14 November 2020

Mythos Beer (Olympic Brewery) By @SpectreUK

Mythos Beer (Olympic Brewery)

I honestly have no idea where this bottle came from. I found it whilst exploring the deep dark cavern of my beer fridge. There isn't much information on the bottle of this Mythos Hellenic Beer, so I may bore you a little, but hopefully not too much… Part of me just wants to drink it, but there's another more analytical side of me that thinks, well, I'm super lucky enough to have more than 4,000 readers per blog and so I ought to make an effort.

Besides Mythos sounds pretty cool. It sounds like a beer you'd wrestle off a minotaur after groping your way through the pitch dark abyss of a deadly labyrinth with nothing but a lion cloth for protection, a dodgy wooden shield, and a crappy bronze sword with a big chunk chipped out of the top, after being robbed of all your armour during a drunken brawl in a tavern the night before.

So I've been going through Google to find something about it. This Mythos Hellenic Beer is a European Pale style lager beer. At 4.7% volume it is produced by Mythos Breweries in Greece. As previously mentioned I figured Mythos had something to do with Greek Mythology, so I looked that up… Mythos means "mythology sense" or "a pattern of beliefs expressing often symbolically the characteristic or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture."

"Wow", I hear the thirsty bored part of myself say, as the analytical side of me hears the ingenious bottle top ring pull pleasingly pulled back to ca-chunk-fizz! The tedious side of me rolls on monotonously stating that "Mythos" also means; "Anything transmitted by word of mouth, such as a fable, legend, narrative, story, or tale… especially a poetic tale…!"

"Glug, glug…" in the background…

… "A story or set of stories relevant to or having a significant truth or meaning for a particular culture, religion, society, or other group; a myth, a mythology." Apparently Stephen Fry wrote a book about it… I've read plenty of Greek Mythology in the past as any young fantasy role player does, so this is fascinating stuff…

… Or so part of me thought as it suddenly notices that my other bored senseless side has already drunk half of the beer and I hadn't written anything about what it tastes like. "So, you don't care what Hellenic means then?" It asks my inner already slightly inebriated thoughts…

"Nope… Not really," I get the answer back. So I'll start writing what's in the bottle rather than what it represents.

This golden coloured pale Hellenic lager beer shines like the sun on the Parthenon Temple in Athens. Okay, so I may have used the same line with regards to a beer shining on a beech in the Caribbean last week, but I like it being shiny, and you get the idea. It's a pretty golden beer and it's shiny. There was a decent fizz on opening the bottle and a glorious smell of sweet pale malts with bitter herbal hops at the back of the aroma.

Mythos doesn't taste like one of those big belly belching mass produced lagers I used to serve by the barrel when I was a barman back in the day. There was a fine balance in the taste I really liked. I'd wrestle a minotaur for a bottle of this any day. To be honest with you; the amount of exercise I do every morning in my kitchen lockdown gym, I might as well do. The initial flavours of sweet pale malts give way to the bite of the minotaur's axe from the bitter herbal hops. These hops swish pleasurably around the labyrinth of my tastebuds giving way now and then to a touch of the malts in the hidden dark corners throughout each mouthful.

Mythos is one of those beers I could see myself chugging in happier times whilst putting another steak and some sausages and bacon on a barbecue, whilst surrounded by friends and family in the back garden on a sunny afternoon. Now that there's some new hope of a vaccine I reckon we can all hope for a brighter summer next year where social distancing and masks can be a thing of the past, and we can get back to hugs and close conversation.

Oh, and please please reopen the saunas! ;-D

I know nobody cares, but by the way Hellenic is an adjective; meaning "of or relating to the ancient or modern Greeks or their language, to ancient Greece or the Greeks of the classical period, which is 776–323 bc…. " Just to humour my soberer Google obsessed side!

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