It’s small. It’s out of the way. It’s more than just a bit frayed at the edges. But if you ever make your way to Helsinki, don’t you dare miss it.
“It” is the One Pint Pub.
Living room-sized and, as even owner Markku Korhonen happily admits, a little old and run down, the One Pint is the kind of place you could easily pass by if you weren’t paying attention. Look twice, however, and you’d notice empty bottles of lambics from Cantillon lining the window ledge and posters and signs from a variety of beer festivals and small breweries decorating the walls. Walk in the place and the One Pint’s credentials become more impressive, with an ever-rotating array of ten very fine to excellent taps and a list of about one hundred bottled beers, including some, like the 2002 Cantillon Groseille, fermented with red currants, and the 2006 Cantillon Baie d’Argousier, flavoured with something called ‘tyrni’ in Finnish and ‘buckthorn berry’ in English, made exclusively for the Pub.
Like other beer bars of its ilk – dba in New York and the Toronado in San Francisco spring to mind, as well as the Oliver Twist in Stockholm – the One Pint is the product of its owner’s passion for great beer. Korhonen is both a pillar of the Finnish beer community, as I discovered while hanging with him a couple of years back, and, in testament to his passion, a proponent of not just his, but all of the surprisingly good and numerous beer bars the Finish capital boasts. In fact, after two days of being courted around to places like St. Urho’s Pub and Janoinen Lohi, both fine bars in their own right, I almost had to coerce Korhonen into taking me to the One Pint.
Once there, however, I pretty much had to pull myself away in order to return to the Helsinki Beer Festival, being held at the time a short distance away. After all, who would not want to sit and partake of the One Pint’s homespun charms and almost ridiculously varied beer list, culled mainly from Korhonen’s regular beer buying trips into continental Europe? There may have been more Finnish beer at the fest – which, after all, was why I had travelled to Finland in the first place – but the selection of the One Pint was more varied.
And it’s only the best of beer bars which can boast that!
