Brewpubs in Paris? Say it's so...

As some of you may know, I’m currently out of the US on a research trip to Paris, France. The old stereotype about French beers and French beer drinkers are largely true, in that both of them suck. Seriously, so many people drink beer in Paris cafés, but they’ll take their little half-pints of Kronenbourg (the French equivalent of Budweiser) or Panaché, and nurse it for about an hour-and-a-half, at which point they’re happy to pay their three euros and leave. My father once told me, as a rule of thumb, that he never drank beers that came from the French parts of France...if they come from Alsace, Lorraine, or French Flanders than fine, but anything else is sacrilege. I couldn’t agree more.

Or, should I say, I couldn’t have agreed more. If you’re looking for a good French beer in the grocery stores, you’re out of luck. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to move beyond the grocery stores and the traditional French café/brasserie, you might be pleasantly surprised to find that the Microbrew revolution has finally made its amphibious assault on the shores of France.

It used to be that tourists who were looking for a good beer had to go to the numerous English/Irish pubs across town. My favorite was the Bombardier, Place du Panthéon in the 5th arondissement. It was always nice to get a hand-pumped bitter and sit outside on the terrace in front of the Pantheon and the St. Etienne-du-Mont (in itself a wild mixture of weird 16th and 18th century French architecture), but the 8 euro asking price sorta turned me off. Even the relative bargain of 5 euros during happy hour seems steep considering that some British pubs have lowered the price of a Pint to 99p (with the exchange rate being what it is for foreigners, that’s about 1.10 euro or $1.35). So my appetite for fresher, better and cheaper beer was tickled, and what will follow in the next few days is a critical analysis of some of the better brewpubs that I have run into here in the City of Lights.