beer guide latvia - Labs alus

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practice for some small brewers involves selling the same beer with different names or
using one beer as a ‘base’ and introducing small tweaks (such as extra carbonation) to
obtain a ‘different’ beer, so the range of beers can appear larger than it actually is. Often
some of the smaller breweries go bust, during the last years it has happened to Gulbenes,
Lodiņa, Latgales and previously to many others.
In general, smaller breweries are not doing well as the most, but few have been on decline
for the couple of years and I believe it is mostly due to bad management practices.
Latvians seem to embrace ‘hit and run’ tactics - at first a fair quality beer is introduced,
but after the demand increases, the owner immediately puts a ridiculous surcharge, possibly
even sells a beer brewed elsewhere under its name that leads to inevitable quality
issues.
Unfortunately it does not seem that all brewers are seriously involved in any long-term
planning, some just go with flow, blaming everyone else, mostly government and homebrewers
for their own faults. This type of tactics has clearly not yielded any results, as the
market share of small Latvian brewers has fallen below 10% in 2010. It was more than
20% just less than a decade ago and there is no sign for this tendency to decline.
Lodiņa Brewery in
Bauska.
Lodiņa brewery,
operating from 1873
- 1950s was opened
again in 2004 in the
historic buildings
under a new owenership
and with lots of
promises. It managed
to last for just under 5
years. There are plenty
of similar stories
in Latvia - Gulbene,
Vārpa, Kimmel, just
to name a few.
Dzīvais alus (Live beer)
Live beer is an interesting concept that is quite popular in Latvia and some surrounding
countries, most notably Russia and Lithuania. It is generally assumed, mostly by supporters
of the national beer (meaning that origin of the beer is far more important than
its taste), that there is a special type of beer that has significantly better flavour, in addition
to being healthy. This beer is called ‘live beer’ and this definition has nothing to do
with CAMRA’s cask ale.
Although many locals tend to assume that this concept has been known for many years,
its origins in Latvia can be traced back to mid-nineties when Lāčplēša brewery released
its Dzīvais alus (Live beer), the same term was also used by Užavas brewery. Prior to that,
this term was rarely used and never in this particular context. It is quite possible that
Latvian simply borrowed the term from Russia where it has been utilised much more
extensively. During the Soviet times, only state approved names for beer could be used
and all-pervasive state standartisation system would not allow for such loosely defined
criateria to exist.
In order for beer to be considered live, usually several arbitrary conditions have to be
met. Some of them are mentioned below; the concept of live beer usually includes not
all, but a few of them:
- live beer can not be pasteurised,
- live beer can not be filtered and pasteurised,
- beer only from small breweries can be considered live,
- live beer does not contain any E-substances (any food supplement classified by the
EU and containing a letter E in its abbreviation. E300, E209, you know the drill),
- only draught beer is live.
What is more important, many breweries, instead of trying to educate customers about
properties of beer, try to use this obscure term for their advantage as a marketing tool.
One of tricks used include not filtering the beer, but pasteurising it. Yest is dead and does
not contribute to the taste, but public seems to love the haze it generates. And the brewer
can safely claim that he is brewing live beer - there is yeast in the bottle, after all.
No Latvian brewery who actually claims to be a brewer of live beer would be able to
define precisely what live beer actually is and why his own beer qualifies for it and others
not. Only one thing is certain - live beer can be sold for much better price than ‘industrial’
beer.
I would suggest not paying any attention to live beer and waste your time seeking for
it. Some of the most acclaimed live beers are bad and there is no need to overpay just
because of some local hype.
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