| Helsinki Pub Guide |
| Bars - Brewpubs - Beer gardens |
| Introduction | |
| This is a small list of a couple of pubs in the central area of Helsinki. Included are the city's four homebrew pubs. Helsinki all is a big city and has hundreds of pubs. Those listed here are nothing more than a tiny fraction of the total. | Index Pub Listings Pub Map |
The following section about the city and it pubs was written
by someone (unlike myself) with personal knowledge of Helsinki, namely
Laurent Mousson. Many thanks to him for supplying it.The City The
city centre is compact enough to be covered on foot, and there's a very
good and reliable public transportation system, especially trams and an
underground network.Helsinki is a very good place for shopping, by the way. Especially for rather affordable nordic design crockery, very good cutlery (outdoors knives, but also kitchen ones, and also Fiskars scissors), as well as excellent sturdy outdoor and winter clothing (Very good wooly socks, and Joutsen down jackets and coats are amazing stuff, if a touch on the pricey side). Oh and if like me you're 6ft 7 tall and a touch on the chubby side, there's no problem finding everything in larger sizes. The Stockmann and Sokos department stores in central Helsinki are true institutions, the way Harrods is in London, except a lot less posh... Its PubsIndeed there's an awful lot of pubs in Helsinki, with amazing beer ranges. I tend to attribute this to the high duty, which means draught bog-standard lager is only marginally cheaper than draught beer specialities, local or imported (EUR 5-6 vs. 7-9)...The interesting thing also is that they went further then the usual "fake-Irish / fake-Brit" pub thing, and there's fake Dutch browns, fake-pivnice etc. which, fake as they might be, nevertheless add diversity to the beer landscape. Buying beer elsewhereOff-sales : supermarkets and food stores sell beer and cider up to 4.6%. From 4.7% up, it has to be sold in the stores of the Alko state monopoly (for example, if you want a few bottles of Koff Porter, that's the place to go). Since Alko stores tend to make most of their money with spirits, the beer selection tends to be rather small, varying from branch to branch from ok to downright poor.Off-sales of sahti : it may be tempting to buy bottles to bring home, but beware: sahti is still fermenting rather violently in the bottle, and is pretty unstable, getting sour quickly if not kept cool enough. Drinking habitsThings are the locals still have the prohibitionist nanny state behaviour patterns firmly in place, and on a friday or saturday night, their ability to get from "boringly sober" to "smashed out of their minds" in mere minutes is truly amazing.Add to that a strong culture of not expressing much whatsoever, especially not one's own feelings, and the change once people get drunk is almost frightening. Photograph courtesy of Laurent Mousson. |
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Ackowledgement cornerMany thanks to those who helped me in the compilation of this guide, in particular Laurent Mousson, Micheal Knies and Stephen Beaumont. Thanks are also due to the Good Pub Guide to Finland, which proved to be an invaluable source. |
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A
small, one-room pub on the ground floor of a modern block of flats. It´s
not very well marked so be warned: it can be tricky to find (see photo).
Rather
posh looking brewpub and restaurant.