Al-Chark

Brewed by Al-Chark Brewery
Style: Pale Lager
Aleppo, Syria

Serve in Dimpled mug, English pint, Lager glass, Shaker

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Tasted during a trip to Aleppo and Damascus. An average lager, not very special. Syria was a wonderful place, with incredible people. But not very incredible beer, sorry.

This beer used to be the greatest beer ever!! but recently for some reasons it’s some times awful and sometimes good.. anyway I love it with lemon and salt!!

Bottle, 62 cl, named "Al Shark". Golden-blond beer, bubbles, little head that is gone immediately. Aroma of skunky malts, grain, wheat and light sweet. Taste is a mixture of a bad grainy taste, wheat and malts, there is no finish - and if there is one it is a bad one.

A Mes rate: 33cl bottle kindly bought back by my flatmate Rob from Syria. Very very odd stuff. A huge deposit of sediment in the bottle. Looks almost like the honey stuff you get at the bottom of a Bieken but far more of it. Chunky nose of hops with some butterscotch. Very cloudy looks with a bubbly and soapy head. Bags of butterscotch and toffee in the flavour accompanied by some dusty old tobacco notes too. Finish is nasty and spoils it considerably. SilkTork???

alcohol 3 to 3,5% - clear golden colour, giant foamy head; aroma of dust, musty, yeasty notes; quite thin-bodied and with a very low carbonation, sweet with a decent malty finish; more dust, yeast and some residual sweetness in the aftertaste - Thanks to Laurent Mousson for sharing this bottle with me. I wonder if this is really supposed to be the same beer that SilkTork found so wonderful ?!?

This is a wonderful beer, an astonishing shock considering it’s made in Muslim Syria. Unfortunately it’s hard to get hold of - the disgusting beer from Damascus, the capital of Syria, is available almost everywhere, but I only found this in a cafe near Saladin’s Castle not far from the coast. Frustratingly when we stayed in Aleppo we were in a Muslim hotel next to a mosque and so were served a non-alcoholic Almaza. The beer comes in generous 1.5 litre bottles and is very fruity, the dominant flavour being pineapple, but with some grapefruit present. For a lager I found this to be full of complex flavours, the hops fresh and sharp, and the malt body firm and distinctive. Five different bottles were tasted by seven people and all agreed that this was astonishingly excellent. Given more time to track down a supplier I would have brought back a case load. Worth going to Syria just to sample this jewel!