Searching for the line between "hobby" and "obsession"

Brasserie Federal – Zurich, Switzerland

I’ve been procrastinating writing the last post in the hopper from our Europe trip, but here it goes:

After taking a beautiful 3 hour train ride from Lugano back up to Zurich, the wife and I were looking around for a relatively reasonably priced restaurant (for Switzerland) at which to have our final meal in Europe. Not wanting to stray too far from the train station, we happened upon Brasserie Federal (which was actually IN the main train station). I didn’t expect anything extraordinary, but unbeknownst to me at the time, this place was on Beer Traveler’s list of 150 great places to have a beer. I got to check this place off the list without even trying!

The food was pretty good, albeit expensive as was to be expected in Switzerland. They had a really nice bottle selection with an emphasis on Belgian beers as well as a small but unique (to me) draft selection. I tried a schwarzbier by Falken, a brand brewed in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. It was very clean with hints of roast, paired with a similarly subtle hop bill. I could get into lagers like this. The second beer I tried (almost out of compulsion, as they had so many signs about the place that I thought it was the restaurant’s name at first) was a hell beer  by Haldengut. This brewery in Churn, Switzerland was purchased by Heineken just a few years ago. Their hell beer was pretty much as I expected: very clean but with that familiar lager taste I can’t get myself to fully enjoy. Very similar to Surly’s Hell beer I tried last summer. Just can’t get into hell lagers.

With that, I’ve now run out of significant material from our three week Euro-trip extravaganza back in May/June. I’ll leave you with a few crappy pics taken out the window of the train on the ride through Switzerland into Zurich. They don’t do the scenery justice at all, but it was really amazing to see in person.

Comments are closed.