It being Greece, and summer and all,
you can see some lovely ads for beers – Alpha, Mythos – who celebrate their
cool drinks being enjoyed by a cool
coast, Alpha even going as far as to show scenes from Another Big Fat Greek Wedding, to the delightful strains of
Dimitris Mitropanis singing, ‘Thes’. But
don’t be taken in as I was recently when I fancied a cider. Given the choice of
Strongbow or Milokleftis, I chose the
latter to support our economy. Wrong choice – much too sweet! And it is produced in Greece, by the
subsidiary group Athenian Brewery, offering employment to around 900 locals,
but the company is actually owned by the huge Dutch multi-national, Heineken, which also produces Alpha and
Amstel, while Mythos is a product of Danish Carlsberg.
I actually thought I had stumbled across a case
of plagiarism or copyright infringement when I read about a cider in Ireland
called ‘Orchard Thieves’ which sounds very similar to “Apple Bandit’ which is
how the company translates the Milokleftis
brand name. A little research revealed that the same cider is marketed by
Heineken under similar, but different names: Malaysia has the ‘Apple Fox’,
while Portugal enjoys the feisty ‘Bandida do Pomar’.
So, hold on a moment, do we actually have a
purely Greek beer-producing company? Step right up, Macedonian Thrace Brewery, established in 1996 in Komotini, Thrace,
by Dimitris Politopoulos who is the
company Chief Executive Officer. Run as a family operation, it seems quite
natural that on their website they talk of their different kinds of beer as
‘being born’!
In 1998 Vergina Premium Lager, brewed in the
Pilsner tradition, became the first 100% Greek beer with a Greek label.
In 2001, Vergina Red - initially brewed for their brewmaster’s wedding! – an
amber speciality beer, came on tap.
The product family continued to
grow:
Vergina
Weiss – brewed to
the Bavarian tradition of top-fermented wheat beers.
Vergina Perfyra - an
unfiltered, limited edition lager.
Vergina XXX Black – an unfiltered, dry stout.
In ancient times, the natural spring waters
from the mountains of the Rhodope range were renowned for their exceptional
quality and archaeological finds have shown that some of the earliest beer
fermentation in Europe took place in Thrace.
Macedonian Thrace Brewery aimed to craft a fine
premium lager, to bring back to Thrace the lost art of beer craft. Much of the
information and the pictures here are credited to their website: www.verginabeer.com.
Their development, however, has not been
without difficulty. Athens Brewery (AB) took Macedonian Thrace Brewery (MTB) to
court on the grounds of alleged perjury. The prosecutor, however, found this
claim to be ‘totally false’ and lodged ‘with malicious intent’.
This was just one episode in a long, ongoing
legal battle between MTB and Heineken/AB for anticompetitive market abuses in
Greece. In essence, it was found that AB had employed a policy to exclude
competitors from wholesalers and other retail outlets. For almost 20 years the
company had used its dominant market position to thwart competitors, thereby
contravening both Greek and EU laws. Consequently the subsidiary was forced to
pay a hefty fine of 26.6 million euros.
Taking
on and smiting Goliath must have been a real strain on the time and resources
of this David organization but, despite that, MTB has continued to thrive. It
now operates one of the most technically advanced brewing and bottling
facilities in Europe.
More diverse products are literally in the
pipeline as the company continually quests to improve and diversify. One new product is their Greek Mountain Tea
with the delightful name, Tuvunu -
literally ‘from or of the mountain’. This tea is infused with lemon juice,
wildflower honey and brown sugar – a little added ice makes this just the right
beverage to quench your thirst in these hot, summer days.
And my quest to find out more about Tuvunu was
to lead me on an exciting trip to the Rhodope mountains, north of Xanthe in
Thrace …………
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