Saturday, July 19, 2014

Drinking in Switzerland

A bunch of us attended a conference in French-speaking Switzerland last week, and knowing of breweries like Brasserie des Franches-Montagnes and Docteur Gab's, I was looking forward to tasting more craft beers of that ilk while in town for nearly a week. Switzerland has a tradition of craft brewing, both German-style lagers and the more Belgian/British-style ales, but in the small town we were stuck in there were very few bars or restaurants, and almost all those we found served only cheap lager; at best there might be one brune on offer (and Swiss taste in brune seems to run to the yeasty and chewy, rather than any of the quality or flavour you might expect from French or Belgian styles). Where better quality beer was available, it was in the form of a white or wheat beer in the German or sometimes Belgian style, very crisp, dry, subtle—actually pretty nice on a hot day (although it was raining non-stop the mid-July week we were there!) and lacking the gummy, chewy, spoiled sweetness that some English wheat beers suffer from.