The long-awaited day has finally come. In addition to the Days of the First Croatian Beer, organised by the Osječka Pivovara brewery on the left bank of the Drava river, and the craft beer festival held on Sunčana Street, Osijek now also has its home brewing festival – HOMBRE.
HOMBRE is a play-on-words and an abbreviation from the expression “home brewing.” Spaghetti westerns inspired the visual identity of the festival, so the festival poster included the character of Angel Eyes from the cult movie The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Conceptually, this event is similar to the Požega Krigla or Pijana Čaplja in Slavonski Brod. For a price of just 100 kuna, visitors received a festival glass, two dinners and beer in unlimited quantities. On offer were beers made by craft breweries, as well as homebrewed beers.
The festival took place on Saturday, May 18, and the venue was the Pampas shooting range in Osijek, located in the town, yet sufficiently distant to provide the intimacy of a homebrewing party. This is an event where you come intentionally (and remain until the end), unlike the craft beer festival in Sunčana Street, which you can stumble across while taking a walk through the town, have a beer or two, and then leave.
When it comes to craft breweries, visitors had a chance to drink ESB by Valens, Novi Val by the Medvedgrad brewery, pale ale by Zmajska brewery, C4 by Nova Runda and the coffee stour by the Mlinarica brewery. Appropriately for this type of event, there were considerably more homebrewed beers on offer. Visitors were quite thirsty, empty kegs kept being replaced by full ones, so it is difficult to list everything that was offered, but we should certainly mention a homebrewing team which appeared under the name Dost’ Dobro Pivo, and brought two truly quite good beers: American pale named “mosaic + simcoc = ♡” and fruit beer called “It takes two to mango”.
Congratulations to the leadership of the Pannonian Brewery Union who organised the event. They thought of everything, even bringing a cannon for mosquito spraying so that the blood-thirsty insects would not spoil the fun for the beer-thirsty visitors!
More news about Croatia’s beer-brewing industry can be found in the Lifestyle section.
