes and the late evening sun warming our backs.

We stopped at one of the beach-side bars, under the shade of a palm leaf roof and ordered a cold Thai beer. I recall it being delicious, fitting just perfectly into that moment. It was, right then, one of the best beers I had ever had.

Now I don’t recall if that beer was a bottle of Leo, Thailand’s best selling beer. I suspect it was a Singha but to be honest it doesn’t really matter. What made it so special had everything to do with the circumstances and hardly anything to do with the beer.

Which is why when I got the chance to try Leo recently my expectations were not sky high. The white sands have after all long been replaced by white snow, the beach-side bars with cheap pizza restaurants and the warming evening sun has been a stranger in this part of northern Sweden for several months now.

So in fairness to my bottle of Leo I decided to cook a Thai red chicken curry, seasoned with lemongrass, coconut milk and lime in an attempt to help it fit a little better into the moment.

And guess what? It succeeded! Leo describes itself as having a “smooth and great taste”. Well I’d dispute the latter adjective but Leo is indeed pretty smooth. It has a classic pale lager look to it, all watery yellow with bleached white head.

Up front it has a pleasant sweetness that smothered the heat of the curry rather nicely. After that to be honest there is very little there – but then with beers like Leo that’s largely the point isn’t it?

I would probably never drink a bottle of Leo on its own when all its weaknesses are brutally exposed, but put it together with spicy Asian food and it becomes as good as it can be.

Leo Lager will be available from the Systembolaget’s beställningssortiment from April 1^st in both 33cl and 63cl bottles.

Isn’t it funny how you can overlook something that’s right there under your nose?

I do it all the time. Like snow for example. There’s lots of it up here in the north of Sweden but it took several years before I realised you could actually use it to ski on.

Primator Premium Dark is the first of three Primator beers I'm reviewing.

The same thing regularly happens to me when I visit my local Systembolaget store. I tread the same well-worn path through the isles, instinctively searching out the small orange markers that denote a new beer is in town. Failing that I tend to switch into autopilot, heaping bottles of beers I am on familiar terms with into my shopping basket.

I rarely seem to stray from this regime, and therein lies my problem because there’s no doubt I am guilty of overlooking beers that deserve some space in my fridge back home.

Primator Premium Dark is one such beer. This dark lager from the Pivovar Nachod in the Czech Republic is a multi-award winning brew, having been voted the World’s Best Dark Lager in 2008 by the British ‘Beers of the World’ magazine.

The Pivovar Nachod brewery dates back to 1872 and first registered the Nachodsky Primator brand name (the predecessor of the current dark beer) in 1935.  Since 2006 the brewery has undergone some radical modernisation but still uses only Czech ingredients in all is beers, including South Moravian malts and spring water from an underground lake in the Adrpach National Park.

All very interesting stuff for a beer I’ve overlooked for months and months. So what’s it like then?

Primator Premium Dark pours a, well, dark russet brown with a slightly off-white head. The smell is all malts, with freshly baked brown bread, treacle, muscovado sugar and raisin juice.

It is naturally quite sweet to taste, but there’s just enough hop bite to avoid it becoming too sticky sweet. There’s also an underlying mineral taste – I assume from the water – that increases the drinkability factor considerably.

This is great beer and for me (a die-hard ale drinker) it’s altogether more interesting than its paler lager cousins. I can imagine it would pair really well with shellfish and practically any meat from the BBQ, as well as Asian dishes with some spicy heat that require a little sweetness to lift the flavours.

Primator Premium Dark

A Dark Lager from Pivovar Nachod, Czech Republic

4.8% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 1615

We throw the term artisan and craft beer around a lot these days. The boundaries of the term are often stretched by breweries desperate to convey the message that they still personally roll their sleeves up and get involved in the creation of beer rather than leaving it all up to computers, buttons and valves.

Where we should draw the line between craft and non-craft beer is an ongoing and hotly debated subject. What isn’t is the fact that beer brewed in an old dairy on a farm in a field near the east coast of Denmark is craft beer with a capital C.

Stensbogaard Bryghus is a family-run brewery that produces small batches of just 1,000 litres of beer at a time. I haven’t been to their farm but I’m pretty certain there aren’t that many computerised processes involved in the making of any of their seven main beers.

Two of these, English Dark Stout and an IPA are currently available (in limited numbers) at the Systembolaget, so while I was waiting for my bottle of beer to explode last night I got stuck into the stout.

It poured as expected a deep, dark brown with an attractive off-white, beaten egg head so packed with hop aroma it smelted like a bag of old pennies. This vanished after the head died away.

Considering the beefy 6.8% ABV the mouthfeel was disappointingly thin, with some mild coffee, dark toffee, cigar box and an unsettling salty sourness in the finish that stayed in my mouth several minutes after finishing my glass.

It all reminded me of old Army and Navy English liquorice sweets my Nan used to give me as a kid and that I used to spit out the moment her back was turned. In a way this beer had a real ‘yesteryear’ taste about it, a little raw, like something I could imagine people drank in the 18th century, From a barn on a farm perhaps?

Stensbogaard Bryghus English Dark Stout

A Stout from Stensbogaard Bryghus in Denmark

6.8% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 11709

With breweries producing ever more intense , alcoholic beers these days it’s a welcome relief to see that Nynäshamns Ångbyggeri at least agrees with me that good things can come in little packages.

The brewery has fairly recently upgraded its bottling line so that it can handle smaller bottle sizes and Sotholmen Extra Stout is the first beer out in their new rather cute 25cl bottle format.

So little bottle, big beer right? Well, not quite.

Sotholmen is an impressive beer to gaze at. It pours very dark, almost black and has an appetising fluffy dark tan head. The aroma promises much, with a hit of filter coffee and port wine.

However in the mouth I struggled to find the something ‘Extra’ the beer claims to have. If Nynäshamns means extra alcohol then that’s in there, but it fails to give the beer the body and complexity I’m looking for in a strong stout.

This is even more surprising because this beer, like all beers from Nynäshmans is unpasteurised, and I’ve come to take for granted the smooth, full mouth-feel of the ‘live’ beers from this brewery.

Cold coffee with a dash of milk – there’s lots of that and a little bitter chocolate but that’s about all I could find. It feels a little grainy and thin considering the 7% ABV, finishing with a dry, slightly boozy finish.

Don’t get me wrong, drinking a small bottle of Sotholmen is a pleasant way to pass the time. But then so is watching curling at the Winter Olympics. Hardly exciting though, is it?

(footnote: Watch out for another 25cl bottle from Nynäshmans being launched at Systembolaget on March 1st . This time it’s their 9.1% ABV Bötet Barley Wine).

Sotholmen Extra Stout

A Foreign Stout (strong stout) from Nynäshams Ångbryggeri

7% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 11723

It’s time for my second beer from Dugges Ale & Porterbryggeri this week. The first one left me feeling a little flat but my hopes were high for their 1/2 idjit Imperial Porter, the ‘younger brother’ of Dugges floor-kissing’15% ABV Idjit Imperial Stout.

At a ‘mere’ 7% ABV 1/2 idjit is still a porter worthy of it’s imperial tag. When the word imperial is used in conjunction with a beer these days it really means ‘drinker beware’, as imperial-style beers are invariably extreme both in terms of flavour and strength.

The term imperial doesn’t originally relate to porter at all but in fact to Imperial Russian Stout, a beer brewed in the 18th century in England for export to the court of Catherine II of Russia (who  apparently liked a drop of the strong stuff). It had to be strong (normally around 8-12 % ABV) to stop the beer freezing on its way to the Baltics.

That’s enough history lesson for one day. Let’s get to the beer.

Dugges 1/2 idjit pours an inky black with a short-lived praline-coloured head. The dominant aroma is instantly recognizable – burnt toast – backed up with smells of bitter dark chocolate, cold black coffee and charred wood.

Dugges themselves promise a distinctive taste of salt liquorice and yes it was there but not at the levels I had feared (I bloody hate salt liquorice. It’s supposed to be a sweet for goodness sake. Salted tyre rubber more like).

Much more pleasant were the beer’s delicious coffee and cocoa tones, a burnt brown sugar sweetness and a sprinkle of cigar ash in a bitter/dry finish. There was some salt and sappy pine courtesy of the hops, which played nothing more than a supporting role to this porter’s impressive malt cast.

Oh yes, my faith in Dugges is restored! No half measures with this beer. You’d have to be a complete idjit not to try it.

Dugges 1/2 idjit

An Imperial Porter

7% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 11729 (but only available for a couple more months, so hurry while stocks last).

Dugges Ale & Porterbryggeri from Gothenburg is arguably the coolest of the new generation of Swedish microbreweries. With their eye-catching ‘Miami’ coloured bottle labels and tongue-in-cheek brand names Dugges have always succeeded in making their beers look good as well as taste great.

I’ve personally had more than one enjoyable session at the Stockholm Beer Festival propped up against their stand, when it was all High Fives, me talking a lot of bollox and then leaving feeling a bit of an idjit.

Dugges was early to embrace American hops in its beers, creating a succession of innovative and generally well received beers. They’re largely responsible for making Swedish beers fun again, creating a buzz based on humour but with very serious beers to back their micro-message up.

I say all this as a precursor to what’s coming next because I really like Dugges. Really I do.

But I don’t like their Spring Beer Lager.

It wasn’t that long before things started going wrong. When I poured the beer into the glass I noticed it was a rather cloudy pale copper colour with a thin slightly yellow head – strange for a premium lager I thought. The first line in my notebook reads: ”Is this beer ok?”

I was partially reassured by mild hoppy smells of grass and orange but they were muted by something else unpleasant and yeasty.  In the mouth things went from bad to worse. The body is quite thin, with some initial malty sweetness followed by a short-lived bitter finish. The third line of my notebook reads: ”where are the hops?”

It all culminated with the strong taste impression of wet paper, a classic tell-tale sign of oxidized beer, which leads me to wonder if I stumbled upon a dud bottle. I hope it was, because this beer was stale and dull and Dugges is normally anything but.

So take this review at face value with a disclaimer that I may not have experienced Dugges Spring Beer at its best. I’d be very interested to hear what you all thought of it and will revisit it again to see whether I was just unlucky this time. If I was then forget all of the above, or as Dugges themselves would probably say, Never Mind the Bollox!

Dugges Spring Beer Lager

A Premium Lager

4.7% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 1479

Now before we begin I have a confession to make. I’m not a great fan of wheat beer – never have been.

I can honestly say I’ve tried to like it. I’ve supped many of the generally accepted best examples from Germany and Belgium in an attempt to convince my palette that it’s as amazing as many of my beery friends say it is.

My personal issue with the style is simply that I struggle to find drinking pleasure with a beer whose predominant tastes are banana, band aid and bubblegum mixed up with coriander and cloves.

So with this beer skeleton now publicly out of the closet lets get on with the review of Sigtuna Brygghus’s latest release, its oh-so-cooly named Vårweizen.

For the non-Swedish speakers vår means spring and this beer is part of a clutch of new beers recently introduced into the Systembolaget as part of the theme ’spring and spicy cuisine’.

Now you only need to take a look at the photo to the left to see that you’d have to be REALLY creative to call this a spring beer when there’s over a metre of snow outside and the thermometer is literally frozen under minus 10 degrees. It’s more the latter category that this very unusual wheat beer falls into.

Sigtuna itself describes Vårweizen as an aromatic wheat beer based upon a southern German style with a ‘modern touch’ – the touch being the highly unusual addition of American hops.

This would no doubt make most Germans spit out their sauerkraut in disgust, as Sigtuna have clearly broken the style rules here which say that yeast should be the star of wheat beers with hops playing a very small supporting role at best.

Just as well I’m not from the style police then, because those hops make this beer, turning it from a potentially rather flat example of a weizen into something far more different and interesting.

Vårweizen is an unpasteurised beer that pours a cloudy amber (remember to swirl the bottle a little to agitate the suspended yeast floating around in it, otherwise your first glass will be far clearer than your last).

On the nose the phenolic smell of banana is clearly there but it is more restrained than in most other examples I have tried. There’s some peach too and an undercurrent of spice which isn’t obviously cloves but more like freshly cracked black pepper corns.

In the mouth VårWeizen is crisp but has a ‘skinny’ mouthfeel that lacks the soft creaminess I’m looking for from the wheat. There’s a dash of malt sweetness followed by some uplifting citrus acidity and then come the hops, sweeping in to finish the job with a nip of bitterness.

With all these qualities and its moderate ABV I can see why this beer will pair well with spicy cuisine. As a stand alone drink however it didn’t quite do it for me, although it gets plenty of ‘cred’ for daring to be different.

Vårweizen

A wheat beer (with a twist) from Sigtuna Brygghus

5% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 11552

Bottles from Swedish microbrewery Oppigårds are the beer equivalent of Paul Potts. From the outside they can look rather boring, a little awkward and forgettable. If you didn’t know you might even pass them by without ever giving them a try.

They may not look all that amazing from the outside, but it's what's on the inside that counts!

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But if you do give their beers a chance, if you do allow them the opportunity to open up then oh how they sing!

Rarely have I felt so elated as a beer drinker as the moment I opened my first bottle of Oppigårds’ Amarillo Spring. Just like that magical moment when Mr Potts the goofy-toothed mobile salesman from south Wales walked onto the stage and said he was going to sing opera, I had absolutely no idea what magic was coming next.

The aroma of freshly picked, green leafy hops was simply overwhelming. It stopped me in my tracks.

I can’t recall a more exhilaratingly hop nose on a Swedish beer. It reminded me of the smell of broken Dandelion stems I used to snap as a child playing outside during the summer. If every colour had its own unique aroma then this beer is how green would smell.

There’s a dash of white wine in there to, along with subtle hints of red berries and pine needles. Malt must be present too but if it is it’s not telling anyone – and quite frankly who cares.

In the mouth this maestro continues to perform beautifully, delivering a fleeting sweetness before a swell of citrus climaxes in a crescendo of lingering balanced bitterness.

Oppigårds Amarillo Spring is an outstanding example of the role hops can play in the aroma and taste of a beer. It is one of the absolute best European versions of an American Pale Ale I have ever tasted.

The beer was originally released to celebrate Oppigårds’ 7th year in business and has been renamed to fit in with the current seasonal theme at the Systembolaget. With its assertive bitterness (measuring 50 IBUs for you beer nerds) it almost strays into IPA territory, so if you like hops you’re going to love this.

But here’s a warning – the beer is only available at the Systembolaget for the next three months. I therefore urge you to go and buy it – lots of it. Then go home, throw all the food out of your fridge and fill it with bottles of this beer instead.

It’s that good.

Oppigårds Amarillo Spring

5.9% ABV

An American Pale Ale from Oppigårds Bryggeri

Systembolaget Article Number: 1440

I really wanted this to work.

I’d taken home a quarter pounder with cheese for dinner and Bruce Springsteen was whipping the crowd into a patriotic frenzy as he blasted out Born in the USA on Spotify.

Conditions were as ideal as they could be considering I’m sitting 400 km south of the Arctic circle in Sweden to try my first ever glass of Spendrups’ new US-inspired Pistonhead Hot Roddin’ Lager

The bottle’s flaming skull motif was fairly eye-catching, as was the incorrect (brewed on…) and clumsy English (no bling??) on the back label. But these, I hoped, were merely scratches in this beer’s hot rod bodywork and that there was still a high performance brew revving up underneath the hood.

However instead of this……

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I got this.

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There’s no easy way to say this. Pistonhead is about as genuinely American as Arnold Schwarzeneggar. Spendrups promised a beer with attitude but delivers a lager that barely gets into first gear.

Appearance-wise Pistonhead is unspectacular – perhaps a shade more amber than most pale lagers with a bleached white head. The first clear sign that it has very little in the tank is the smell of it. American hops are known for their distinctive and explosive aromas of grapefruit, citrus and pine needles. Despite the fact that Pistonhead uses more than one US hop variety I just couldn’t locate them underneath thin smells of vegetables and butterscotch.

Taste-wise things went from bad to worse. Hash, metallic, raw malt flavours that thankfully vanished in one of the shortest aftertastes I’ve experienced in recent years of drinking beers. As for the hops…..they simply failed to turn up.

There seems little point in carrying on. In a previous post I gave kudos to Spendrups for seemingly breaking the brewery mould and daring to launch this beer. I still think they should be applauded for doing so, although I am hugely disappointed they didn’t give it the horsepower needed to make it worthy of the hype.

The back label proclaims Pistonhead comprises “only high quality parts and a lot of torque”.

Unfortunately it should read “a lot of talk” instead.

Pistonhead Hot Roddin’ Lager

A lager from Spendrups Brewery

5% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 1432-03

If I’m ever going to stand a chance of achieving my New Year’s resolution of reviewing 300 different beers this year it’s about time I got started don’t you think? Searching through the fridge for a bottle to try my only condition was that it should not IN ANY WAY remind me of beers in Tenerife.

That’s why I eventually grabbed a bottle of Midtfyns Bryghus Imperial Stout, a heavyweight 9.5% ABV beer from Denmark that pours as black as the volcanic rocks of Mount Teide.

(Ed note: That’s it. I’m sick of references to Tenerife now. Stop it)

I don’t know much about this quirky brewery. I have previously tried their IPA and found it to be pleasant if a little forgettable. I couldn’t uncover a  lot of information about it on the web although I did find a rather unflattering picture of the brewery which makes it look like a botched 70s shop front extension to a house.

However microbreweries don’t always need to look pretty as long as they deliver in the bottle. MB’s Imperial Stout had previously been voted the Best New Beer of 2007 by the Danish Society of Beer Enthusiasts so my expectations were high.

The beer pours a coal black colour with an impressive and firm O’Boy coloured head. Smells initially of milk chocolate, cereal husks and burnt coffee beans, but there’s something odd mixed in there too that reminded me of sour cream.

In the mouth the beer starts to disappoint, with salty stingy bitterness and raw burnt flavours of rågbröd, liquorice and ash making it a little ‘uncomfortable’ to drink.

Considering the high ABV this Imperial Stout doesn’t have the flavour muscle I expected it to have. Lots of burnt tones but you’re left searching for something else to add contrast.

Not a great Dane, but I wouldn’t swap it for a Dorada (dammit!)

(ps: I noted on their website that among an interesting line-up of beers produced at Midtfyns Bryghus is one called Gunners Ale produced for the Danish Arsenal supporters club. As a die-hard Liverpool fan I want to stress this in no way influenced my appreciation of their beer).

Midtfyns Bryghus Imperial Stout

9.5% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number 11707