The traditional "Akkurat" visit to celebrate the summer vacation

Last Friday was the first day for our summer vacation, so it was then time for our "tradition" (3 times creates a tradition, according to me) to start of the vacation by a visit to "Akkurat" for a couple of beers.

With everyone doing the last things at work we made it to Akkurat in a reasonable time around 4:30. Found a good place on the outdoor terrace (we Swedes needs to be outdoors as soon it is possible, and you do not freeze to death) and could start with some great beers.

The summer has started so the beer range is not so exiting and many as you normally see at Akkurat (meaning draught beers, the normal stocked beer range is nothing that you can complain about) but you could survive, and probably the best in town anyhow.

Personally I like English real ales, and I could found at least 3 from Dark Star.
but decided to start of with a Ålö Ale from Nynäshamns Ångbryggeri instead. It took I while to actually get the beer, as it normally does when this great English Pale Ale styled beer is served as it should. But it was worth the wait, because it was a good start, a very drinkable ale with a complex, rewarding mix of hops and fruitiness



Lets go back to the Dark Star real ale offering for the night, we found 3 of them as I wrote earlier;

1. Dark Star Old Ale (traditional enlish Old Ale)
2. Espresso Stout (amerian stout?)
3. Dark Star Festival (Strong Bitter / ESB)

This is beers from a brewery that has been the summer real ales in Stockholm for the last 2 summers, after we lost the great Harviestoun Brewery to Belhaven and could not drink the amazing brews (meaning as real ales, with the old taste) like; Bitter & Twisted and Schiehallion. So a local english real ale brewery as Dark Star is good replacement (but not the same as Harviestoun, :( ).

My personal favorite is the Hophead (not served at Akkurat, but later at Oliver Twist, :)) which is a very hoppy english bitter, at least for a beer from England. Great bitter with a hoppy and citrus fruit flavour, a hop aftertaste but not too bitter, just hoppy.

Some information about this very small brewery in England is that the brewery was born in 1994 in the cellar of The Evening Star Pub, in Brighton. With a brew plant only marginally bigger than an enthusiastic home-brew kit the characteristic style of hoppy beers was developed and tried out on the willing guinea pigs at the bar. In 2001 the brewery relocated to a new purpose built 15 brewers barrel brewery in Ansty, near Haywards Heath, from where it still supplies the Evening Star with a selection of its beers, along with its sister pubs.



Skipped the real ale (not my friends that tested both the Festival and the Espresso) and thought about trying something different, so I went for a german Zwickel bier from Lisberger. This was a new beer style for me. Basically it is a unfiltered lager\pils beer and with more hop than a traditional german lager. For me it was a great beer and something that made me understand that german lager beers can also be interesting. Had to look Zwickel up, and found the following description at RateBeer;

Zwickel/Keller/Landbier
Three related, minor, lager styles most common in Franconia. Essentially, these are hoppier versions of a helles, served with natural carbonation and unfiltered - they are the lager world's answer to real ale. Kellerbier will on average be hoppier than zwickelbier. There is also Landbier, which is more malt-accented, may be filtered, but is similarly lacking in carbonation. Gravity is standard, hop rates ranging from 22-40 IBUs, the colour from pale to reddish-amber and the palate should be balanced with a hop accent.

So Zwickel is not a brewery or a beer name, it is a beer style, in the same tradition as keller bier.

That was not the end of the pub walk and the evening, but it was the end of the first "Akkurat" visit that day, so it was the end of the "tradition", and the rest is an other story.