Small Thoughts for Small Minds

Tomorrow I head back home after a little over a week in Västerås, Sweden. While here, I made the most of my opportunities to try new beers.  With the exception of a couple, they’re all Swedish beer. The Swedish beer market is like so many - filled with pilsners that vary little. But, it seems that the Swedish craft beer market is starting to take off.

I started on the flight over…

One of the two not from Sweden, a forgetable Danish pilsner:

Another easily forgetable pilsner, but from Sweden this time…

In Sweden, to purchase beer stronger than 3.5% alcohol by volume, you have to go to the government run liquor store, the Systembolaget. Unfortunately, I can rarely get to it, as it closes by six and my boss never seems inclined to leave the office that early. On Monday, for some reason, we left by five so I had a chance to visit the Systembolaget and stock up on Swedish craft beers.

I won’t review them. Here are a bunch of pictures of beer. Pretty exciting stuff, huh??

I will definitely purchase this (and the next) one again if I can…

(Sorry about the focus. Oops…)

The next four are from the Bishop’s Arms pub. I’ll put a picture of that place in my upcoming post on the town of Västerås.

This one is very nice, with a wonderful Amarillo hop character.

The following is brewed in Västerås by the Hantverksbryggeriet. From their website, it looks like it is only slightly bigger than my homebrew setup…

They also have an oatmeal stout and an ESB. Since I’ve been here last, it seems like they’ve changed hops in their IPA. It used to have a very citrusy character (Cascades? Centenniel?). Now it has more of a noble hop aroma. Not a change for the better, in my opinion.

A hoppy interpretation of a Märzen.

The next one is brewed for Bishop’s Arms. It is 9% alcohol by volume. As you can see, they served it with little chocolates, which worked nicely…

The other non-Swedish beer in this set of pictures (but I did have some other beers, but didn’t document them with my camera).

This was at Andrew and Angela’s joint birthday party. (More on that in another post - it was flat out bizarre…)

Since they are from Australia, it wasn’t surprising to find some Austrialian beer at their shindig…

And back to the hotel….

I just had a sip of this one, as I passed out before drinking it. Oops…

The hours of alcohol consumption (Bishop’s Arms and the party) really didn’t work well with my lack of sleep recently…

Here are a few waiting tasting (front row) and a few to take home with me (back row).

Another blurry picture. The battery in my camera is just shy of dead (and the charger is at home). The camera would shut itself after taking the picture, so I couldn’t see it until I uploaded it on the computer. Oh well.

Even blurrier…

And to finish it off, a picture of my "refridgerator". If you can’t tell, that’s the window ledge. I am a little concerned that the wind might pick up and brain someone on the sidewalk below…

An Italian salami and a Spanish chorizo to take home (since it is so hard to get decent cured sausage in the US) and a soda for breakfast tomorrow (since I have to catch the bus before the hotel breakfast opens…)

I also picked up (and ate) some really good vitlökssalami (garlic salami). Yumm!

Next week, Panama!