Almanac Life: My beer-drinking Norwegian neighbour

 

 

 

 

Reading Mickey Randall’s story of Norwegian beer took me back to when I had a great neighbour down on the coast and his love of beer and having a chat.

 

Koora left Norway in the 1930s and, after doing a few odd jobs around Victoria, answered an advertisement for a job delivering milk to the people of Lorne. After a few years, the owner decided to sell the business so Koora borrowed money and bought the business. He married a local lass, Lorna, had four kids, paid back all the money he owed and ran the dairy for close to forty years before he sold the business and retired in Lorne.

 

While Koora thought that milk was OK, his great love was beer. After his wife died I would drop in occasionally for a chat and a beer. I moved to Melbourne so we decided that I would buy an international beer and we would sample them on the weekends.

 

Each weekend I would bring down two “stubbies” of a beer from a European brewery, taste them, and have a discussion on how good or bad it was. Stubbies were stored on a shelf in the kitchen and then we would wash them down with room temperature Melbourne Bitter. Koora firmly believed that room temperature beer has a much better flavour. Beers from other countries were pretty hard to find then so I would check out the original Dan Murphy in Chapel St.  Koora told me you wouldn’t be able to buy Norwegian beer because the locals drank it all but one day I bought two stubbies of Aass Bokk Lager.

 

Koora was rapt and declared it a great beer. It was stored ‘pride of place’ among the other bottles and we celebrated with many room temperature Melbourne Bitter ales.

 

We kept up this get together for many years until he went into a Care Home in Geelong and died. I still have all the empty stubbies stored in the laundry and it brings a smile on my face remembering Koora , our sampling of international  beers and drinking Melbourne Bitter at room temperature.

 

 

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Comments

  1. Rod- living in England I was always bemused when there was a work function or a party and warm beer would appear out of a cupboard or a car and get plonked down on a table at room temperature. I’ll try to get some Aass Bokk Lager, if only for the name!

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