My favorite holiday is a beercation – a holiday devoted to sampling the local beers and beer culture of a city. There are so many obvious places to go to, but Europe has a rich brewing history and there are many hidden gems off the beaten beery path.
Spain and Portugal
Starting in Portugal and ending in Estonia, here’s my first-hand experience of some fantastic and often overlooked cities which serve up great places to drink, as well as interesting microbreweries to look out for. It should also be said, all these cities are full of history and culture which must be explored between the bar hopping!
Portugal is the western most country in Europe and a good, yet surprising, place to start our journey. Known mostly for wine, beer was banned for a long time by the church which is why brewing is stunted compared to its European counterparts, but beer is making a rapid return.
Lisbon has two noteworthy bars: Cerveteca Lisboa is a light and airy, relatively new craft beer bar. It has a lot of British and European breweries including a good Brewdog selection and quite a few Mikkeller brews. It also stocks a lot of up and coming Portugese craft beer, the most notable of which is Letra. The staff were very friendly and knowledgeable, and did a spot of homebrewing themselves.
The second bar is the opposite. Lisbeer is a cavernous, dark bar specializing in many beers from all over Europe, especially Belgian. This bar feels more traditional due to its décor and selection, although does have its fair share of newer craft beer. And of course, I can’t talk about beer in Lisbon without a mention of their beer museum. A look into Portugal and its colonies’ brewing history, along with a free sample. Go to the right place in Lisbon and it will provide you with a sample of Europe’s old and new breweries as well as Portugal’s emerging brewing industry. However, from a beer perspective it’s not a place to linger.
Wales
From sunny Lisbon we fly to rainy Cardiff. Any of Britain’s cities would provide a fantastic choice of beer, but Wales’ capital is rapidly become a craft beer hotspot. With its fair share of traditional boozers, like the Pen and Wig and the City Arms, both a dozen or so cask hand pulls, more modern craft beer is rapidly gripping the city, but they live harmoniously together and there is a strong appreciation for both.
An example of this is the major brewery Brains. It's the Cardiff equivalent to Fullers, their real ales can be found in any pub, from dive to classy, and across the nation Brains is known brand of real ale. They also have a smaller craft brewery producing some of the finest small batch beer I’ve had, and it can be sampled in their tap house the Cambrian Tap. Try before you buy seems to be encouraged in this modern, wood and steel built pub.
For a bigger selection of bottles, cask and keg, then a trip to the Urban Tap House is in order. Owned by Welsh brewery Tiny Rebel, you can find a lot of their beers along with some fantastic other British, American and Belgian craft beer. Urban Tap House should be a stop off for anyone visiting Cardiff. It’s the first craft beer bar in the city and serves award winning burgers along with delicious deep fried pickles. This bar is a local favorite, and one of my personal favorites.
The Newly opened Hop Bunker, located opposite the medieval castle, is joint owned by Hopcraft and Pixie Spring Brewery. It has 24 kegs and 15 casks, all serving British made beer and cider. It may be buried underground (underneath student accommodation conveniently) but the modern décor and framed empty 25kg sacks of malt make this a place you could happily sit and drink away an afternoon. The men’s urinals are converted kegs, giving the toilets a spot of charm!
Ghent Belgium
I could probably write an entire article just on real ale and craft beer in Cardiff and Wales, and I wish I could include more, but we must leave now and head back to mainland Europe as Ghent awaits. Most tourists heading to Belgium tend to go to Brussels or Bruges, and the truth with Belgium is that wherever you end up, you’re never far from good beer. Ghent is a beautiful medieval city surprisingly not on a lot of travelers’ radars, meaning it has some unique drinking locations.
First on the list must be a trip to Gruut Brewery. The entire brewery is their tap room, with tables and chairs places around their fermentation vessels and a small stream chiselled through their flooring. As the name suggests, the majority of their beers contain no hops, and even for Ghent standards it’s a pretty cheap place to drink making it amazing value.
Beer is probably the national sport of Belgium. It’s taken very seriously, and each brand of beer needs to be served out of that brand’s glass. When your chosen beer is delivered to you from the bar, the bottle is placed on the table and rotated so the label is facing you. You can’t fail to get good beer in this city.
Bratislava
Moving across the West-East divide and into the old Soviet bloc, Bratislava is famous for stag parties due its cheap pints of lager. Whilst a small city, and perhaps less offerings than the others on this list, there are still a few places to get good quality (and still pretty cheap) beer. Interestingly, in Slovakia, they measure beer by degrees plato instead of ABV%.
Starosloviensky Pivorar brewpub serves some of the best beer in the region. The building itself might seem like any old pub, but their produce does the talking. The staff are very happy to help you choose the beer right for you, and I can highly recommend their pilsner and red ale, both of which shot their way into my top ten beers ever.
Nearby is Stupavar Beer Pub which is worth a visit. Perhaps considered a dive bar on the inside, and barely recognizable on the outside as a bar at all, it goes for quality over quantity. Not the biggest selection ever but stocks fantastic beers from local breweries.
Budapest
Two and a half hours away by train, traveling deeper into Eastern Europe lies Budapest. Originally two cities Buda and Pest split by the Danube, no matter what side of the river you’re on there’ll be somewhere to pick up a beer.
If you’re in the mood for a strong Belgian ale, the Western bank of the Danube has you covered. Belga Sorozo pours a perfect pint of Kwak, along with the some more unusual bottles, including Quintine Blonde, a pleasant hoppy blonde ale. A few doors down is Dunaparti Matróz Kocsma, it’s hard to miss with the infamous Delirium elephants plastered all over it, and sells many different beers from Delirium alone, including some rare ones. Sandwiched between them is another Belgian café which sadly I didn’t have time to visit.
Craft beer is very alive and well too in Budapest. Eleszto Craft Beer Garden has over 20 taps offering some of Hungary’s best beer out of an almost steampunk setting, including some of the best stouts I’ve had. Jonas Craft Beer House is a light and modern bar built in a glass department store on the banks of the river. It’s a great place to sink a few local beers for an afternoon.
If you’d like to take some bottles home, Csak a Jo Sor stocks dozens and dozens of bottles from all over Europe, and some of the more known American craft breweries. They have four taps as well and a few tables, meaning some of those beers probably won’t make it home.
Tallinn Estonia
Last on our list, but no means least, is Tallinn, the capital of Estonia and Russia’s neighbor. With a beautiful old city dating back a thousand years, it’s a great place to walk around between the craft beer bars of which there are many.
My favourite has to be Porgu: based underground with steep stone stairs leading downwards to huge wooden doors marking the entrance to the low ceiling stone room, this really reflects the old city it’s underneath. With 15 taps and a seemingly endless supply of different bottles, breweries from Estonia, Eastern Europe and far beyond are well represented here, as is the variation of beer types. Their BBQ ribs are astonishingly good too making this place hard to leave.
It’s not recommended to spend the whole trip here, as there are many other great bars to visit. The old city has a microbrewery built to look like a traditional German beer hall. Whilst I’m not into the whole lederhosen-clad staff, their honey ale (Medovar Honey) is like no other and a stop here for a couple of half liter tankards is highly recommended.
It’s hard to narrow down the bars to include in this article, but Drink Baar would be on my favorites list. A selection list long enough to drown in, including some British beers I’ve never seen in back in the UK (where I’m from). The staff are helpful and the hundreds of framed photos and paintings line the walls giving this place real character.
Europe has some fantastic drinking spots, and to write about them all would require a large book; even the places I mentioned I couldn’t include all the bars I wanted. But these cities never come up in a craft beer and travel conversation, despite being great places to try new and interesting beers. Munich has lagers, Dublin has porters, but these places have it all.
Josh Charig is a home brewer from the UK living in rural Ireland. You can follow his blog Honest Beer Guide here.
