Monthly Archives: January 2012

Kafé België and Bert’s Bierhuis

Beer, , , ,

We went to Kafé België in Utrecht for lunch and a few beers today.  The food was great café food, but not a lot of selection.  This continues the trend of really outstanding food we’ve gotten at cafés.

The beer selection was impressive — they had 150+ bottles (see pic), and a dozen or so taps.  They were dominated by abbey beers, but there were also a few saisons and other styles.  They even had some American beers (Bud, Anchor and Flying Dog).  We were glad to see some saison and Flanders red on the menu, since we hadn’t seen any since we got here.  One of the beers we got was contract-brewed for them specially, and our waiter called it a DPA (Dutch Pale Ale): a milder, less hoppy cousin to IPA.  It reminded me a lot of Swamp Head’s Big Nose: lots of aromatic hops, but not a lot of bitterness.  Though it wasn’t as full-bodied and malty as Big Nose.

After lunch, we strolled down the Oudegracht to Bert’s Bierhuis.  This is a great beer shop owned by the same people who run Kafé België.  The selection is great, and very well-organized by region and style.  It was nice to see the beers I’d seen back home lined up, with all the other beers from the same brewery next to them.  There were a ton of beers I’d never heard of before, and hard-to-find things like Westvleteren 8 and 12.  We got as many bottles as we thought we could lug back to the train station, and they threw in a free totebag.

I’m definitely looking forward to coming back to both of these places, and sampling many more of their broad selections.

Mittens (and beer)

Beer, knitting,

It’s dropped down into the low 30s here (or -4/-2 C, which sounds so much more alarming), and so I experienced some increased pressure to finish the mittens. (Especially because my son was resisting going outside for recess.)

Here they are:

I started to move my beer and its stray bottle cap out of the way, and then thought “Well, it is Knittles and BEER after all…” and so here we see the mittens, plus the beer that helped me finish them last night.

For once my second copy was better than the first, thought I did have to frog my first attempt at the second mitten. The pattern is actually meant for a two-color mitten, with columns of a different color in the cuffs. My son was not at all interested in this, so I just stuck with “silver”, but now I think I understand the basic logic of slipping stitches to do multi-color patterns. So, that’s my lesson for this project. 🙂

Also, I’m not so happy with the length of the cuffs. I did what the pattern called for, but they seem too short to me. My son seems to agree- he kept trying to pull his coat sleeves over them all the way to school. I may try to lengthen them after the fact with just a simple ribbed pattern.

Stadskasteel Oudaen

Beer, , ,

We took the train into Utrecht today and walked around, looking at the famous churches and generally taking in the sights.  We did a little shopping, but almost everything opens late on Mondays for some reason, so most things were closed in the morning.

Luckily, one place that opened for lunch at 11am was Stadskasteel Oudaen.  In addition to the cafe and a variety of meeting/catering functions, they also have one of the handful of breweries in Utrecht.  Their website touts their 15,000 litres of production, which works out to something like 640 barrels, so it’s a pretty small operation.  We tried three of their beers: Ouwe Daen, Jonge Daen and their Winter Bock.

The Ouwe Daen is a nice unfiltered hefeweizen.  It has a little creaminess and sweetness that I really liked.  The Jonge Daen is the filtered version of Ouwe Daen — and it’s sparkling clear and golden.  It’s got a much gentler taste, and comes across as a refreshing summer beer.  Given that it was just above freezing outside, it was a little out of place.  But still very enjoyable.  But the real treat with the Winter Bock.  This was rich, malty and spicy.  It was also a little smoky, which went nicely with the sweetness, reminding me a little of maple-smoked bacon.

Beside the beer, the cafe itself was also very nice.  Wind had a ham and cheese omelet, and I had a prosciutto and Gorgonzola sandwich, and both were excellent.  The cafe is in a nicely restored castle, in a large hall with high ceilings.  The location is great: a short walk from the central train station, right on the canal that runs through the center of town.  And our waitress barely winced at all when I butchered the pronunciations of their beers in Dutch.

First Week in the Netherlands

Beer, ,

We’ve been in the Netherlands a week, and we have a few bottles to show for it.  The family we traded houses with thoughtfully left a few bottles for us, and our local grocery store also has a handful of Belgian beers.  We have found a wine shop up the road that has a somewhat wider selection, so we’ll be checking those out soon.

We mostly enjoyed the Belgian dubbels and tripels from Westmalle, Leffe, La Trappe, and Duvel.  We hadn’t had any lager in ages, so it was interesting to try Heineken, Grolsch, etc. again.  A few of the lagers were surprisingly good: Grolsch’s Herfstbok and Kanon were both pretty drinkable, and Brand’s Sylvester winter beer was good, too.  But most of them were the same old lager I don’t like much these days (though I did manage to choke them down somehow).  The only total loss was Heineken’s Oude Bruin — I don’t know if it was spoiled or if it was supposed to taste like cough syrup, but it was our first drainpour in some time.

Dangerous knowledge and fun with metric

knitting, , ,

So, Google completely lied. The yarn store is actually more like 4 minutes from my house. This is dangerous, dangerous news for me. Luckily (at least for my bank account), I have pretty much no time to knit right now.

It turns out the store is not really a yarn shop, it’s more of a general store of fiber-related crafts. This is good and bad, actually, because I now have pretty much a one-stop shop for most of my addictions hobbies, but it also means that there’s not the kind of diversity of offerings that you’d expect from a yarn shop. As Redbeard would say – there’s breadth but not depth.

Though some interesting depths are there! There is a huge selection of large, interesting buttons, and I think they must stock every color of embroidery floss ever made. The yarn selection is… interesting. I found some really neat things, but in the end just got this as my first haul:

Why grey? My son has Made It Known that he requires mittens. Silver mittens. I took him with me and we looked at our options together before he wandered off to the play nook (where he promptly barricaded himself in). I actually did find a cool, glossy, multi-colored yarn that could possibly be said to have silver in it, if you are 4. But, it was the good stuff, meaning hand wash only. There is no point where knitting my 4-year-old (“Look at the rocks I found today!”) son hand-wash-only mittens becomes a good idea. But, then I found this (acrylic) grey. I uptalked it into silver to my son and bought some “3.5mm” needles to go with it.

On a totally unrelated topic, I predict that a new “metric woes” tag is going to get really big over in the side bar before this trip is up. In this shop, I stared hard at the yarn label, willing it to reveal its secrets:

Washable …

 

 

 

 

… Made in Kosovo (?!) …

 

 

 

 

…. and Jackpot! … even in English! … kind of …

So, machine wash in 40 degree water, no bleach, tumble dry okay, don’t iron it… good, good….

And… it’s okay to park on it. Near it? With it. In a parking garage. Or perhaps a stadium …

Crochet or knitting needles, use size 3 to 4. Hmm…. does that mean 3-4mm? And what about this gauge. Well, I can’t read those yet in English, so no wonder it makes even less sense in Metric. The last picture has only just now clicked – it will take about 450 grams to make a sweater. But, for a 40 year old? Size 40?

In the end, I bought the 3.5 DP needles on the idea that the label must mean 3-4mm. Once home, I ended up looking up the yarn online and found that it is a “3” (equally silly measurement system, btw), and so my new US size 4 needles will work just fine. Apparently in this one case, metric and US work out the same.

Another sheep-based hobby

Fiber, , , , ,

Good thing that the Netherlands has all these sheep since I apparently can’t get enough of sheep-based fiber hobbies. Right before we moved, I made a few felt applique projects:

A crown for my son (whose favorite colors are pink and silver, and who wanted a rose crown):

This was a little tricky because I made it while I didn’t have internet access, and so just had to wing it. I convinced him that the flowers were roses, though it is clear that he remains somewhat skeptical. As do I.

A little pouch for my daughter:

And a “magic” pillow (filled with buckwheat hulls) for my son:

I actually made this pillow from a pattern that I sketched myself. I’m really happy with how it came out, though it might’ve been better it I knew more stitches that I could’ve used on the star. Right now I’d just like to get the mattress stitch right on a more frequent basis (ignore that stitch by my lower finger, nothing to see there).

SHEEP!

knitting, Uncategorized,

So, while I have not yet sighted any wooden shoes, I have seen many windmills. Old ones, all wooden, quaint and squat, and new ones like these:

The biggest surprise, though, is the all the SHEEP! They are everywhere, around every corner. It seems like every patch of green has at least 3 sheep happily grazing on it. I halfway expect to wake up one morning and find them in my yard. Though, they would surely be terrorized by the freakishly large neighborhood cats. And squirrels. In fact, the squirrels may be larger than the cats. But, that’s for another post.

It is remarkably difficult to get a picture of sheep from a moving car. Here is the best of my embarrassingly high number of attempts:

Google claims that I have a yarn store that’s about a 5 minute walk from my house. I am going to try my very best to make that walk tomorrow.

Felt penguin

Fiber, ,

Here is my first attempt at a felt creature made from an actual set of instructions:

My fantastic grandmother (the recipient of my earlier alpaca) got me Laurie Sharp’s Wool Pets, which had this pattern, along with a bunch of other equally neat creatures.

I actually made this right after Christmas, but have only gotten to post it now – things have been a little crazy in the lead up to my current status: ex-patriot living The Netherlands. It’s a temporary gig – 5 months. But that’s plenty of time to track down some yarn shops!

What’s the difference?

Beer, , ,

Stewardess: What would you like to drink?
Guy in 23A: Beer.
Stewardess: Beer, or lager?
Guy in 23A: What’s the difference?
Stewardess: We have Heineken or Grolsch lager, and London Pride beer.

It would have been much better if the stewardess had asked “Ale or lager?” instead.  Though frankly, since they only had three kinds, I’m not sure why she didn’t just list them to start with.

Sigh…

All Packed Up

Beer, , ,

Our first keg of homebrew kicked last night.  Which was good timing, since we’re leaving the country tomorrow.  I packed up the kegerator and cleaned out the keg today, packing everything away until we get back in June.  There was a minimal amount of swearing and I only cut myself once.

Tomorrow we fly to Amsterdam, for a 5 month sojourn in the Netherlands.  I’m really looking forward to easier access to European beer.  Though I noticed that St. Somewhere just released a new beer, so I’m already missing Florida beer, and I haven’t even left yet…