During the Russian/Ukrainian holiday I took a number of beer photos specifically for use when blogging about the beer, but then they were lost, so I did the blog posting with new photos taken at home. Now, of course, most of them are found again, and so I decided to do a piece with just beer photos. I thought about calling it "Ukrainian beer porn", but decided that pictures of industrial pale lager wouldn't be desirable enough to warrant the name "porn".

Kiosk selection (Hurzuf, Ukraine)

This picture shows the beer selection in a perfectly normal kiosk in the Ukraine. I count 40 different beers, most of them Ukrainian, and for the Ukraine that's slightly above average. Elsewhere in the world finding that many domestic beers in one place is really out of the ordinary. You can't read the price tags in the downscaled picture, but most of the beers are priced at 4 UAH, which is about 0.50 EUR, but one of the local beers (from the Crimea) is at 3 UAH. The irony is that that was one of the better beers.

Drinking beer, Ukrainian style (Hurzuf, Ukraine)

We quickly got fed up with the very loud and annoying music in every place that served food and or drink, and so decided to drink our beer the way that the locals did. This meant buying it in a kiosk like the one above, and then sitting down anywhere you could outside to drink it. This is on the beach promenade. We've tried park benches, railway stations, and the beach as well. It's actually much nicer than you might think before you've tried it. As long as the weather holds, that is.

Desant DMB (Hurzuf, Ukraine)

I'm quite happy with this picture, although the beer it shows is nothing much out of the ordinary. The name is Desant DMB (a brand with a military image, as you can tell), and it's brewed by Obolon, the biggest Ukrainian brewery. I rated it at 2.7 out of 5, and summarized it as follows: "Not much taste, but refreshing and free of any off tastes." That's a reasonable summary of Ukrainian pale lager in general.

Note that the label says 10.5% on the left and "Alk 4.3% vol". This may sound contradictory, but the 10.5% is the strength of the beer on the plato scale. (The plato scale indicates how much sugar there was in the wort before fermentation.)

Arsenal Mitsne (Hurzuf, Ukraine)

A "strong" beer, at 6.5%. Most Ukrainian breweries offer both a "svitle", meaning pale (which is normal industrial pale lager), and a "mitsne", meaning strong (which is the same, but a little stronger). The picture is taken on the beach promenade just like the drinking picture above.