{"id":289457,"date":"2025-06-12T05:02:57","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T05:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/the-wholesome-vegetable-beers-of-the-balkans\/"},"modified":"2025-06-12T05:02:57","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T05:02:57","slug":"the-wholesome-vegetable-beers-of-the-balkans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=289457","title":{"rendered":"the wholesome vegetable beers of the Balkans"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

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How many times do you need to come across different vegetable beers before you start thinking it might be a regional style?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s debatable whether Romania counts as being in the Balkans. It certainly shares some culinary heritage with its neighbours to the south, however, including a fondness for roasted vegetable spreads. Red pepper is the most common base vegetable but tomatoes, aubergines and beans can also feature.<\/p>\n

In Romania these spreads are called Zacusc\u0103; in the former Yugoslavian countries it\u2019s known as Ajvar or Pindjur; in Bulgaria it\u2019s called Kyopolou.<\/p>\n

Whatever they call it, you can be sure that if you go into a supermarket in any of these countries, you will see shelves filled with jars of various varieties of delicious red goop.<\/p>\n

But our first encounter with Zacusc\u0103 in Romania was in a craft beer bar, not a supermarket. We were working our way through the twelve or so taps at Flow<\/strong>, a craft beer bar in Sibiu, Transylvania. When we got to Zacusc\u0103<\/strong> by Timisoara-based brewery One-Two<\/strong> the barman warned us to have a taste before committing to a full measure.<\/p>\n

At the time, we wrote in our weekly tasting notes on Patreon<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s allegedly a Gose, at 5%, and is named after a national dish of roast peppers and aubergine. It tasted incredible \u2013 which is a word that can go either way. It has a powerful red bell pepper flavour and yet was still undeniably beer. It\u2019s like when that tzatziki sour broke our brains a few years ago. It might even be a possible beer of the year contender. We had a second, because we enjoyed the thrilling weirdness of it so much.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I was sufficiently enamoured that I read up about Zacusc\u0103 and went hunting for it in the supermarket the next day. I then ate it, or similar, for breakfast or lunch almost every day of the rest of the trip.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d assumed this was a one off oddity but the next example of this type of beer we came across was at the Lo\/Hi<\/strong> bar in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. They had a Tomato Basil Gose <\/strong>from Czech brewery Zichovec<\/strong>. (Definitely not in the Balkans.)<\/p>\n

\"A
Zichovec Tomato Basil Gose.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I had to try it \u2013 both as it came, and with the optional dash of hot sauce proffered by the barman. The basil was ever so subtle, which is good, as I really don\u2019t like an overly herbal beer. It tasted like a fairly standard pale ale with a dash of V8 canned vegetable juice in it \u2013 a favourite cornershop treat for me when I was in my early twenties.<\/p>\n

The only problem with it was the 8% strength. On a hot day, after tramping around a strange city in the sun, you just want to neck it\u2026 and you really shouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

At the High Five Taproom<\/strong> in Sofia, Bulgaria, we got to try another offering from One Two<\/strong>, this time called Tomatina. <\/strong>Once again, they pulled off the magical trick of making a beer taste both like beer and like a sauce. The condition was really good, too, with an appealing foam and lots of life. Many Gose type beers with fruit or vegetables seem to end up a bit flat but this one avoided that trap, while maintaining the essence.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re really keen on salads in Bulgaria. As in, they\u2019re sort of the national dish. Ray read this bit from Bulgarian novelist Georgi Gospodinov\u2019s Time Shelter<\/em> out loud to me when he came across it:<\/p>\n

\n

In the late afternoon we had sat down in one of the little pubs along the shore, every last one of us writing, unmarried, and unpublished, at that pleasant age between twenty and twenty-five. The waiter could barely keep up, scribbling down our orders of brandy and salads\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well, if salads are what people eat during boozy sessions in the pub why not brew beers inspired by them?<\/p>\n

We drank Cucumber-Juniper Kisel Gose<\/strong> by Sofia Electric Brewing<\/strong> at the lovely Kanaal bar in Sofia. It was 3.5% and cloudy in appearance, with a heady aroma of fresh-cut produce. There was a pronounced wholesome wheatiness along with a refreshing whack of raw green cucumber. It wasn\u2019t too sour, or too \u2018soupy\u2019, and definitely retained plenty of beer in its DNA.<\/p>\n

We were starting to think that perhaps the sun and exotic climes had got to our tastebuds because we kept finding ourselves, to our surprise, declaring these beers to be delicious.<\/p>\n

It was interesting, then, to have an example that didn\u2019t work as well, and be reassured that we could still tell good from bad.<\/p>\n

\"A
Docker Tomato Bastard Gose<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Belgrade, Serbia, we visited the Docker <\/strong>tap room and among other beers tried their 4.4% Tomato Bastard Gose<\/strong>. As the dreadful name might suggest, it wasn\u2019t as subtle or accomplished as the other beers we\u2019ve written about. It was reddish in colour, as if it had been dyed, and tasted more like a Bloody Mary than a beer.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s a coincidence that we came across what felt like a lot of examples of a very niche subset of a very niche style in this part of the world.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps we should start work on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage application now.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How many times do you need to come across different vegetable beers before you start thinking it might be a regional style? It\u2019s debatable whether Romania counts as being in the Balkans. It certainly shares some culinary heritage with its neighbours to the south, however, including a fondness for roasted vegetable spreads. Red pepper is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":289458,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115299,116590,120679,120680,120681,120682],"tags":[31632,12859,80567,6568,54156,22621,3677,31425],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-289457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-balkans","category-beer-reviews","category-bigtrip2025","category-bulgaria","category-gose","category-romania","tag-balkans","tag-beers","tag-bigtrip2025","tag-bulgaria","tag-gose","tag-romania","tag-vegetable","tag-wholesome"],"yoast_head":"\nthe wholesome vegetable beers of the Balkans - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=289457\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"the wholesome vegetable beers of the Balkans - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How many times do you need to come across different vegetable beers before you start thinking it might be a regional style? 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