The price of beer in Denmark, just like other Scandinavian countries, is madness incarnate. A couple of pints will cost anything from £11 to £13, and that’s before you add a fairly all-pervasive credit-card charge of 3.5%.

The casual beer drinker, apart from being blinded by the eye-wincing prices, would also think to themselves that there wasn’t much variety. Carlsberg appears to be all-conquering, with a few varieties (Carls Special, Carlsberg Dark) as well as the well-known pilsner lager beloved of Liverpool fans. It’s not even the best lager in the world, in spite of its rather clever advertising.

Salvation appears to be at hand with a visit to the bar - in many places, there’s also a range of beers from Tuborg. Whether it’s Tuborg Special, or the standard Tuborg Green, at least there’s a choice of company to pay. Hurray for competition, you’d think. Until you discover that Carlsberg, um, owns Tuborg (and has done since 1970). Mind, you won’t normally find Tuborg in the UK (though it’s a big name in Israel, apparently).

If you’re really lucky, you’ll find another brand name at the bar. JC Jacobsen produce some splendidly nice beer; the Dark Ale is in many bars, but they produce a pretty full range, including Belgian-type strong blonde beers, wheat beer, helles, amber, and more. The beers are splendid. So splendid, in fact, that you almost feel that you can overlook the fact that these beers are named after the founder of, yes, Carlsberg, and they’re yet another brand of the brewery.

Paying all your money (and I mean all your money) to Carlsberg seems almost inevitable, therefore, given that they have a virtual monopoly on beer in Denmark. 92% of all of the 870 million litres of beer drunk by the Danish comes from Denmark, so I’ve no idea how they get past the EU Commission, but, as the fifth largest brewery company in the world, they’re clearly doing something right. They also own Tetley, and Scottish & Newcastle.

However, look a little further, and there’s a surprising microbrewery scene in Denmark; particularly in the centre of Copenhagen.

Start at the dowdy end of the Stroget, the Copenhagen shopping ’street’, and next to the town hall square you’ll find not just one but three brew pubs; all of which brew their own beer on the premises.

First, there’s the nattily entitled Brewpub, which is in an otherwise quiet road that you’d probably not wander down. Don’t make that mistake; on my visit, Brewpub was selling six of their own brews, including Cole Porter (which is a deeply lovely porter), a wheat beer, a fabulous IPA, a lager (well, you know, if you can’t beat them, etc), an odd blended beer which I didn’t really understand made from a few different beers mixed together, and something with elderflower. The Brewpub also does rather good pub meals as well as a fancy restaurant which I’ve never eaten in, though it looks rather good. Everything’s cooked with beer, naturally.

The other side of the town hall square, on the short road to the train station, contains a number of pubs and restaurants, including Copenhagen’s Hard Rock Cafe, an Irish pub, and various other eateries. Among the McDonalds and chicken shops you’ll also find Vesterbro Bryghus which sells, at the time of my visit, five beers - each with their own beer mat (so you can match the beer to the mat). Their IPA was cloudy (presumably unfiltered) and not as fully-flavoured as the Brewpub’s; however, my drinking companion found the Brewpub’s IPA too bitter for his taste, so there’s no pleasing everyone, I suppose.

A few doors away is The Old English Pub, above, which sounds dreadful but is actually rather a pleasant place to pass the time. It’s not a brew pub, but sells quite a variety of beer, including the Carlsberg range as well as at least one other Danish beer from one of the smaller producers. I enjoyed a wheat beer from said brewer - it was darker and less sweet than the Franziskaner weisse that my friend went for.

Over the road (not for this visit) is another brewpub - the Bryggeriet Apollo; actually, more of a brew-restaurant. You always know you’re going somewhere proper when there is a sign, proudly displayed inside, from CAMRA - saying something like “On 28 November 2006, some blokes from Camra decided to have a drink here and quite enjoyed it”. Nicer beer, though I remember it as being rather more intimidating than any of the other places I mention here.

And around twenty minutes walk away is the Nørrebro Bryghus which once more sells wonderful home-brewed beer in a rather industrial surroundings - a 19th century metal factory. Nørrebro is apparently the cool place where it’s all at; it served a really nice lunch too, when I went a while ago.

So, the moral of the story is: if you’ve the money for a drink in Copenhagen, there are plenty of places where you can avoid the all-pervasive Carlsberg Group. And I secretly hope that while 92% of the beer drunk in Denmark might continue to be Danish, at least the proportion of Carlsberg beer in that number might start going down: competition’s good for everyone.

Over the last few days, I’ve been taking part in an interesting idea - a kind of travelling conference. I, and my commercial radio colleague Nick Piggott, have been doing a presentation called Radio for the Facebook Generation, in which we talk about interesting ways of keeping radio relevant for a young generation - and this week we’ve done it in Stockholm, Oslo, and (above) Copenhagen.

A travelling conference is a really neat idea. In each city, the programme was different - but while it would have been difficult to fly some of the speakers ‘just’ to Oslo, for example, the big international names appeared at all three; so you got the benefit of some really big names, and also the benefit of good local content too (a bit like, I suppose, what local commercial radio is trying to do).

So, also speaking was Mark Ramsey, who spoke engagingly about some of the things US radio is doing; and Nik Goodman. Nik’s talk was really good; essentially saying that sponsorship and promotions can lead to some really good radio, instead of boring crappy competitions. He played a lot of the work from Virgin Radio’s S&P department, who are deserved award-winners in this field. It reminded me that coming up with great radio ideas isn’t always the job of the programmes department; and rather nicely got a load of people listening to the radio and laughing.

Quite a few people asked for a copy of the presentation Nick and I gave. It’s 38 meg, and given that I was demonstrating Olinda (our rather nice prototype connected radio) and a rather neat webcam-based piece of software that got a spontaneous round of applause (when it worked!), it’s a bit hard to simply forward a PPT file to someone.

Instead, you’ll find a small PDF download here - Radio for the Facebook Generation - which is the text of the speech, suitably fiddled-with to make it less reliant on the visuals. If you want to see the whole thing, then do contact one of us; and note that the speech doesn’t make it clear who’s speaking at any one time, so don’t take anything in here as official BBC policy, because it isn’t.

I’m grateful for the hospitality shown to us by everyone we met; and it was good to make some good new friends.

My full disclosure is, as ever, relevant for this posting; in particular, it’s worth the licence-fee payer noting that all travel, accommodation, and internet access in Scandinavia was covered by the conference organisers.

Photo: Steve Rhodes, of Bank of America staff trying to stop him taking a photograph in a public place (the pavement). Take on March 19th. Used under licence.

PhotoShopped
Ack. Very splendid blog showing really quite awful photoshop work. Much amusement.

XMPP Pubsub Radio Playlist Bot
Interesting - an XMPP "now playing" bot for a radio station. Not quite convinced it works like this, but XMPP is certainly worth looking at for a distributed way of doing that type of information. Much better than regularly pinging a server. via kael

How to Look and Feel Like a Complete Idiot
Amusing comment from Curtis Poe (a BBC chap). Via Alan Connor.

A Copenhagen beer map
I personally recommend B and J in this map - both great places to eat and drink some unusual beer. And what a good idea.

How do you get your radio these days?
Word Magazine: "We're thinking of doing a piece in the magazine about the state of radio. How are you getting your radio? And what are you listening to?" - interesting comments!

Math links for fun and charity « Let?s play math!
Use of one of my photos: this time a recent one from the London Transport museum. Nice to see it used in a totally different situation.

TechCrunch UK » News Round
What a brilliant new service Mike's started. Excellent, I hope he continues.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from February 29th to March 20th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.