Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Jacob and Waldemar

Jacobs Bar & Kjøkken calls itself Bergen's only gastro pub. This combined restaurant and bar is situated in the Kong Oscars Gate street, and is known to have an excellent kitchen. The bar looks nice, and it is placed in a room with good space and nice, high bar stools.

There are many bottled beers available at Jacobs, but as always I was looking for draught beer. Jacobs Bar & Kjøkken offers three beers on tap: Hansa pale lager, Waldemar brown ale and Waldemar wheat beer.

Waldemar is Hansa's micro brewery based in the old brewery at Kalfaret near Bergen's city gate. Hansa also produces some Waldemar beers to be sold in cans in Norwegian supermarkets. These beers are brewed in Hansa's new brewery at Kokstad south of the city centre.

I started with trying Waldemar brown ale. I have tried the canned version earlier and I was not impressed. The draught beer version was better, but it looked more like a Czech golden lager than a brown ale in the glass. There was some carbonation and a medium sized head. The nose was sweet with caramel, while the taste was fruity with some lemon and toffee before a bitter and watery finish with a touch of grapes. I liked it. It is an average brown ale, and it was much better than what I feared.

Then it was time for the wheat beer, Waldemar hveteøl. This was another cloudy weizen with banana aromas. In the mouth the bananas took the lead with some bread and a hint of mint. This was a lovely wheat beer, and it is one I would love to try head to head with a Paulaner or Weihenstephaner weissbier. It is much better than Erdinger's efforts and worth while checking out.

I will be back at Jacobs Bar & Kjøkken. The Waldemar beers are not that easy to find on tap, and this wheat beer is a gem. I hope Hansa will market it in bottles soon. In the meantime it can be found at Jacobs at 74 NOK for 0.4 litres of beer. That is nearly 8 GBP.

No comments:

Post a Comment