So, I had a weekend in Paris recently, staying in Montmartre, the area in which I discovered to my great delight last Christmas, a bar called Au RDV de Montmartre, that sold my favourite beer, Loburg. This, and a couple of other nice bar/restaurants in the area that sell other decent beers, promised to make the weekend very special indeed. As I have noted on here several times, Loburg is quite hard to find anywhere in France and Belgium, so to have a bar that sells it so close to where I was staying, was more than I could have wished for.

When we went out for a sightsee early in the afternoon, I went by the bar to ensure that it was going to be open at apero time later in the day. The first thing that looked ominous was the new signs out the front, showing the beers etc that they sell. This is not the kind of bar that changes its signage, so I went over to make sure that they still had Loburg on the list. Can you imagine my disappointment (to put it mildly; I think my wife was embarrassed to be seen with a man my age weeping in the street) to see that they no longer sell Loburg. I have posted a photo of their current beer list; a more miserable collection of beers is hard to imagine; he’s my commentary on them:

• Licorne is a French beer that is passable - I have posted on here about the 3 types I have had and they are OK but nothing to get excited about. Floreffe is a Belgian beer, fairly strong and not really one to get too excited about. I had it once some years ago at a local restaurant near my place in rural France, don’t remember it being memorable.

• La Chouffe sucks, no other way to describe it! Very strong (8%) and not a beer you want to have more than one (small) one of.

• Blanche de Bruxelles is another Belgian beer, wheat beer (not my thing).

• And Slash - who the hell makes a beer called Slash? I’d never heard of it, but a Google search shows it to be a very recent beer from the Licorne brewery. So they must have received some attractive incentives from them to now carry two of their beers, when they didn’t carry any the last time I was there.

So, I had to make do with other bars and other beers. I was able to revisit a very pleasant bar called Le Relais de la Butte, that has a Belgian beer called Maes, which I have posted about on here already. Not wonderful but certainly a decent beer and the ambiance at the bar is wonderful.

Then later to another bar that I’ve frequented before, called Le Rendez-Vous des Amis and a French beer called Slavia, which, again, I’ve posted about on here. I wasn’t a huge wrap for it the first time I had it, last Christmas, but I liked it much better this time and would rate it a 7/10 now.

Rounded out the bars with a very ordinary one called Café Adelaide which had La Cadette Blonde on tap; I’ve had the bottled version before and posted about it here. Unsurprisingly, the draft version was an improvement on the bottled one, and I adjusted its rating slightly, to 6.5/10.

All in all, a deeply disappointing visit to Paris from a beer standpoint. Luckily the city itself makes up for it.