Have you ever heard of a supermarket trolley dash prize? You’re given a few minutes and an empty trolley which you can fill with whatever you can grab from the shelves before your time is up.

Sometimes beer festivals can feel like that.

With so many beers, so many happenings and so little time it’s sometimes difficult to know where to begin.

I’m not a huge fan of lists (I am, after all, the World’s Worst Ticker) but I do have a personal checklist of things I want to try at this year’s show and thought I would share it with you:

Eskilstuna Ölkultur, Pang Pang Brewery, Södra Maltfabriken and World’s Smallest Brewery (world’s coolest brewery name?) are among those making their first appearances at the festival this year so go along and give them all a big hug (and try their beers).

Oppigårds’ stand is always a must-visit, not just because of the Klassisk IPA they’re serving up (Ed note: this is not the only ‘old-world’ IPA coming to the show this year. Do I detect the start of a new beery trend?) but because they’ll actually be brewing beer on their stand on the first Thursday of the show. Cool initiative!

Last year's powerhouse Ace of Spades was a big hit. And this year....?

Who can forget Sigtuna’s Ace of Spades when it was released to huge critical acclaim last year? Well this year’s version promises to be different but equally outrageous and you’ll be able to try it first at Sigtuna’s stand.

Pilsner Urquell are rolling out their 2,700 litre barrel once again offering you a rare chance to try the original golden beer in all its unpasteurised and unfiltered glory.

Cask Sweden are letting the dogs out this year with a huge selection of BrewDog beers, including the läskigt and läskande Ghost Deer, which at 28% is the world’s strongest (non freeze distilled) beer. Oh. I should also mention for those of you brave enough to try it that it is poured from the mouth of a deer. BrewDog James will be at the festival during all days of the second week of the show and will be giving Master Classes every day (together with yours truly).

If you wear one of these badges at this year's show you are 615.2% more likely to find romance. Allegedly.

Brill’s stand is one of the first you encounter when you enter the hall and one of the hardest to leave, with the beery pulling power of a black hole (rather appropriate really).  It’s also the place to go and pick up your free and exclusive BSF badge if you’re a BeerSweden Forum member. That way you can not only walk around the festival knowing you’re cooler than a polar bear’s toenails but fellow BSF-ers will be able to pick you out among the crowd. Who knows, it may be the start of an amazing beer friendship!

The Oliver Twist/Brewers Association stand is another place I guarantee you will happily lose a few hours. THE place to try your way through some of the very best US beers out there today in friendly sample measures, including, I note, some of the increasingly hard-to-get Dogfish Head beers. Go there. Nuff said.

One of my highlights of last year’s show was the Danish section and this year the invasion continues with Elixir Wines once again bringing over no fewer than 7 Danish breweries (and this one from Norway), including Amager, Raasted and Djævlebryg.

Carnegie Porter is an underestimated Swedish beer classic in my book (I’ve been lucky to taste delicious vintages as far back as 1988) but if you ever needed an excuse to discover it again this is the year to do it with the special limited release of Carnegie Porter Jubileumsbryggd brewed together with Brooklyn Brewery to celebrate the beer’s 175^th anniversary. Grab a sample from Carlsberg’s stand at the show.

Lastly if a day at the beer festival isn’t quite enough there’s the ‘efterfest’ every night after the show at the Bishops Arms in Vasagatan. Here you’re pretty likely to bump into some of your favourite brewers and can grab a midnight snack with the kitchen staying open extra late and the bar serving some pretty amazing beers until 3am.

I realise I’ve missed out a lot of great stuff trying to keep this list ‘short’ (like these ones, or the Black IPA from this lot) but I hope you get a sense of how epic this show promises to be. So dive in, ask questions, explore beer styles you’ve never tried before and most of all have loads of fun. 

And if you see a guy in glasses wearing a BeerSweden T-shirt and a thirsty look on his face come up and say hi. It might just be me

Just one of the BrewDog beers coming your way before Xmas.

BrewDog has a pack of new beers coming to the Systembolaget over the next few months. Details of some launches have already been leaked onto the net but here, for the first time, is a confirmed round-up of what BrewDog fans can look forward to in the run-up to Christmas:

Abstrakt 07 – launches 1 November. 960 bottles @ 125SEK (SB Art Nr to be confirmed).

Black Tokyo Horizon – launches 1 November. 960 bottles @ 135SEK. SB Art Nr 11181-03

There is No Santa – launches 15 November.  42.000 bottles @ 19.90SEK. SB Art Nr 11178-03

I Hardcore You – launches 1 December. 9.600 bottles @ 39.90SEK (SB Art Nr to be confirmed).

Winter Porter – launches 1 December. 12.000 bottles @ 26,90SEK. SB Art Nr 11142-03. (This beer has Alice Porter as its base and is flavoured with chilli, chocolate, cacao and orange zest).

There’s some pretty amazing news coming your way in the first few months of 2012 too. Can’t say much now but trust me, you’re going to love it!

It’s a week that started with haggis and Hardcore and ends in a storm of surprise, uncertainty and conjecture that arguably Sweden’s most iconic craft brewery might be Norwegian from next month.

Beer so tasty you can eat it!

On Tuesday I was in Scotland with Stene and Rille from Akkurat and Per from Cask Sweden to help brew Abstrakt 0X (working title….most probably Abstrakt 08) at BrewDog*. It’s an imperial oatmeal stout that’s modelled on the traditional Scottish dessert Cranachan and uses crystal oats, an obscene amount of malts including Extra Pale Marris Otter and Carafa (a German dehusked malt that gives a smoother chocolate flavour without any harshness), Fuggles hops, wild Scottish raspberries and a bucket of heather honey from local bees.

Oh and then it’s going to be stuck into whisky casks for ”around 3-4 months” before being bottled and hopefully finding its way over to Sweden. Rumour has it that a very limited number of kegs may be exclusively available in one particular Stockholm pub. More on that later!

Brewing beer wasn’t the only thing we did on Tuesday though – we drank a fair bit of it too. In fact we sampled so many outstanding brews I’m calling Tuesday, September 6th The Day of Many Beers and will attempt to give you all the details of exactly what we imbibed early next week.

This was also the week that we said Goodbye to Ingrid. She set something of a craft beer record when she went on sale just 9 days ago as crowds of people lined up at Systembolaget stores throughout the country to grab her. According to the Systembolaget website all 10,000 bottles are now sold. Is this the last we’ll ever see of Ingrid? You’ll find out here first.

In a week when the world’s strongest fermented beer known to man was poured from the mouth of a deer almost as shocking was the news from Gothenburg that a drunk elk got stuck in an apple tree. Seems to me the line between wild animals and beer has become very thin these days.

And finally are they or aren’t they? Norwegian craft brewery Haandbryggeriet announced on its Facebook page yesterday night that Sweden’s Närke Kulturbryggeri are to join forces with it. The rather strangely worded statement reported: ” Närke is our friendly brewery and its a damn good brewery but they don’t have a clue re marketing and production” before revealing that ”From 1 October Närke will be part of Haandbryggeriet and håke (read here Håge?) will be our master brewer” and finished by declaring that ”Stormaktsporteren will from now on be made here in Drammen”.

Since this announcement there has been no official comment from either brewery, inevitably leading to speculation about whether the news is true and if it is what it means for Sweden’s famous craft brewery in Örebro. Will all production move to Drammen? Would such a move result in more Närke beers becoming available? The early excitement among US drinkers that they might finally be able to get their hands on a bottle of Kaggen is almost palpable.

When it comes to Närke it’s my experience that it’s best to wait for a formal response before publishing anything. So that’s what I’ll do. Wait. *drums fingers*

So how do I round off a week like this one? With a bottle of the amazing Prototype 17 perhaps? No, I think that’s enough BrewDog for this week so I’m going for something a lot closer to home – Dugges Höstbrygd Contemplative Ale.

This 5% ABV British style brown ale is being tipped as a great partner to the earthy mushrooms popping up everywhere around Sweden right now, so why not grab yourself a bottle and follow the advice on the label and take a time-out to reflect on what has been a pretty awesome beery week.

Have great weekends everyone. Be safe, be happy and be unlagom

Darren

  *Just so you all know I’m laying claim right now to the headline ”BrewDog beer gets its just desserts”. It’s mine OK and my lawyers WILL be watching

Tuesday, September 6th. The Day of Many Beers.

It was the day when we visited BrewDog to help make an upcoming Abstrakt and tried so many different beers with so many different crazy ingredients that I simply lost count. There were beers with surprising twists on well known names , such as 77 lager brewed with Belgium yeast, flavoured with Scottish raspberries and aged in whisky casks* and new beers like a blonde imperial stout drunk straight from the fermentation tank and a dry-hopped imperial red ale with so many hops in it it took 5 minutes to tease a sample out of a tank literally clogged up with them.

And then of course there were the beers I’m not even allowed to tell you about. Yet…..

So while I try and make sense of my scribbles and pictures over the next day or so I thought I’d give you a first peek at the Abstrakt 0-something that we were at BrewDog to help brew. It’s an imperial stout based on a famous Scottish desert called Cranachan which uses an almost obscene amount of speciality malts and oats and is flavoured with wild Scottish heather honey and Scottish raspberries before being aged in whisky casks for a few months.

I’ll tell you much more about it and The Day of Many Beers shortly. Right now I really need to unpack and lie down for a bit.

By the time you read this letter I’ll be gone. I’ve left to travel to Scotland for a few days to brew some beer with those guys again. Rumour has it I may even get a chance to mash in on an upcoming Abstrakt beer! I hear it could be black, extremely imperial, involve whisky casks and some sort of fruit, so I’ve taken my video camera with me and will try and capture some exclusive footage for you.

I’ll promise to try and keep in touch while I’m over there but you know how it is sometimes. Luckily BeerSweden Trev has one of those ‘live’ episodes of BSTV lined up featuring none other that Black Tokyo Horizon (which, you’ll be pleased to hear, is probably the first ever video review of this amazing beer), so make sure you watch out for that.

I'm taking to the open road later this month!

I also wanted to tell you about a few other things that are coming up in what promises to be the craziest month of my beery career ever. Any of your followers who live in or around Umeå are in for a real treat between now and Christmas with my monthly beer club at Duå kicking off again in September after the summer recess. The first tasting (two sittings) takes place on Friday September 16^th and the theme is ‘No Monks Allowed – An Alternative Belgium Beer Tasting’. Pretty much speaks for itself doesn’t it! You’re supposed to get in touch with Duå in Umeå on 090-7800303 to book your place.

Before that on Tuesday 13^th September I’ll be in Stockholm for the first ever BeerSweden Forum meet-up.  The fun starts at Akkurat at 8pm and finishes up at Oliver Twist. It promises to be a night of great beer and the chance for BSF members to get to know each other IRL (In Real Life). Your followers who use Facebook can let me know if they’re coming here.

After that things really start picking up speed. I’m hitting the road for a four day road trip through southern Sweden between September 20-23^rd, starting with a BrewDog food and beer pairing event at De Klomp in Linköping, before cruising by some great beer bars on our way to Gothenburg, where we’ll round things off on the night of the 22^nd September with a huge BrewDog total tap takeover party at the Bishops Arms Plaza.  It’s going to be epic – sort of like Thelma and Louise with penguins. 

The following week the Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival 2011 kicks off but that, as they say, is a whole new story….

Look after yourself while I’m away (and keep an eye on Ingrid and that BeerSweden Forum for me). Missing you already!

Darren

I feel a little ‘displaced’ this Monday morning, having woken up to the gentle hum of commuter traffic on the E4 for the first time in months.

Leaving our summer cottage paradise and moving back to town over the weekend has been both a physical and emotional wrench. Clothes, food and other assorted ‘stuff’ are now scattered liberally between both places and I can’t shake the feeling, as Churchill once prophetically pointed out, that this is “perhaps, the end of the beginning” of the warm weather.

I’m sure it’s a feeling I’ll shake off soon and searching around for suburban positives I soon found one – my internet connection is considerably faster here, which gives me the chance to finally start catching up on some of the beery news I missed during the summer:

The official opening ceremony at Kallholmens Maltbryggeri in Skelleftehamn takes place next Saturday, August 20^th, when the Czech Ambassador Mr JanKara will be the head guest, reflecting the fact the new brewery takes its main source of inspiration from the Czech beer tradition. BeerSweden will of course be there to cover this event.

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BrewDog’s co-founder and Head of Stuff James Watt will be giving three (!) Master Classes on the Thursday (9pm), Friday (4pm) and Saturday (4pm) of the second week at this year’s Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival. Check out the festival’s website for updates. Rumour has it James will be out and about around town outside of his festival duties too. More to follow!

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The Systembolaget is stopping its ‘mitt-i-månden-släppen’ with immediate effect, meaning that the ‘exclusive’ releases will now be lumped together with the ‘standard’ ones at the beginning of every month.

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Over the weekend the new(ish) BeerSweden Forum passed yet another important milestone. In just under 5 weeks we logged 100,000 topic views, which is remarkable considering so many of us were on holiday during this period. Will be exciting to watch the progress of BSF over the coming months. Bets are already on as to whether we pass 10,000 posts or 500 members first!

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"For relaxing-in-the-sack times, make it Ron de Jeremy time".

80s porn star legend Ron Jeremy is having his own personal ‘Suntory time’ moment with the release of an ‘adult rum’ (as opposed, I assume, to children’s rum) that bears his name. This has absolutely nothing to do with beer. I just think the whole thing is enormously funny.

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Good to see more beers from the UK coming over to Sweden! Reviews of this line-up coming soon!

Newly started alcohol import company Grape and Grain STHLM is launching three beers from UK Purity Brewing Company via the Systembolaget’s beställningssortimentet from September 1^st.  This ultra environmentally-friendly brewery produces session beers with character and I’m particularly looking forward to reviewing them on this blog very soon.

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If you’re crazy enough to write a beer blog in Sweden then you’re invited to a get together at the upcoming Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival 2011. A beer bloggers meet-up has been arranged by Johan over at the Portersteken blog and will take place between 15:00 – 16.45 at the festival on Thursday, September 29th. For more details check out Johan’s post.

If you never met Ingrid back in March then get ready because the Bergmanesque beer that everyone’s been talking about is coming back – and this time there’s plenty more of her to go around!

Hello My Name is Ingrid – in case you didn’t know (Ed Note – huh?) is a Cloudberry Double IPA that was designed and named by you, the awesome BeerSweden community and brewed by those very nice chaps at BrewDog.

When it was launched at the Systembolaget on March 1st of this year the rush to order cases led to something of a system meltdown, with the entire stock of 1,720 bottles sold out in the first day and many people left disappointed when they discovered their orders were never going to be fulfilled.

In fact demand for Ingrid was so strong that the Systembolaget has agreed to welcome her back for a second time, with 10,000 bottles going on sale in around 25-30 stores throughout Sweden from Thursday, September 1st at 10am.

This time single bottles will be available to order through the ‘ordinary assortment’ unlike last time when you had to order cases of 12 bottles. We really hope this means more people will get a chance to say hello to Ingrid.

Even better news is that Ingrid is a cheaper date than last time too – 3SEK a bottle cheaper to be exact with her new figure-hugging price of 36.90SEK. If you need to order you’ll need to make a note of the Systembolaget article number, which is 11177.

Several people have asked me if Ingrid is going to be different this time around. The answer is no….and probably yes. Ingrid has been brewed in exactly the same way as she was the first time, using a trilogy of US, NZ and UK hops, heaps of rich malts and of course buckets of Swedish cloudberries to give the beer its uniquely tarty finish. Once again she’s been dry hopped to the brink, dragged back and then dry hopped again.

It’s a formula that worked so well the first time (Hello My Name is Ingrid currently has 97 out of 100 points on Ratebeer, making it the most successful blog beer ever) that we kind of figured ”if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”.

Having said all that this is craft beer and one of the things that makes craft beer so special is that there are always subtle shifts in flavour and character with every new batch brewed. Think of this new release as a new vintage of Ingrid. Will she be more elegant and refined than her predecessor or will she be more of a brazen hussy?

There’s only one way to find out, so write Thursday September 1st in your diaries now. The day Ingrid comes back to Sweden. The big question is how long will she stick around for this time?

66,240.

That’s the amount of minutes that have passed since we last had a release of new beers in the Systembolaget. I don’t know about you but I’ve missed the monthly pilgrimage to the monopoly to wait anxiously in line at 10am in the hope of scooping some new brews.

Fortunately normal service is now being resumed following the summer break and this morning 10 beers go on sale, some of them old favourites, one of them a very different take on an DIPA, another a homebrew that’s hit the big-time and one that’s price-tag already has many beer fans up in arms.

So where to start…..why not in alphabetical order with Bitch Please – BrewDog’s collaborative brew with Three Floyds Brewing from the USA. Has to be one of the stand-out beer names of the year so far but what does a 12%ABV barley wine flavoured with Laphroig whisky malt, shortbread, fudge and candy-floss and single hopped with Nelson Sauvin from New Zealand taste like? As crazy as it sounds really, although I think it’s a bit of a car-crash beer with so much going on. Worth a try although it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

There’s not too much to say about North Coast Old Stock Ale other than buy it. In fact at 42.80SEK a bottle buy at least three bottles and age the other two because I promise you it will be worth it.

I’m particularly looking forward to Drakens DIPA which was crowned the winning beer at the 2010 Swedish Home Brewing Championships. Co-brewers Tomas Lunqvist, Rick Lindqvist and Magnus Alström are the guys behind the recipe and who now get to see their beer, which has been brewed at the ‘brewery that can do no wrong’, go national as part of their prize.

If the two bottles of Djævlebryg OriginAle Darwinian IPA I’ve tried are anything to go by the theory of evolution clearly applies to this beer. The first bottle of this rare English take on a DIPA I tasted was several months old while the second was only a few weeks young. I much preferred the aged version, which develops a musty, barley wine-like character with earthy, mango chutney flavours. It’s all very different and a must-try for IPA fans.

Avery Brewing Company is offering you Salvation in the form of their 9%ABV Belgium Strong Ale. I haven’t tried this one before and can therefore only be guided by the chatter on the net which says it’s peachy, spicy and has a hint of cinnamon in the finish. On paper I’m not bowled over about this one but of course I’ll still be trying it to find out for myself. Expect a review shortly.

Whoever said good things come in threes was right!

Sierra Nevada isn’t launching one but three beers this morning and they are all HUGE! First out is the hairy, scary multi-award winning Bigfoot, a barley wine at 9.6%ABV. If you don’t buy several bottles of this at its ridiculously cheap asking price of 29.90SEK then you’ll be missing out on one of the best beery deals of the year.

From the sublimely cheap to the ridiculously expensive, Sierra Nevada Hoptimum Whole Cone Imperial IPA is a tough beer to recommend. Not for the beer itself which is awesome but because whichever way I try and twist and turn it 349SEK for a chubby 710ml bottle is a hell of a lot of money and undoubtedly takes away some of the fun of drinking it. If you do buy a bottle (perhaps spilt one with a friend?) I promise you won’t forget Hoptimum in a hurry because you know that feeling on a freezing winter’s day when you step inside and your ears start to burn red-hot even though they’re cold? Now imagine your ears are your tongue. This is what Hoptimum will do to you.

Finally there’s the beer with the longest name of this month’s release, Sierra Nevada Harvest Southern Hemisphere Fresh Hop Ale. Read my review about it here and then go any buy loads of it because it is simply amazing stuff.

Hornbeer is one of my favourite Danish brewers (I still dream about their Black Magic Woman) and although I’ve yet to try my bottle of The Fundamental Blackhorn any beer that has coffee malt, chocolate malt and honey and a whopping 120 IBUs has got to as complex as a blackboard full of long multiplication sums and worth your hard-earned cash.

And to finish off we have Triple Karmeliet, the beer I tried to convert a group of wine-loving Frenchmen with back in 2009 (but then it all went so horribly wrong). On its day this is a stunning example of an Abbey triple and I just love these 1.5L bottles which are perfect for ageing or for stealing all the attention at a dinner party. Big bottle, big investment, big beer.

Happy scooping everyone!

(EDIT): How could I have missed the fact that Sigtuna are also releasing a beer today??! I tried Sigtuna Harvest Ale with my Francophile father (see the video here) but it isn’t listed on the Systembolaget’s website under ‘Små partier 1 augusti‘ – hence the oversight