Are you being serbed?

I don’t often get to add a whole new country to the rather long list of countries from which I have sampled one or more beers, and it’s a similar story when it comes to countries I have visited. Therefore, you can imagine my excitement when last week I got to add a country to each list – and not just any old country, but a relatively new one, namely Serbia.

Serbia, with its capital Belgrade, is one of the many countries in Europe with a rather unfortunate history. Dominated by either the Turks or the Austrians for centuries, the country was attacked, sacked, burnt down, rebuilt, reburnt and otherwise molested dozens of times all the way up until 1999, when (hopefully) the last bombs finally fell. Belgrade, meanwhile, went from being a Roman settlement through a fortified town and then on to become the capital of the rather substantial country I was used to seeing on the European maps of my childhood – Yugoslavia. Then bit after bit fell off, until today we’re left with a smallish landlo