BrewDogging #89: Nice

"Founded in the early 1930s, Hotel Albert 1er is an historic establishment in the city of Nice, which invites you to relax in an elegant Riviera-style building at the entrance to the old town. Overlooking the sea and Albert 1er public gardens, the hotel is just a stone’s throw from the Promenade des Anglais and Place Masséna. The ideal base for discovering the charms of the Old Town or a shopping trip, Albert 1er hotel will seduce you with its elegance and comfort in the heart of the city."

It also, as you may have noticed, has a bloody great big BrewDog bar on its ground floor. Which I guess is why we're here.

Last time we were drinking in a French BrewDog bar, it was at Le Marais in Paris. That was five years ago, when The Belated Birthday Girl and I paid a weekend visit to the city to celebrate what we now think of as our -4th anniversary, if you know what I mean. Reading back my review of the Paris bar, it turns out I'd forgotten that I wrapped up the report this way: "we can now say we've visited every single BrewDog bar in France. That is, until two weeks after our anniversary, when BrewDog open their second French bar in Nice. We'll have to get back to you regarding that one."

So, we're now celebrating our first anniversary, and we're getting back to you. There'll be more we can say about the city and its surroundings, and inevitably that'll come in a future post. For now, I'm just going to focus on BrewDog Nice and a couple of its competitors.

When we were looking for somewhere to stay for the first half of our week in Nice, part of our process involved tracking down the bar on Google Maps and seeing what sort of hotels were nearby. On the map, Albert 1er looked conveniently close to BrewDog - it wasn't until we'd made the booking that we dug a little further and realised that 'conveniently close' in this case meant 'one of them's on top of the other'. Still, it's not like it's the official bar of the hotel or anything like that: the two of them are completely independent businesses with no way of getting from one to the other that doesn't involve going out into the street. The hotel itself is actually pretty good, but that's a story for another time.

It's instructive to re-read that review of BrewDog Le Marais from 2019, and see how comfortable I was with the idea that BrewDog had just taken the existing design quirks from their UK bars and simply shipped them over the Channel. Before that, a visit to an overseas bar - maybe one of the Nordic ones, perhaps - would be enjoyable for the discovery of what individual touches that particular venue had added to the template. But as we get further and further into this series of posts, all the bars are being hammered down into a standardised format. In fact, Nice looks just like a UK bar would have done in 2019, which is presumably how Paris still looks now.

However, there are points of interest beyond just seeing all the regular signage translated into French, and the frustrating discovery that they're still labelling the water bowls for dogs with K9, which doesn't work over here. For a start, this is the first BrewDog bar I can think of that literally has its own dog. That seemed to be the case on the two nights we were there, anyway: a cheerful beast that mostly stayed around whatever table the off-duty staff were occupying, but occasionally wandered around the room to survey its territory. That makes it sound like the staff spend more time hanging out with the dog than with customers, and that absolutely isn't the case. The people behind the bar are even more attentive than usual: chatting to us about beers (in English), offering us tasters, and making sure we were on top of the idiosyncratic measures French beer tends to be served in.

And it is French beer we're drinking - after all, we can get all the BrewDog regulars back at home, so our interest is more focussed on the local beers available on tap. Curiously, the bottle fridge for takeaways and off-piste choices stays turned off and empty for all four days that we're in the area. But those taps work just fine for us, particularly a couple of imperial stouts from Hoppy Road and Blue Coast for our Saturday night nightcap. The inside of the bar's a little quiet for a weekend night, but that's because like every other hospitality venue in Nice, people would rather sit outside on the pavement. We try it ourselves on our final night there, and it's rather enjoyable, apart from the odd boy racer roaring down the street past us at high speed and quite obviously pissed.

89 episodes into these posts, you have to clutch onto the features you don't see anywhere else: the large number of people at the pavement tables, the dedicated menu for spritzes, the sticker in the gents toilets for Genoa craft beer joint Scurreria Beer & Bagel reminding us that we were just down the coast from here one year ago. So, on the whole, I'd say we're happy with this as a bar. But where else in Nice can you go for craft beer?

Plenty of restaurants can offer you interesting brews, but here are three places that stuck out for us. Just down the road from BrewDog is 3 Brasseurs, a branch of a restaurant chain that happens to brew its own decent beers on the premises. (Although when I try to log them on Untappd, they're all listed as Canadian beers. It's complicated.) Fans of the BrewDog approach may enjoy visiting Beer District Liberation, which is a bit like a more raucous attempt at recreating the same vibe: the sound system is tuned to Radio Whiteboy as ever, but here people sing along to it. But if you're looking for the biggest range of the most interesting French beers, it's probably the place to go.

The best one, though, is Allez Hops, and not just for the terrible pun. It's a beer shop with a small number of taps, which also acts as the taproom for the Brasserie Bleue microbrewery. However, on the day we visit they have none of their own beers on tap, as they're still winding down from a tap takeover from another brewery called Mogwai who are hogging all the lines as well as all the fridge space. Their beers are good, but we're keen to try out Bleue's own, so we buy a bottle of their brown ale which has been sitting around at room temperature all day. When they open it for us, it explodes. Without blinking, they replace it with an even better beer from their fridge at the back - one made using bread supplied by a baker who is literally having a drink elsewhere in the bar - and refuse to let us pay for either of them. It's a family business, and it shows: they're all really nice people, and when we went to BrewDog later the same day and saw a Bleue beer on tap, well, we just had to return the favour.

So, as we discovered in Paris five years ago, France is doing pretty well on the beer front. As for all the other stuff they do, we'll get onto that shortly.

[Previously: Bristol, Camden, Newcastle, Birmingham, Shoreditch, Aberdeen, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kungsholmen, Leeds†, Shepherd's Bush, Nottingham, Sheffield, Dog Tap†, Tate Modern†, Clapham Junction†, Roppongi, Liverpool, Dundee, Bologna, Florence†, Brighton, Dog Eat Dog/Angel†, Brussels, Soho, Cardiff, Barcelona, Clerkenwell, DogHouse Glasgow, Rome†, Castlegate, Leicester†, Oslo, Gothenburg, Södermalm, Turku†, Helsinki†, Gray's Inn Road†, Stirling, Norwich, Southampton, Homerton†, Berlin, Warsaw†, Leeds North Street, York, Hong Kong†, Oxford, Seven Dials, Reading, Malmo, Tallinn, Overworks†, Tower Hill, Edinburgh Lothian Road, Milton Keynes, Canary Wharf, Brixton†, Paddington, Dalston†, Aberdeen Union Square, Peterhead†, Itaewon†, Le Marais, Outpost Manchester, Perth, Edinburgh Airport, Carlisle, St Pauli, Old Street†, Cambridge, Ealing, St Andrews, Chancery Lane, DogHouse Manchester, Bath, Reykjavik, Inverurie, DogTap 2.0, Waterloo, DogHouse Edinburgh, Upminster, Wandsworth, Hull, Dublin Outpost, Basingstoke, Exeter, Gatwick Airport]