I made Mrs RM walk all the way round central Paris while we were there, 15 miles on the Monday alone (she tells me, bitterly). After all, you can’t see backstreet pubs from the metro, can you ?
From the lower Mousse we ambled back to Montmartre via the Louvre and Les Halles, guided only by Pubmeister’s Parisian Pub Guide.
Sadly, Parisian craft culture shares Pubmeister’s predilection for micro pubs, with unhelpful opening hours. Both Brewberry and the “other” Mousse were shut.
So I took a deep breath, prayed for forgiveness for my sin, and consulted RateBeer for advice.
La Binouze was not only a place Pubmeister hadn’t visited, it was also very green.
“It looks just like Thirsty Cambridge !” exclaimed Mrs RM.
And indeed it did, from the cosmopolitan cans to the man scarves to the Pink Floyd soundtrack. Is “Wish You Were Here” compulsory in Parisian bars ?
To be honest, nearly all the places we went in had that sort of bottle shop-cum-posh micro feel. You could have been somewhere modern like Bucharest or Wigan.
Again, Mrs RM found the last table in the corner next to a table of students and the inevitable curious gentlefolk.
As in Tunbridge Wells Fuggles, it’s the grazing platters that draw the middle-classes attention before the beer.
Friendly table service here, as I couldn’t even have squeezed past the giant scarves. But I could read the beer board;
I’d seen the Duclaw the night before, but the Triple Crossing was a new name, and presumably from an artisan shed brewer in Nancy. So we had one of each of theirs. Only now do I find they’re brewed in Richmond, Virginia (and Duclaw is from Baltimore). What’s wrong with British murk ?
In their authentic Brew Dog glasses they were tasty grapefruit IPAs, albeit indistinguishable from every other grapefruit IPA. Yes, that is over a tenner a pint etc etc. “I like a beer that tastes like beer” said Mrs RM as I suggested the DIPA Sour, without any apparent irony.
The cheese and meat platter was magnificent, mind.
Can’t remember what we talked about. Possibly Brexit, probably Tekus.
Oh, and this is what we’d put in the fridge the night before, bought for £6 from the corner store. No Bass there either.
retiredmartin 
I suppose one does go to Paris to search out a vice or two.
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Where were the vices?
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P P-T might know.
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Vices are normally found on top of workbenches that are generally used in craft bars these days.
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I know what you mean by “indistinguishable from every other grapefruit IPA”.
Last weekend an old friend got me to have a taste of her Duvel Tripel Hop Citra and I doubt if I could have distinguished it from Oakham Citra.
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That doesn’t make them bad, of course, just hard to distinguish. And the alternative in these bars is often something with coconut or chocolate in it.
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Yes, indeed.
I didn’t mean to imply that they’re “bad”, just not to my liking any more.
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So that’s two mentions of Tekus in consecutive posts.
That qualifies as unbelievable Tekus.
* if Russ gets that joke he’s a genius *
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I envy that cheese and meat platter– in Paris, I expect the standard is very high indeed.
But based on the photos, I agree with your assessment of “bottle shop-cum-posh micro”; I can only apologize for your having gone to France only to discover the beer was brewed by damned yankees! 😉
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The cheese and ham and crusty bread was a highlight of Paris.
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Well, they can’t do hot pork baps like the Great Western.
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So what you’re saying is that the cheese and ham baguette was a highlight of Paris and the rest was a mere bagatelle ?
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Mention of cheese, ham and crusty bread brings a tear to my eye. Remembering what Fuller, Smith and Turner did to the wonderful Newport at Braishfield.
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I did visit that once, my sort of pub (Landlady died I think). Yes, I think this rose-tinted view of Fullers (and previously Youngs) as maintaining some English pub utopia is wide of the mark. Very few family breweries can claim an unblemished record; perhaps Sam Smiths is top of the tree.
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Apart from the day of Janet’s wake, the pub closed immediately on her death. Fuller’s couldn’t wait to shut it down to sell it as a private house with attached building plot. Any respect I had for Fullers’s as a “family” brewer disappeared that day.
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Yes indeed, easy to forget that a family’s first responsibility will generally be to its actual family rather than to anything as ephemeral as tradition.
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