Travel: Edinburgh

I spent last week in Edinburgh. It is indeed a beautiful city with its medieval buildings and the illuminated castle on top of a hill right downtown. The city is nice to look at, but it also offers a great number of excellent pubs that serve delicious cask ales.

A lot of pubs seemed to have the standard line-up with Belhaven Best, Guinness, Stella Artois, Tennents Lager and Strongbow, and if you were lucky Caledonian ales. Only a small number of pubs had cask-ales beyond one or two from Caledonian, typically Caledonian 80/- and Deuchars IPA.

My favourite pubs were:

• Thompson's Bar
• Cloisters
• Guildford Arms
• Halfway House
• Blue Blazer
• Bow Bar
• Abbotsford

All of the above pubs had taps to please the swill-drinkers, but they also had a nice selection of cask ales in top shape. Most of them standard taps, but also a few of them dedicated to guest ales. I love the idea of guest beers as new ones will be put on as soon as the current ones are empty. Within a day or two the guest taps rotate, and the next time you visit the pub there is going to be new beers to try out. Very nice. I wish they would do the same thing here in Oslo...

Real ales typically have a soft mouthfeel, very little carbonation (condition), a subtle maltiness and a mellow hop aroma and bitterness. Some of them venture into more hop bitterness, but it never gets out of hand. The alcohol content of most of the beers I tried was in the 3.4 - 4.3% range. The various ales were surprisingly similar, which is a bit sad as I cannot see why brewers could not apply more creativity when making them. There is afterall a surging interest in craft ales. The only American influence I could see was the fact that a some of them used citrusy American hops.

Anyway, thanks to the half-pint, I managed to get through about 60 different real ales.