OnTap Magazine

at festivals – but education needs to get a solid boost to purge a lot of obscure beer mythology or straight damaging information from peoples' minds. CHANGING MINDS One of the most frustrating pieces of fabrication is a notion of "live beer", which is supposedly only good for consumption for three days, a concept with its roots in the Soviet period. A lot of beer produced during that time was sold on draft from huge-wheeled metal barrels on the street, all of them sporting a "live beer" label painted on the barrel. This beer needed to be sold fast and people were told that real beer, devoid of chemical additions, would be fit for drinking just for a very short stretch of time. Imagine whole generations of people believing this marketing fairy- tale and being sceptical about any beer with a shelf-life longer than one week. "It's pasteurised, it's full of preservatives," they say. They don't trust in the preservative qualities of hops and alcohol and don't want to listen when told that if beer is spoiled after one week, then there's clearly a serious hygiene issue. It will be a long battle, but we are ready, with more books coming into print, more people writing about beer in the media, more brewers engaging with people, and hopefully more festivals once we have bid farewell to the pandemic properly. But do all these hurdles stop Ukrainians from diving enthusiastically into the depth of beer? Hell no! Even if craft beer is way more expensive than mass-market options and is not easily available for a huge amount of the population, there's a promising growth in the numbers of people willing to choose quality over quantity. And bit by bit more daring styles appear on the market. EXTREME EXPERIMENTATION If Berliner Weisse or Gose was almost impossible to sell four years ago, now sour beer is the darling of beer enthusiasts and novices alike. You won't be able to find a proper craft taproom in a major city like Kyiv or Kharkiv without New England IPA on draft. There are — for God's sake! — beer smoothies and pastry stouts, and if the first barrel-aged programme in the country was started in 2017, now there's at least six of them, and more popping up. If global trends were slow to come to the local scene three years ago, now there's an almost immediate response to nearly everything happening in a beer world, even the most obscure trends. Weird ingredients, projects with local fruit and vegetable growers, barrel-aging projects with domestic winemakers, bioprospecting of wild indigenous micro-flora, new hopping techniques and products, unconventional yeast for non-alcoholic beers: you name it, we've done it. Heard of Cold IPA? We have one already. For better or worse there's enough hard- core audience to swallow even the craziest experiment. What the feedback will be is a completely different story. Riding the wave of trends is exciting, but does the Ukrainian beer scene have something of its own, something special and very local? Yes, but the style is still taking shape and the local community of brewers and drinkers is still coming to terms with whether to claim it as truly local and own it with pride. Whatever the result will be, it's difficult to deny the existence of Ukrainian golden ale. Mostly it goes by just golden ale, but the thing is it's neither a British nor a Belgian version of the style. It came to be as a brainchild of two people (Vasyl Mykulyn, the founder of Varvar Brew, and Dmytro Nekrasov, the brewmaster and co-owner of First Dnipro Brewery) and is quite boozy at 6.8% ABV, with a rich body and sweet finish, featuring just WORLD OF BEER The number of breweries using cans grows slowly, but steadily. (Photo: Nikita Lebedev) There's enough hard-core audience to swallow even the craziest experiment 42 | Spring 2021 | ontapmag.co.za