Heartbreak & then joy in June 2025

Well, July 2025 brought heartbreak and a new sighting. First the heartbreak…

I have recorded here the names of two bars in a town called Angers in France that had Loburg on tap, and had so until very recently. One was called La Civette and the other was La Belle Epoque. Recently by sheer coincident - no, really - we took a brief camping holiday on the Mayenne River at a place that turned out to be very close to Angers. I couldn’t believe my luck!

So one afternoon we hurried over there and were able to locate both bars - my excitement soon turned to heartbreak: one bar (La Civette) no longer served Loburg (and had a pretty shitty range of beers on tap, with the marked exception of 1664), but the other (La Belle Epoque) was closed down completely!!

So, this fits two of the categories I outlined at the start of this post about what I have found with bars and Loburg.

As you can imagine this put a VERY big dampener on my spirits, but there ended up being a silver lining, and one that came about in such an odd manner that I can only assume that the Beer Gods took pity on me. And it was this….

We planned to camp another couple of nights on the way back home and had booked a camping park but when we got there, bearing in mind this was during a heatwave, we decided that it wasn’t suitable, so we decided to press on and stay in a hotel in a town called Rennes.

Needing a place to have dinner, we asked the woman in the hotel for some recommendations, and on the list was a Vietnamese restaurant called, unimaginatively, Le Petit Hanoi. Why we (I should say my wife) chose a Vietnamese restaurant is unclear but we did. And what an inspired choice it turned out to be because, as we were perusing the menu out the front of the place, my eye went, as it always does, past all the food offerings, to the beers available. And what did I see? My beloved Loburg. My heart soared. At this point I had no interest in what food they had, as long as they had Loburg, that was all that mattered. Luckily my wife was happy with the food offerings, or it could have turned ugly.

So we got a table. But then, remembering the number of times before when I have been bitterly disappointed when Loburg was supposedly available only to find that it wasn’t, I demanded of the waiter that he confirm that they did indeed have the precious drop. He assured me they did so I ordered a big one (50cl), naturally. As Confucius once said Life is too short to be drinking small beers. At least I think it was Confucius…

I had another mild panic attack when it came out in a Leffe glass!!! But he assured me that it was just that they didn’t have any 50cl Loburg glasses; and so it turned out well in the end. He brought me a 25cl Loburg later, and it did come in the correct glass.

SO…two locations that can be scrapped but one new one to add.

The search goes on…

Heartbreak & then joy in June 2025

Bars with the sign but no Loburg