Brewery: Various
Country: Various
Size: 50cl – 63cl
ABV: 4.5% – 5.5%
Price: Various
Systembolaget: –
So I had a bit of a dilemma when it came to choosing some of the beers for this themed beer tasting. The Mediterranean is mainly known for its lagers and lighter beers, though this has changed slightly over the past decade with the craft beer revolution that had permeated every country. When deciding which to have, I was torn between getting in a barley wine or lots of lagers for the same price. I went for the lagers in the end because it just felt a lot more representative of the beer produced in that region. To make it a bit more interesting though I decided that the guests would blind taste them. I wanted to see if they could tell the difference between them and which one people preferred the most. I also took beers from 4 different countries as I wanted a wide geographical spread of products.
I picked Mythos from Greece, Efes from Turkey, Keo from Cyprus and Birra Moretti Toscana from Italy. I chose the Toscana as opposed to the regular Birra Moretti as I wanted to have one beer that costs proportionally more than the others. I thought it would be interesting to see if people could taste the difference in price range and the results were quite evident of this. I’m not going to recap ever flavour profile, but the first 3 beers were unsurprisingly quite similar. The Tosacana though was darker, with a fuller aroma and taste. After the tasting, Birra Moretti Toscana was the winner, as 85% of the guests chose this as the favourite out of the four samples.
I was quite surprised by just how big a margin of win it was. The Toscana costs only 10kr more per bottle, but the slight increase in price clearly had a large impact on the quality of the product. If I had picked the regular Birra Moretti I think the results would have been a lot closer as it is a quite similar to the other lagers. Mythos, Efes and Keo weren’t particularly bad, but they were pretty boring. If you’re interested in finding a new summer lager though, you could do a lot worse than giving the Birra Moretti a try.