ex-yu 4 - inb4 summer

Extremely wonderful and extremely sad news from Croatia.

First... the good news...

An amendment to the law which regulates taxing of breweries was passed yesterday, reducing taxing of micros by 50% if I remember correctly and helping with other stuff. Macros (MolsonCoors (formerly Starbev and InBev) owned Zagrebacka Pivovara, Heineken Croatia and Carlsberg Croatia) allegedly have their people in a board that usually handles such decisions - so they allegedly helped ensure the laws which favored the big 3 and crippled everybody else, but the minister in charge and his people apparently went around them and gave the proposal directly to the parliament. So, election year had its positive effect on micro/craft/small brewing in Croatia. Yay!

Second... the bad news...

The most popular, important, positive, hedonistic, wonderful (and the first to boot) beer event in Croatia, the craft/homebrew conference which took place late each September at the Magic Beer Room in Zagreb was cancelled a couple of weeks before it was supposed to go on. There was will, there was a way, the 400ish tickets get sold out within 3-4 hours in general for events in this organization. However, the local mentality fucked everything up. The organizers clearly stated that the kegs people pledged would have to be registered till today really. Even though 30+ kegs were pledged, only 7 (seven) were registered till yesterday. Some people who were supposed to hold lectures didn’t bother answering mails. There were no further volunteers for anything. So, faced with having to do a ton of work with a lot of the community ignoring them - EVEN THOUGH they would trample over each other to participate - they pulled the plug. Oh, it would work out in the end - as all those kegs would show up, it’s just that "someone else will do it instead", "we’ll do it later", and such lovely lines of thought took over. Again. But there was no "somebody else" and deadlines are actually important to some. A hard, harsh, but important lesson in humanity. Let’s hope that people learn...

And, out of the blue, a new nano brewery appeared in Zagreb, producing a pale lager beer called Fulir (not related to the BaD Brewery which presented its Gospodin Fulir Pale Al at a conference, only to re-disappear, and which seems to have been put on hold completely due to, allegedly, more paperwork-licensing issues caused by the place they were (supposed to be) brewing at.

The only info right now is really that it’s a 5% pale lager, and I certainly hope it’s a good twist on the style. :) It’s being presented for the first time today in Sisak. Can’t wait for the people’s impressions and now I’m a bit sad I couldn’t go.

Ceasing my activity on this thread due to lack of feedback / activity from others.

Too bad. Enjoyed reading this :-(

Originally posted by Marko
Ceasing my activity on this thread due to lack of feedback / activity from others.

I am reading this too :) But I forgot to reply to a Koelschtrinker’s post.. I will do it now :P

Originally posted by Koelschtrinker
I’m planing a trip in April next year to some cities in that area, starting with Zagreb-Sarajevo-Podg orica-Pristina-Tir ana-Thessaloniki-S ofia-Skopje-Belgra d. If I can make it Bucarest, Chisinau, Tiraspol and Odessa via train from Sofia or Belgrad. It will be a short beer trip with only few tourist stuff. I will be in most cities only for some hours and will have to make a good plan where to go.

I was also reading this and got nice tips for my last holidays.