Pivo in Pivo

Leaving the series "Beer shops of Budapest" aside for a moment, I will embark on another possibly-not-to-be-frequently updated series - "Czech Pubs of Budapest". These all seem to have opened in the last year or two, and the one with the best selection of beer is undoubtedly "Pivo" on Hegedűs Gyula utca, in the 13th district. So I'll deal with this one first. Cue linky:

Pivo söröző

Two of the draught beers have changed since I took this photo...

I have been to "Pivo" a few times, although not as often as I'd like, as I don't live in the 13th district any more. I moved away just before Pivo opened, at the end of 2010. Quite unfortunate timing. Still it is closer than actually going to Czech For those who don't know (much) pivo means beer in Czech (and all other Slavic languages.)

Pivo is apparently the only pub in Hungary with a range of guest beers - unless you count the "Csak a Jó Sörök" shop on Kertész utca, which has a different couple of beers on tap every time I go - but that isn't really a pub. In fact, Pivo is a bit too small to call a pub, as there are only two tables, a couple of counters to sit up at on high stools and the bar. It is on the small side, so turning up without a reservation in the evening is not recommended. Fortunately it is quite easy to make a reservation by phone, and they will let you sit at any empty tables before the people who have reserved turn up. Or you could go during the day, when it is usually empty and there are discounts.

There are currently 5 draught beers, all Czech of course, and a wide and changing range of bottled beers. Although the beers rotate they do seem to have some regulars - all the Cerna Hora brewery's beers generally seem to be available in bottles, and their unfiltered "Vycepni" (10° plato) type lager has always been on tap when I have visited, and I find it pretty tasty. Its also the cheapest beer they have, at 390ft for a 0.5 litre korsó. Which is pretty reasonable by any Budapest pub standards. Not everyone seems to rate it, but maybe they aren't used to real yeasty unfiltered beer - or they just want something stronger. This weaker type of beer is actually the most popular type in the Czech Republic (although not in such a special unfiltered version.) A good description of the various Czech beer styles can be found here: Czech breweries and beer styles - I found it most educational.

It is testament to the range of types and styles of beer that Pivo serves  that last time I was there, a week or two ago, I had three beers, and none of them was a classic light Czech pilsener (a la Buvar or Pilsener Urquell). This may have been a little contrary of me, in a Czech pub, but there you go. As I visited during the afternoon I took advantage of the 20% off draught beers between 2pm and 5pm, and had a Havran, a brown lager ( a tmavy, as the Czechs would have it) from the Vyškovi brewery. I can confirm what the Pivo website says - it has a pleasant malt-caramelly taste and went down well. A little watery perhaps, but that meant there was room for a couple more.  They have another brown lager on tap "Cerna Rebel" which I tried another time and which was stickier (less watery) I think. Really I should taste them side by side, maybe with a bottle of Cerna Hora "Granat" to be properly impartial in the matter. There's an idea.

There is plenty of information about the beers on offer on posters and little leaflets placed on the bar, and from these I learnt that the Chlumecký Vít is a wheat beer - apparently Vít is a man's name in Czech, and also the English for wheat. Well, not really, but apparently the people of Vysoký Chlumec don't discern any difference between an English "w" sound and a "v" (like the Germans) so for them the pun might work. The beer is better than their attempt at word play, and for my money (530ft for 0.5 litre) better than an Edelweiss, which is the wheat beer most often found in Hungarian pubs, and which will cost more in most pubs. It was essentially a German hefeweizen type wheat beer, but perhaps not quite as complex (or banana-y) and floral as the better examples of the style. A good effort though.


The other beer I had on my most recent trip to Pivo was from a bottle, as I couldn't resist tasting what a Czech attempt at an India Pale Ale would taste like. Also from Vyškovi brwery, the Jubiler IPA is probably a result of the American fashion for IPAs, but comes out tasting more like a good English one - not too "XtrEEme"-ly hopped, but instead with a good balance of malt and hops. With four types of malt and three types of hops it is quite a modern sort of brew, but very well executed and not some kind of silly homebrew experiment like some "new wave" IPAs can be. It is also cold hopped, and I think you can tell. At 490 forints for 0.355 litres it is not all that pricey either, for what it is. I certainly thought it money well spent. Actually I didn't pay for it, come to think of it, but you know what I mean. Oh, and I did try to pay, but my companion was very insistent.


The service is good in Pivo, especially when the owner is there, as he knows his stuff. There are a few bar snacks available, but for proper Czech food I would go to the Ferdinand söröző in the 6th district. Which may form the basis of another post in this series.


The only downside to the rotation of beers in Pivo is that you sometimes can't get a beer that you enjyoed the last time you visited. This was the case with the beers from the Svijany brewery,  a couple of which I tried in the summer at Pivo, but couldn't find when I went there the other week. Particularly tasty was a crisp, hoppy pilsener called Svijansky Rytir (apologies for not including the proper diacritic marks) - but happily the "Csak a Jó sörök" shop has bottles of this, and even had it on tap a couple of weeks back. Maybe Pivo and Csak a Jó sörök have an agreement not to stock the same beer as each other - although its not as if the Hungarian market is flooded with high quality beer from independednt Czech brewers. It might be if more Hungarians tasted how much better it is than the highly suspect Kozel and Zlaty Bazant brewed under license by multinationals here - whose shareholders must love this market for being so undemanding. With a few (very) notable exceptions, like Pivo.

Three Beer Shops - part 1

Having not posted for quite a while I'll be doing a bit of summarizing and listing in the next few posts, which at least has the advantage of conveying quite a bit of information in a relatively waffle-free format. Apart from the first sentence, that is.

I haven't been out sitting drinking in pubs very much since August, as a freshly made (brewed?) Dad. I have, however, picked up a few bottles of beer to drink at home in front of the PC / TV, once the little chap has gone off to sleep. The problem with this in Budapest is that all but a ahandful of the shops all sell the same Hungarian macro-lagers, with their "magical" maize, and generally Pilsener Urquell is the only half-decent beer available. I mentioned that Tesco have a slightly wider range of Czech beers, but having tried all of them several times I started to make special trips to special little shops. Three are worth mentioning, listed here in ascending order of greatness.

3. GRoby
This is a chain of a few mini-markets - or perhaps cramped supermarkets might be a better description - dotted around Buda and Pest. Its not a place to do your everyday grocery shopping, unless you like paying extra - I had written these off as something like the CBA chain - a shop I only go to when the better value places are closed or too far away. On such occasions I go in, find that all the milk and bread costs more than it should, get annoyed at having to get out of other people's way all the time without knocking over stacks of tins in the extremely narrow aisles, then leave vowing not to go back. Until next time.

Or until, that is, I noticed that they actually have a wider than usual range of bottled beers.
First off they have a pretty good selection of Belgian beers. I know they can be nice but I can rarely bring myself to shell out 750ft or more for one of those cute little bottles. I keep meaning to try a range of Belgian beers, then remembering how they cost about 1 or 2 euros in Brussels, and my stingy side gets the better of me.
Then there are a usual couple of English beers that pop up from time to time in supermarkets in Budapest - Wells Bombardier and Banana Bread Beer. I was feeling less penny pinching than usual one day and bought a bottle of the latter, and was pleasantly surprised - after not having ale for months the range of malty flavours present was a a treat, and a nice change from all these lagers and (sort-of) IPAs with their dominant hops. And there was a hint of banana in there too. I think they had cans of Courage, or Director's or something too, but I didn't bother with them, as I wouldn't bother with them in England either. The Bombardier is available on tap at the Pointer pubs - but thats another story.
Finally, at a more acceptable price level for beers for less special occasions there were a couple of beers from a couple of smaller Czech brewers. I tried two types of Zlatopramen - the standard lezak (light), which was a a decent pilsener, and the "half and half", amber coloured poltmavy, which was OK, but with a bit too much dark malty coffee type stuff for my liking. Slightly cheaper, and of similar quality were the offerings from Litovel. I first tried this at the Czech beer days on Deak Tér in the summer (another untold story) and enjoyed both their standard light pils and their more reddish, maltier poltmavy -particulary the latter.

Sadly I didn't see the Litovel last time I popped in, but it has been out of stock before, so it may return to the shelves at some point. It seems that it is imported to Hungary by a small entrepreneur, so it might depend on the size of his garage and how recently he has taken his van to Moravia.

GRoby has since been rather eclipsed by the other two beer shops I found, but I'll still pop in if I am passing. And I am still not quite sure how to say the name of the shop. Is it "Gay Robbie"? If so, that would give it extra points. They also sell some rather tasty bread - for slightly more than I usually want to pay.

Osterbrau (Domony) beer at a Pizzeria on Ráday utca

Just round the corner from my gaff, at the quieter, non-pedestrianised end of Ráday utca there is a pizzeria which I sometimes use. It has been there for a year or two at least, which makes it quite well established round here, as I have seen several other pizza places come and go. The pizza is good - thin and crispy, with a good range of toppings, few of which would be recognised in Naples, but hey. The beer, until now, has not been worth bothering about. It started off selling Fosters, and was one of the few places I have seen in Budapest with a Fosters sign outside. This did not attract me, however, as Fosters is rubbish everywhere  A few months ago it changed to Borsodi - even less exciting. A week or two back, though I was delighted to see that the sign now read "Osterbrau -Az Élő Sör." (No sign of this momentous change on the pizzeria's website though.)
At first I thought it was the same Osterbrau brewery (based in the small town of Fót) which has a small bar on Veres Pálné utca, where they do a hoppy, tasty, unfiltered brew which is supposed to be an IPA (India Pale Ale), a rather odd ginger beer and a quaffable "Bájor" ("Bavarian") blonde lager. The IPA they do there is one of my favourite Hungarian beers, so I thought my luck was in, but on closer inspection it turned out that my local pizzeria was now serving beer from the "other" Osterbrau, the one from Domony, which I have tried only once before.
The domony Osterbrau, with its catchy slogan "Az Élő Sör" - (The Living Beer) has a pub/restaurant on Tölgyfa utca, over in Buda. I went there once with a fellow beer scout, and our conclusion was that it was not bad, but not as good as the other Osterbrau. I kept meaning to go back there, and have something to eat, but as it is not on my way anywhere I have yet to get round to it.
Osterbrau (Domony) has a few typical characterisitcs of brewers of Hungarian "házi sör" - (home-made beer). The Germanic name apparently is supposed to add gravitas - see also Corvinburg, Petersbrau, Kaltenberg, Brandecker etc etc. As there are hundreds of extremely naff industrially brewed budget beers trying the same trick - (Adambrau et al, )some more recently established breweries are sensibly now giving themselves more believably Hungarian names. Osterbrau is one of the most long established though, so it is stuck with its teutonic tag.
I didn't sample the basic, világos (light) beer this time, but have tried it at Tölgyfa utca and it was not particularly memorable. Refreshing on a hot day, and at least there is no cornmeal in it. And of course, it is cheap - most small brewers in Hungary try to compete with the multinationals on price, at least for their basic beer - and as that seems to be the main consideration for 99% of Hungarian drinkers, I don't think that will change soon.
I opted this time for the Vörös - (red) and was pleasantly surprised. When I tried it last time in Buda it had seemed a bit watery, and I had the suspicion it was just their light beer with a few caramely additives. Trying it this time round, I wasn't struck by any wateriness, and the flavour was pleasnatly complex. Not too coffee like, not too sickly - really rather good. I'll certainly try it again - while they bake me a pizza.
I also tried a half of the fekete (black) beer, and that actually tasted much the same as the vörös, so perhaps the waitress just got my order wrong...
The very simple, or uninspired, names are also rather typical of Hungarian small brewers - Light, Red, Black. Not exactly informed by marketing nous, are they? However, this seems to be changing, as newer (and more ambitious) Hungarian micro-beers have more imaginative Keserű Méz ("Bitter Honey") and Grabanc IPA. I wonder if the Domony branch of Osterbrau will evolve similarly. Somehow I doubt it - but you never know. At least the fact that they have non-mainstream beer is actually advertised here, as a selling point. There is a sign and everything. I have noticed that many pubs with házi sör almost seem to be ashamed of it - as if it is not a "professional" proper beer like Dréher, Soproni or Borsodi. Most drinkers in Budapest also seem to turn their noses up at the suspiciously anonymous "házi sör". I don't know, perhaps they have got used to the taste of cornmeal.
The Nana eszpresszó on Királyi Pál utca is a good example of this "modesty" - without peering at the menu you'd never know that this is one of the few places in the capital which sells Kárpi Sör. Even when you look at the menu it is only described as "házi sör" - and is extremely cheap  - wich hardly suggests that it is worth trying, when in fact it is rather good. The unfiltered version of Kárpi sör really impressed me, but I have only found it once, at a festival.
In a way, though, the lack of advertising makes finding Hungarian indie beers more fun. It almost seems like small scale brewing is an underground movement, which has to stay beneath the radar of the corporate beer police. But perhaps it is coming to the surface now, and hopefuly will slowly learn not to fight price wars with the majors, but instead go for a quality, niche market. Until then it can be a laugh ordering the no-name cheap stuff, and finding that it is generally more drinkable than the pricier slop with the big advertising budget.

Anyway - enough of this musing. There is a new Osterbrau outlet, and they do a tasty pizza too. And, if you are me, it is round the corner. Which is handy.

UPDATE: I noticed the other day that they also do beer to take away, which is cheaper than buying it to drink in. I got a bottle of the "Irish black" today, and found out that the red beer is just a half and half mix of the light and the black beers. I think I must have been served the black stuff when I was last in. On second tasting it was still good, but to be brutally, errrr objective not a patch on a proper English bitter, or Scottish heavy...as for Irsh black I wouldn't know - it certainly isnt a stout...

1895 versus 1795

On a trip to my local Tesco I noticed that they had a couple of Czech beers on special offer ("AKCIO!") - cans of Staropramen and 1795, a pilsener from Ceske Budejovice's "other" brewery, the Budějovický Měštanský Pivovar.
 Then the other day I read someone thought that Soproni 1895 was one of the best Hungarian beers, so despite my rather entrenched prejudice against the big four Hungarian brewers I thought I'd give it a try. The Soproni 1895 cost about 265 forints, and the discounted 1795 cost 169ft, so there was about 1 forint per year price difference....err, no that doesn't quite work. Anyway.

The Soproni was the bottled variant, rather than canned, just to give it a sporting chance, and it was also the first of the beers I tried, so it benefitted from the first beer of the day effect, which has on several occasions made me think "well, maybe Dréher/Soproni/Borsodi isn't that bad after all."
And indeed, my inital reaction was - yes, I can taste more aromatic hoppy bitterness here than in most Hungarian macro-beers (see, I am picking up the beer tasting jargon). I could taste a pleasant bitterness on the tip of my tongue. The label makes a big deal of it containing genuine Saaz hops, and they were definitely present, if not too skilfully handled.  Unfortunately these heavy handed hops seem to have been grafted onto a typical népsör (a nice term sometimes used by the Hungarian beer bloggers, meaning something like "beer of the masses".) Wateriness, lobotomized, cardboard malt and worst of all, the inevitable, slightly acrid-sickly taste of "corn semolina". The aftertaste was of water, corn and a hint of alcohol. The colour was rather too yellow - I think perhaps that is the idea behind the corn - market research must have indicated that this market likes light, yellow beer on scorching hot summer days. There was rather too much CO2 for my taste - I like a burp as much as the next man, but these wer harsh, ripping gassy burps, and compared unfavourably with the fruity, evocative belches I had stifled a day or two before after a nice glass of Ferdinánd "Sedm Kuli" at the Ferdinand sörház. Big, profit driven brewery tries to appease beer lovers and fails.
So my raised hopes were cruelly dashed, and instead of refreshing bitterness I felt somewhat embittered. I had peculiar visions of masses of wage slaves pouring this stuff down their necks - neither complaining nor particulary enamoured of the mediocre anodyne at the end of the daily grind. Soproni 1895 is the premium version of a beer for an undemanding market, where "beer is beer." As a car it would perhaps be the sporty version of a midrange family hatchback, maybe a SEAT or Suzuki. And for the same price, why not go for the real thing?

Opening my can of 1795, I was already fairly confident that it would be better than its predecessor, but after the Soproni I really need something to restore my shaken faith. Sunshine to light up an overcast afternoon, the joyful laughter of young children to drown out the droning of cynical old businessmen. You get the idea. I can report that 1795 works much better as a first beer of the day. The depressive effect of the Soprioni took a while to subside, and I even detected an inkling of a headache coming on from it. After a while though, the 1795 began to shine through. The can didn't boast of Saaz hops, but  alook at the ingredients revealed that this is what they were, and the hops I could taste were distinctively Czech. I must confess have a soft spot for Czech beers - they conjure up memories of lazy afternoons in beer gardens, and rarely disappoint too badly.
I would place 1795 somewhere in the middle of the field of light Czech lagers. It is certainly inoffensive, has some nice hops and a hint of fruity sweetness in the aftertaste, what might be called a slightly caramelly malt (my beer tasting vocabulary is failing me here slightly.) I didn1t detect notes of alcohol, nor a foreboding of a post-industrial-beer hangover. There are better Czech beers, and worse ones. If I see it on sale again for less than 200 ft, I won't hesitate to pick up a couple of cans.

For me then, 1795 beat 1895, as I was fairly sure it would. I thought it would be interesting to see what people thought about it on Hatebeer, erm, I mean Ratebeer.com. 1795 fared about as well as I thought it would - judged against other Czech beers it was found tobe average, or perhaps below average. There seem to be plenty of beer lovers out there who really don't like Czech beer, perhaps annoyed at the ubiquity of pilsener style beer. Soproni 1895, as one of the "best Hungarian beers" seemd to almost get better reviews, but again no-one said it was their favourite. Next to other Hungarian macro-beers Soproni 1895 looks good, while 1795 Budweis looks like the poor cousin of the more famous beer from České Budějovice, while being too geared up for selling large quantities to foreign supermarkets to qualify as one of the many small, interesting Czech brewers. Stuck in the middle, but for all that, clearly better than any comparable Hungarian lager.

In the background of the photo there is a clue as to why this might be...

The Curse of Corn meal

Look at the ingredients of just about any mainstream Hungarian beer, and you are sure to find "Kukoricadara", which could be translated as corn meal or maize groats - however you say it, it shouldn't be there. This holds true for the cheapest brews, the flagship or "core lagers" - Soproni, Dreher, Borsodi and even the recently introduced wheat beer from Borsodi - Borsodi Buza. Any beer where corn is used to bulk out the ingredients is never going to be too special. (Although I'll keep an open mind about beer that is actually labelled "corn beer", which is apparently a speciality in parts of Africa.)

 There are dozens of disappointing beers here at both the mid- and budget end of the price range. My local CBA, for example stocks a range of slop with fake German names, at under 100 ft per bottle, and they certainly seem to find buyers. The Pécsi sörfözde (Pécs Brewery) seems to specialize in these, and indeed their (sort of) premium brand, Szalon sör, tends to be slightly cheaper than Dreher, Soproni or Borsodi too. I actually don't mind Szalon all that much, even if it is spoiled by the addition of cornmeal. and the dark beer they do, Szalon Barna, is pretty good.

I have never known imported Czech, Slovak and German beer here to include kukoricadara - but it is present in most of the foreign brands brewed under license in Hungary by the big breweries - HB, Zlaty Bazant etc. I looked at a can of license-brewed Kozel the other day and cornmeal wasn't listed in the ingredients, however. You can see that it isn't quite as bright yellow in colour as a typical Hungarian big brewery beer. I wonder if it was the Czech Velkopopovicky Kozel brewery which insisted on no corn being put in their beer even in its license produced version? Still, it doesn't taste much like real Czech beer - it didn't have that intense hoppiness of a pilsener, nor does it have a "sticky" body or pleasant aftertaste like the less crisp Czech lagers. But more on the decent Czech beer I've come across in Budapest later...

So, when looking for drinkable, everyday bottle or can of beer (budget for me means the 100-200ft price range), the first thing I check on the label is that there is no kukoricadara present. If there isn't, I next check who brews it - and almost invariably it isn't Heineken-Soproni, Borsodi, Dréher or Pécsi. I have seen kukoricadara once or twice in some of the cheaper, light házisör ("homemade-beer" - but it really tends to mean small breweries) - but it seems to be more the exception. They add other things apart from water-malt-hops - and with varying success, but they don't seem to have the maize habit of the big Hungarian brewers. My guess is that if one of the big brewers took the cornmeal out of one of their beers would be an admission that it shouldn't be there, and that would be a costly decision as well as an embarrasing aboutface. Maybe one day the curse of the corn will be lifted, but I am not holding my breath.

Blogging about beer in Budapest

This is a blog about my ongoing research into the availability of quality beer in Hungary. The “Budapest” in the title is there partly on its alliterative merit, and partly because that is where most of this practical, hands-on research has been carried out. This is not the first blog about beer in Hungary. It might be the first one in English, though.I await the first comment to set me straight on that score, and plenty of others.
I am not an expert on beer, nor do I drink it every day. I do like a nice beer though, and after living in Hungary for 3 years or so, at some point about a year ago I began to search for decent brews and bars. If I lived in a country with a richer beer culture, and a greater range of beer to choose from, I would probably have never started looking, or blogging about it. Necessity is the mother of invention, and lack of choice is the mother of this beer tracking hobby which I somehow seemd to have picked up.
Now, it is not not difficult to find beer in Budapest, or anywhere else in Hungary for that matter.  Budapest is full of bars, restaurants and (sort of) pubs - in fact it is fun trying to feel the nuances in the various names and social status of drinking and eating places in Hungarian: kocsma, söröző, borozó, kisvendéglő, pub, bar, presszó, eszpressó, sörház, or the celebrated romkocsma and romkert type places (trendy, alternative bars in derelict old buildings.) With all that variety, though  there is a marked lack of choice when it comes to beer. I don’t have any statistics to hand, but I’d guess that at least 98% of places serving drinks in Hungary serve beers from of one of the big three breweries, all of which are totally or mostly owned by the usual multinational beer corporations. I have only anecdotal evidence and supposition to explain why this is the case - the big breweries provide fridges, tables, ashtrays, pumps and (so I am told) pay each bar that opens a substantial sum of money to serve their beer exclusively. The same old tactics which have served them well elsewhere - and in Hungary, no-one seemed too bothered. Nobody claimed that Hungary had great beer - this is a wine producing country, and as at least one Hungarian has told me: “beer is beer.” Well, that was clearly wrong.
Fortunately, after a bit of searching on the web, in Hungarian, I found that the stiuation wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed on the surface. There are Hungarians with a taste for good beer, and there are Hungarians making and serving good beer. You just have to know where to look. Several good blogs written in Hungarian directed me to most of my Budapest beer discoveries. Some others I stumbled upon myself - (not literally) - I hope I can share some of this hoppy happinesss and malty  mysteries with the non-Hungarian speaking imbibers of liquid bread - as one Hungarian beer blog is called: http://folyekonykenyer.blog.hu/ And I too can try to be an amateur hop researcher (another blog name): http://komlo.blog.hu/, but that’s all for now, before I get beery-weary: http://serteperte.blog.hu/.