Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 74: Down a rabbit hole, deep into the Belgian beer paradise (1998).
Insofar as ordinary Americans know to find Moscow on the European continent and not in Idaho, we tend to associate the city with fear, loathing and the grandiosity of the tsars (both God-ordained and Soviet), as well as the frozen immensity of the Russian winter.
In 1999 when Barrie Ottersbach and I spilled into Moscow, we learned to our chagrin that it can get hot enough in high summer to fry eggs on Red Square’s missile-polished paving stones.
Our stated objective was to visit Danish buddies Allan G. and Kim W., both of whom were working in Moscow at the time. The city was dramatically different than I remembered it from a mere decade previous, although it hadn’t yet become the skyscraper-dotted oligarchic landscape of today.
For Russia, 1999 was an interregnum of sorts, with the increasingly unpopular (and sozzled) President Boris Yeltsin resigning office only a few months later, to be replaced by a little known former Dresden resident and fan of Radeberger Pilsner named Vladimir Putin.
My Beers in the GDR, Part Two: Sharing a few Pilsners with a future war criminal
Would Russia’s future be its past, as so often has occurred during the country’s turbulent history? The signs were muddled, and so was I — at least at first.
From the beginning of the trip, it was a strange and disjointing sensation to be returning at last to a land that had captivated me so intensely earlier in my life with music, literature and the glories of a properly laid zakuski table.
In particular, it seemed almost wrong to be entering Russia by airplane.
Before, back in the decidedly dark ages of the 1980s, I’d arrived twice in the Soviet capital after long journeys by train, taking me eastward over a period of days through ever more mysterious and primitive circles of the Warsaw Pact. Being able to effortlessly glide into an airport while ensconced in the belly of a Swissair jet, pausing only to enjoy Italian espresso, seemed positively corrupt and decadent by comparison.
Surely any remaining Russian proletarians would harshly judge me for not enduring the old-school route through Minsk and Kiev.
Ten years later sprawling, brooding Moscow remained the imperial capital of communism, at least in physical appearance, although seventy years of urban methodology had been loosely draped with the familiar veneer of capitalism’s purported victory in the long running saga of the Cold War. Garish neon signs, intrusive billboards, log-sized cellular phones, constant car alarms — even the occasional coat of paint — all conspired to trick the unthinking visitor into believing that Moscow had become somehow Western.
Not in 1999, it wasn’t, and perhaps not yet today; Mother Russia went back a very long way.
If I were to return to Moscow tomorrow, it is unlikely that the city could be fathomed with the precise clarity of objective, unbiased eyes. I first visited the Soviet Union while young and impressionable, during a time of geopolitical ubiquity, when hardly a press conference passed without Ronald Reagan making one reference or another to the evil empire centered in a city that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could capture and hold.
All Reagan’s rhetoric did was intensify my desire to go to Moscow and see for myself.
In 1987, people queued across Red Square to glance for fleeting, rushed seconds at the mummified remains of Lenin, the founder’s fist clenched beneath eerie enclosing glass. Exiting Lenin’s mausoleum in the shadow of the massive red brick Kremlin Wall, the visiting pilgrim walked past idealized busts and burial places of the Soviet Union’s friends and luminaries (“there … that’s John Reed!”), then girded for the inevitable bargaining: jeans, cigarettes, shirts and shoes.
Perhaps the hushed mercantile conversation was taken off the crowded street and into a dirt-cheap and dirty stand-up eatery, with the deal being sealed later over a shared bottle of vodka while seated on a park bench, watching the dignified old folks shuffle past, the ones who worked so hard for so little while building the nation, their grandchildren circling them like tiny ice cream-smeared Sputniks.
In 1999, with a long and fevered century coming to a close, my days in Moscow were spent thinking and drinking, acting out bit parts from Dostoevsky screenplays, hearing Rimsky-Korsakov playing inside my head, flashing backward and forward from the eighties to the moment — haunted by the past, confused by the present, and glad that it was no longer necessary to surreptitiously buy beer from the trunk of a cabdriver’s Lada or the hard currency “Beriozka” shop.
Contemporary capitalism was user-friendly: Merely find the nearest curbside kiosk, spend the ruble equivalent of $5.00, and walk away with more bottles of beer than could be comfortably carried, back upstairs where we’d recline well into our cups as our old friends shared their knowledge with us.
Allan and Kim first met during the early 1980s while studying at Moscow State University, and better hosts could not be imagined.
We were taken for a surreal tour of the ex-KGB’s own in-house museum and hustled to the affluent northwestern outskirts for a meal in a garish Old Russia-themed restaurant where servers in peasant blouses ladled out ridiculously overpriced provincial-style game dishes to aspiring mafia bosses who were seated astride an artificial indoor babbling brook.
We viewed thousands of purely bootleg compact discs that were being hawked at the huge weekend open-air music mart somewhere west of the center, bought a few, and enjoyed the marvelous kvass (a lightly fermented, carbonated beverage made from bread and malt) being dispensed from one of the old dreadnaught-grade metal street-side tanks.
We visited a brewpub (long since mercifully defunct) that could be reached only after passing through a metal detector, where the beer was laughably mediocre and the international clientele of traveling businessmen thoroughly depressing, but at least the shifting selection of pro-am sex workers was diverse and entertaining, providing us with many fresh new ideas for marketing at like-sized American brewing establishments.
We walked along the Moscow River, viewed the city from the Lenin Hills, found the Patriarch Ponds as yet appearing straight from Bulgakov’s magical novel, and drank good Baltika draft beer from St. Petersburg on a scorching night while seated on a cement wall at the foot of Kim’s apartment complex, laughing heartily about the proximity of public toilets — they’re out that way, behind the untrimmed shrubbery, where the light bulbs had all been broken; just be aware of the piquant mud, comrades.
Still, our planned excursion into the Russian countryside promised to be the best part of the itinerary.
—
I knew we might be in trouble from the moment the weather-beaten boat came limping into view. Allan had hired it to take us into the vast expanse of water, an inland ocean that he swore was a mere river, albeit not just any regional watercourse, but the mighty Volga, up close and personal.
At the marina (of sorts), a handful of pasty-pale-hued male natives in flowery swimming trunks eyed us with curiosity from a cluster obscured by smoke from their reeking cigarette stubs. An odor of gasoline was in the air … or was it more vodka?
As if we hadn’t had enough already.
A three-hour commute had been required just to reach the village anchorage. We began the day in central Moscow, with Allan pointing his car north through seemingly limitless, shabby cement towers, until at some point the urban claustrophobia abruptly ceased and we shot into the open countryside.
At least two reassuringly reform-proof collective farms were bisected, as well as a time zone or two, before we finally arrived at the Russian equivalent of Kentucky’s Land Between the Lakes, a wedge of dry ground between the confluence of three rivers, dotted with venerable rural homes made of peeling painted wood, weekend houses (dachas) of the high-rolling city folk, and the virtual certainty that visitors would be effectively distanced from the fast pace of urban life.
Allan’s dacha was a well-built house of recent vintage, tended in his absence by a neighbor. Among her advance instructions were to gather and prepare food in great quantities for the vacationing, supersized foreigners.
Coincidentally or not, a scarfed, elderly local woman from central casting duly met us at the rickety gate of the compound, scenting a rare opportunity for profit in the form of a rather large and regressively odiferous fish, which she excitedly explained might be the absolute high point of our visit to Russia. Allan bought the fish for mere kopecks, and with only slight hesitation it was slated for the ritualistic outdoor grilling of meat and vegetables set to follow the afternoon’s boat trip to Sand Island.
Settling into our evening accommodations, we secured the perimeter of the kitchen against horse flies and bees, then examined the larder brought for our outing. Bottles of ritzy Budvar beer from the Czech Republic, each costing the equivalent of 50 cents American, had been purchased from the “Caucasus Discount Kiosk & Package Outlet” outside Allan’s apartment building in Moscow. A huge peppercorn-encrusted salami already was road-gnawed. Everything went into a canvas bag, along with hunks of regional cheese and crusty bread.
I slammed a clip into my pre-digital camera and reached for the paperback copy of Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita,” some sunscreen and a vial of insect repellant. The four of us strolled down a gentle slope to the dock, which proved to be a rectangular patch of murky river water enclosed by a rough concrete wall randomly pockmarked with stray rebar, all gray and rust, perhaps a suitable home for pocket submarines during the late, lamented Cold War.
It isn’t known whether our small boat was named the пескарь (“minnow” in Russian), but its tiny, coughing outboard motor sputtered asbestos like a leftover Ossie Trabant. The grizzled captain welcomed us aboard, his reflective metal teeth reflecting the hot sun, and our long-awaited Volga cruise began.
The motor died more than once, but the captain expertly revived it whenever necessary, and the boat was steered into the middle of a huge open lake (an impoundment known as the Uglich Reservoir), because even Russians don’t make rivers quite that big. It was a bright, brilliant summer’s day with a stiff wind to cool the glare and create choppy waves, which our small craft struggled valiantly to conquer.
After twenty-five minutes, we slowed and began chugging toward a long, low island carpeted with pine trees. When we closed to within a hundred yards, I noticed something peculiar about the shoreline ahead: There was nothing jutting out from it. In fact, there appeared to be no infrastructure of any kind to calm the nerves of an inveterate non-swimmer, this being me.
Actually, as neither a swimmer nor a naturalist of any remote sort, I asked Allan: “Uh, well, exactly where’s the dock?”
“There isn’t one,” he said cheerfully. “Have a beer.”
Wonderful. We’d have to wade in not unlike a pack of returning Douglas MacArthurs, except we’d be bearing Budvars and sausages, not guns and grenades, and back out again whenever Captain Ahabski returned for us, assuming his long-suffering outboard didn’t go the way of Dzerzhinsky’s toppled statue in front of the Lubyanka prison back in Moscow, where the humorless watchdogs had firmly said “nyet” when Barrie proposed to film the ex-KGB’s self-congratulatory corporate museum.
It was only later that Allan made the offhand comment that provided the mantra for this trip: “My shoes are filled with Volga mud.” I could accept that, just so long as my lungs weren’t filled with Volga water. In the meantime, I held my lagers close to my heart and stuck a naked toe over the side.
The boat drifted toward shore, its engine cut, and we were as close as we were going to get to Sand Island. If I intended to make the picnic and enjoy my salami and Budvar, I’d have to get my feet wet. To the surprise of none, Barrie had no doubts: “I’m going in,” he announced, and commenced swaggering through the knee-deep water.
As oft times before, I was quite happy to let Barr do the blocking, and after my initial hesitation, found the layers of black mud and decomposing leaves to be reassuringly soft beneath my feet.
Clambering up the wooded hillside, we established camp in a sandy clearing and watched through the gently swaying branches as the boat disappeared over the horizon. It was as peaceful an idyll as I’ve known. Civilization seemed a thousand kilometers away. The salami was greasy, the Budvar beer outstanding, the company of my good friends valued, and the mud — that timeless Volga mud clinging to my feet and shoes — unexpectedly reassuring.
—
The following morning I awoke in the dacha groggy and disoriented. Sand Island was history, and so were the kebobs, salads, caviar and even that strange, bony-assed fish we’d devoured after retreating indoors quite early, aiming to avoid mosquitoes of elongated Chernobylesque proportions.
We sat inside talking of old times, drinking vodka and Baltika Porter in the odd glow of a never quite dark summer’s night.
Allan’s local helper had been commissioned to prepare fish soup for a midday meal to be consumed just prior to making the drive back to Moscow, and this left us with several hours to explore. Allan proposed a drive to a nearby town.
Armed with illicit Jackson Browne and Bad Company CD’s procured for next to nothing at the thriving Moscow music market stalls, we set out for the scenic trek to Kalyazin, a dusty and isolated “nowhere” town that has the eternal good fortune to be “nowhere” less than four hours away from Moscow.
And this is quite good, because a brief look at any reputable map of Russia will reveal there to be hundreds of Kalyazins, most of them located in places that are so lost in the middle of nothingness that they might as well be on another planet.
The open road led through another unreconstructed Soviet-era agricultural plantation, then into the “city” limits. A right turn, a rutted dirt street sloping downhill, cracked and peeling pre-revolutionary houses … and at the bottom of the incline the street abruptly stopped at water’s edge.
Ahead of us, one hundred yards from dry land, completely surrounded by water, was the Kalyazin Bell Tower, the neoclassical campanile from the Orthodox monastery of St. Nicholas, which had been submerged into a special kind of symbolic island by damming the Volga to make the Ugrich reservoir, no doubt detailed in the five-year plan written by an atheistic bureaucrat in far-off Moscow.
As it had since the revolution, Kalyazin’s bleak main square was being watched by none other than V. I. Lenin, his statue no more weed-encrusted and neglected than the remainder of town. The market showed a few more signs of life.
Accompanied by children who sold their services as “protection” for a few cents — they were supposed to be guarding the car, but kept wandering off to invest their newfound wealth in ice cream cones — we bought a few more bottles of beer and surveyed the sparse trinkets.
Meanwhile, Allan had determined that locally brewed beer was potentially available in two places: a nearby nightclub and a genuine tavern of the sort that was rare in the countryside. The nightclub was closed up tight; judging from the decrepit exterior appearance, this was not to be lamented.
But the tavern was open, located in a relatively new addition to an older building and appearing positively upscale compared to the surroundings, although once inside, the ambiance proved tom be simple: a few wooden tables, plastic patio chairs, and a window to order and collect the beers.
A young, engaging woman served us from behind the counter, noting to the ever-solicitous Allan that the beer was in fact brewed locally, and giving him vague directions to the brewery site.
As he relayed this information, I saw Barrie’s eyes following something emerging from the base of the wall. It was an adapted garden hose, now serving as the line carrying the beer from the presumably cellared keg to the tap. Nonetheless, it wasn’t bad golden lager at all, a bit yeasty and perhaps on the unfinished side, but workably refreshing. We now resolved to find the brewery.
Back on the main highway on the outskirts of Kalyazin, Allan followed the barmaid’s ambiguous directions. Eventually he pulled over to the shoulder to ask a pair of slack-jawed pedestrians if they knew the location of the brewery, and in opportunistic fashion, they offered to swap this critical information in exchange for a small fee: A ride.
Moments later the car came to rest in front of what appeared to be a collective farm storage building, rough gray concrete with rusty Gorbachevian port wine stains down the sides, and no discernable activity on the premises.
Having ascertained that Allan spoke fluent Russian, our slightly embarrassed passengers swore to the authenticity of the site, and suggested that we ask for the proprietor in a cluster of houses at the end of a muddy lane that was sufficiently booby-trapped with potholes that Allan correctly feared for the life of the car.
It was midday, and there were few signs of people to ask directions, so we elected to abandon the brewery chase. Allan drove back down the dirt road to the highway, and as we pulled out I just happened to see a hand-lettered, cardboard sign with an arrow pointing to the left and a single word in Russian, one announcing the site of the Grail: Пиво … PEE-voh.
Or, “beer” in the Russian tongue.
It was the quintessential roadside beer stand, and the mysterious local brewery’s de facto open-air tap room, nestled under the welcomed shade of trees in a rustic farmyard littered with puddles, chicken droppings and fish bones, where the woman on duty poured beer from a rigged faucet attached to a single keg, minus the needless expense of extras like refrigeration or television advertising.
At her disposal were six glass mugs, a basin of well water for rinsing them, and a bowl of rubles for making change when absolutely necessary; a half-liter of draft beer cost 25 cents, and the origin of the bones was revealed when I offered her a 20-ruble banknote for two beers, and in lieu of coins, she offered two small, leathery smoked fish in return.
Barrie and I gnawed the pungent, salt-laden freshwater fish jerky as Allan conversed with the lady in charge, learning that the nondescript building we had found indeed was the brewery, that is was operated by a Moscow man who’d moved to the countryside, and that the business was growing.
The beer itself was the same fresh, golden, unfiltered lager that we’d sampled back in the Kalyazin pub. How good was it? I feel that it would be wise to subordinate any critique to the uniqueness of the setting, seated on a wooden bench, washing away the dust and midday heat with a cool (not cold) beer, and watching two hilariously drunk local (still shakily “collective”) farm workers in action.
Their extended liquid lunch break apparently having come to an end, along with the bulk of their money, the two staggered to their feet. One of them pressed coins into the hand of an old man seated nearby, who nodded and disappeared around the corner.
Within minutes the old man reappeared, bearing a small washtub filled with water, which he proceeded to dump over the heads of the delighted drunks. Soon their ancient car sputtered out onto the highway, and when we also left soon after them, we were careful to drive the opposite direction.
Later in Moscow there’d be a magnificent Port tasting led by Kim, a walk in Gorky Park, and the requisite stroll through the Soviet-era GUM department store (for many years a privatized shopping mall). But I’ll never forget our time in the Russian countryside.
—
From Moscow we flew to Tallinn, Estonia, then ferried to Finland for a meetup in Tampere with my cousin’s longtime friends Henrik and Eva. After an overnight boat trip to Stockholm, a rail journey brought us to Malmo, where our friends Bob and Mindy were staying with Erik.
Next came Copenhagen and three stunning days of caloric and alcoholic excess with Kim A. and Boris, who was visiting from Haarlem. In 1999, the bridge and tunnel project connecting Malmö and Copenhagen across Øresund Strait was almost complete; it opened the following year, and in the interim, we made the passage by ferry. Kim and Boris were waiting at the dock, commencing three days of riotous excess.
There were beers aplenty, and stupendous meals the likes of which even a hardcore trencherman like me has seldom indulged. Arriving in early afternoon, we sought restorative libations and began contemplating the evening meal.
Kim’s taste in Thai cuisine is flawless, and soon we were in route to a restaurant he’d recently discovered. The place was deserted, and as we entered the workers were seated at a table smoking. At first glance they appeared stunned, then there as recognition, joy and slight consternation: “Kim!,” followed by a rustling of feet as they scrambled for their stations. The waiter greeted Kim effusively, and Kim spoke to him for several minutes amid an outpouring of nods, winks and hand gestures.
Shortly the dishes and bottled beers began emerging from the kitchen as if on a factory conveyor belt, among them Laab, which I later learned was a Thai/Lao minced meat salad, on this occasion spiced at Kim’s instructions with hot peppers of a magnitude that had my eyeballs watering. This went on for hours. The establishment’s rent for the month thus secured, we taxied home to drink the beers we’d stashed there.
On the second day we visited at least three stellar joints: London Pub, down the street from where Kim lived and a bar that often kept local Porter on draft; Vinstue 90, founded in 1916 and still home to slow-poured Carlsberg; and Café Sorgenfri for “Danish lunch,” which lasted the remainder of the day, all the way to closing time.
40 Years in Beer, Part Twenty-Two: A placid traditional Danish lunch in Copenhagen, 1989
The feast included marinated herring, smoked salmon, liver pâté, steak tartare, pork roulade, pickles, potatoes, eggs, onions, horseradish, capers, Camembert (and other cheeses), fresh mayonnaise and heaven knows what else. In my memory the eggs, fish, and beef all were raw (not a complete exaggeration, but an overstatement), and the beer and requisite schnapps, seemingly a different sort for every foodstuff, were consumed with an atypically judicious temperament, enabling the duration of the stay, one enlivened considerably by a long chat with a pair of crusty ancient Danish merchant mariners.
Decades later, I can still remember how we insisted that our third day in Copenhagen would be slower-paced and more relaxed. On second thought, maybe it was me alone who kept saying this.
As it transpired, I was out-voted.
It began innocently enough with a lunchtime visit to the Faergekro restaurant at Nyhavn (“new” harbor), the discovery of which is my single greatest claim to fame, seeing as my Danish pals didn’t know about it before I introduced them. It might be noted that because they spent their childhood carrying herring to school in their lunch pails, I was always more enthusiastic about it.
The daily herring buffet was and remains a highlight of western culinary civilization. At least ten varieties of pickled herring (with sour cream, curry and Madeira sauce, among others) are offered, along with dense dark bread, butter, and garnishes like raw egg, onion and caper berry. Whole smoked herrings can be carved from the bone. Beer is available, as well as Akvavit (Scandinavian schnapps), along with the wonderful custom of providing house-made infusions of herbs and spices for flavoring the firewater and washing down the tasty marinated, pickled and smoked morsels.
The photographic evidence suggests we then repaired to the Apollo brewpub outside Tivoli, which is across the street from the train station and transit hub, because it seems to me that this juncture is when Boris departed (maybe a bus to the airport?). Afterward, we were at Kim’s place for a beer sampling; somewhere in there the Elephant & Mouse figured into the day. Sadly this downtown Copenhagen icon with (only) Carlsberg Elephant beer on tap is long deceased in the form we knew it.
40 Years in Beer, Part Fifteen: A clash of titans (with Elephant Beer) in Copenhagen, 1987
At some point in all this it came time to eat again.
A light evening meal? Kim nodded gravely and replied yes, “maybe a small curry … I know just the place,” and before we knew it another taxi was waiting and we were being rushed to an Indian restaurant, later revealed to have been voted the top such venue in the city, as attested by a line of awards hanging on the wall.
We strolled in, and echoing the Thai eatery two nights before, reaction was immediate and ecstatic: “KIM!!!”
It wasn’t busy, and we were seated just beyond the swinging kitchen door, of the typical sort with a round window. The waiter approached, and as Kim made ready to order, we reminded him again: just a small curry. He nodded, and promptly spent the next five minutes conferring with the waiter.
Beers materialized, and I became aware of a strange Candid Camera sensation; glancing over at the kitchen door porthole, there was a man — obviously the chef — staring out at us. He quickly ducked away. Soon the appetizers appeared, and continued appearing, then the main courses, dish after dish; yet again, we were confronted by an epic, table-groaning pile of food. It was overwhelming overkill.
I mentioned to Barrie and Kim about the man looking at us from the kitchen. When the leftovers were packed and the check arrived, Kim began chatting with the waiter and began laughing. It had been the chef, sure enough; when he saw the sheer size of the order, it made him curious; he went to look, expecting a large party, then saw just the three of us.
Then, noticing our collective tonnage, he promptly decided to add extra to the portions because he was afraid our order wouldn’t be enough for us.
The trip concluded in Berlin amid ever fainter traces of the departed Wall, after a series of lavish meals, brewery tours, bar hopping and wonderful parties, including a high school graduation ceremony at my teacher friend Suzanne’s private school near Waren, north of Berlin, which featured a belly dancer.
Really.
Seldom have I returned from “vacation” in such a state of abject exhaustion, and to think that NABC had already held the first-ever Gravity Head (in April) — plus, another Euro trip was yet to come in September (the second motorcoach extravaganza).
—
This brings me to a postscript of sorts. The personal health and wellness triumph of the 1999 visit to Moscow was a legendary session at the Sanduny banya (sauna), founded in 1808. Tsars, Commies and Putineers have all experienced simultaneous punishment and rejuvenation there.
According to Wikipedia, a banya in its simplest sense is a Russian steam bath with a wood stove. It is considered an important part of Russian culture and has Slavic roots. The bath takes place in a small room or building designed for dry or wet heat sessions.
“The steam and high heat make the bathers perspire … (it may also) refer to a public bathhouse, most historically famous being the Sanduny (Sandunovskie bani).”
The ritual goes something like this: you get hot and steamed to the point of unconsciousness; have the hell beaten out of you with birch tree branches (sold separately one door down before you enter the banya); then jump in cold water or have it poured over you.
In commercial establishments like Sanduny, there’s another tradition involving beer, shrimp, vodka, zakuski (appetizers), and caviar consumed egregiously before and after the ordeal, thus negating whatever health benefits there are to sweating poison out of you.
I cannot speak for the female side of the segregated banya, but on the male side we sat to eat before the treatment, clad only in towels. As a result, these are some of the raciest photos I’ve ever published (they’re Allan’s), but Europeans don’t possess Puritan guilt like we Americans.
I’ve taken care to censor them for fear of starting a riot, so keep the kiddos in the kitchen, please.
(Photo credits: Many are Allan Gamborg’s, and some of them are mine.)
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Next: The FOSSILS homebrewing and beer appreciation club in 1998 and 1999.
