Monthly Archives: February 2012

Weekend Trip to Westvleteren

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Not having any luck trying to make a reservation, we decided to drive over to Westvleteren and see what there was to see.

The drive over was pretty uneventful, until the last few miles on narrow, winding country lanes.  We found the abbey pretty easily and pulled into a nice, mostly empty parking lot around lunchtime on Saturday.  The cafe (In De Vrede) was nice, more modern than we were expecting.  The food options were pretty limited, but good enough.  And of course, as much Westy Blond/8/12 as you wanted.  They were out of the apple tart, but luckily had the local delicacy — hommelpaptart (a pie made with hops).  I’m not a big hop fan, but I’m glad we tried this — very sweet and rich.

We took the kids outside and let them run around to blow off some steam after being cooped up in the car all morning.  There’s plenty of open space around the cafe for kids to play in, and there’s a nice lane nearby leading around the back of the abbey property to a grotto/shrine.  It was nice to be out in the fresh air and relatively natural surroundings.

We were back at the cafe at 2pm sharp, where there was a bit of a line at the small shop that sells cheese, soap, a few other items the monks make, branded glassware, sweets, and (if you’re lucky) gift packs of beer.  It’s not the two cases you get with a reservation, but 4 bottles a person is a lot better than what you pay in shops around here.

We also headed down to Poperinge, and had some of the local beer — not IPA, but more of a mellow, tart pale ale.  We stayed at a fantastic and reasonably-priced hotel on the old market square, and even found a very nice playground tucked in behind the main buildings.  So we expect to make a few more trips over to Westvleteren in the next few months, whether we get reservations or not.

Geuze and Kriek

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We hadn’t had much geuze back in Florida.  Our local shop had three kinds (Lindeman’s, Oud Beersel, and Girardin), and we tried them all.  But there just wasn’t any more to be found.  And we’d had even less kriek — we’d tried some fruit beers (frambozen perhaps) and didn’t like it much at all. So we came into gueze and kriek with pretty open minds (which is to say, pretty ignorant, since I didn’t really understand how different lambic is until I started reading up on Geuze).  But I’d heard great things, especially about Cantillon, so I was excited to find a geuze section at Bert’s.

We’ve grabbed a few bottles each time we’ve been, and found a wide range among the ones we’ve tried:

  • My least favorite was probably Boon’s Oude Geuze, which was very strange — it started tart, but then fizzled into a mildly sappy blandness.
  • I’ve also had a geuze that was sweet enough that I think it must be sweetened (Mort Subite).  Didn’t like this nearly as much as the others.  Though I can imagine wanting this in the warmer months, since it was very much like cider.
  • Timmermans Gueuze was sweet and mild, with subdued tartness and some apple and Champagne.

We were having so much fun with the gueze that we decided to give kriek another chance, and found them pretty interesting and more consistent:

  • Boon Kriek and Delirium Red were both pretty sweet (the Delirirum more so), with just a little sourness.  The cherry flavor was less pronounced than expected, with these beers mostly being more mellow than geuze.
  • Cantillon Kriek was nicely tart, though again not overly fruity (despite rich red color).  It seemed more similar to their geuze, and not as sweet.
  • Girardin Kriek 1882 was the outlier (and probably my favorite) — it was much less transformed than the other kriek (still sharply sour like the geuze).  It also had a noticeable cherry flavor.  So it was more like two complementary notes side-by-side.

I haven’t been able to find any straight lambic, which I’d really like to try.  Cantillon makes a lambic called Grand Cru Bruocsella, though I haven’t seen it yet.  There are also several other fruit-infused lambics (apple, raspberry, pear, etc.) and faro (sweetened lambic), which we might try if the mood strikes us.

Felt soap

Fiber

Here’s another project I’ve been wanting to try – felted soap. I was inspired when I saw some very pretty ones in a store, though wasn’t quite sure how they were made.

Thank goodness for the internet. I found a great set of instructions here and then I took a couple of small soaps that I’d gotten from our hotel in Paris and tried it out.

The green and yellow one was first, and while it worked, the colors are sort of clumpy. The second one came out much better. It is even easier than the instructions I found made it sound. This particular soap is not very sudsy (though it will eventually work up a froth), and so I want to try other soaps and perhaps a thinner layer of wool. The nice thing about this felted soap so far is that it doesn’t leave a layer of soap goo under it.

Busy Signal

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So I’ve enjoyed being able to find Westvleteren beer at Bert’s Bierhuis in Utrecht.  It’s a lot less than you have to pay on Ebay in the US, but still not cheap.  So I’ve been calling Westvleteren each time they have an open slot.  So far: no luck.

Their phone lines are constantly busy.  My cell phone can’t call international numbers (haven’t figured out how to navigate the Dutch phonetree to turn that on).  And Westvleteren doesn’t allow anonymous numbers, so Skype is out.  So my only option is my landline, which is a phone that I think is older than I am, with clunky buttons and no redial, currently on a short cord in the living room, with a wobbly base sliding around as I try to punch in the, by now memorized, 12-digit phone number for Westvleteren (00 32 70 21 00 54, at least I don’t have to dial all those zeroes on a rotary dial phone).

To relieve the monotony, I get a couple of different kinds of busy signal.  About half the time, I get a busy signal right away.  The other half of the time, it rings for a bit and then gives me a busy signal (I wonder whether these are the times when a bunch of people are all trying at the same time, and some other lucky bastard gets through instead of me).  Occasionally, I misdial because the phone is sliding around or I don’t get the buttons pushed all the way down.  But the result is always the same: busy signal.

So next weekend, I think we’re going to just drive out there and see what there is to see.  I’ve seen blog and forum posts saying their cafe sometimes has six-packs for sale.  And since it’s the middle of winter, I figure the tourist traffic is going to be as low as it’s going to get.  So you never know, I might get lucky.

Silk garden hitchhiker scarf

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Noro’s silk garden has beautiful colors, but I guess hadn’t thought too much about how the colors cycled. They cycle slowly. Very, very slowly. So, as usual for me, I ended up with something that I like, but not quite what I had envisioned in my head.

I really liked the beginning (the narrow purple to yellow at the bottom in the right picture), but then a little light went off about halfway into the orange/red section – my stripes were going to get thinner and thinner as I went further into hitchhiker, because the pattern works by expanding each row (it’s a fantastic pattern, by the way!). I went through the usual Stages of Knitting, all done while still knitting away on the project:

1. Surprise (???)
2. Disbelief (But, but… It’s not possible that this yarn cycles through colors so slowly!)
3. Despair (Crap – This is going to be the goofiest looking hitchhiker scarf ever)
4. Anger (Why didn’t anyone tell me? Why did I ever think I liked this yarn?)
5. Wild Thoughts (I should just rip this all apart and pick a different project.)
6. Acceptance (I’m not wasting all this effort. I still like the colors. So, I get to have a stripy scarf.)

As it turns out, the stripes didn’t get as narrow as I thought they would (though only because I ran out of yarn). And I like the final result – using a thicker yarn makes it more snuggly than usual, and the stripes create an interesting effect when I wear it (because they are diagonal).

Further fun with felt

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Redbeard is just shaking his head, but I’m rather pleased with my most recent adventures with felt. I got it into my head about a week ago that what I needed to do, what I really need to do was, I needed to try to make needle felted tulips. I finally got a chance to give it a try, and am pretty happy this first effort. Of course, I didn’t think to take pictures until I was nearly done, but here is one in-progress picture and the final product:

Bulb flowers are for sale everywhere here, usually in small pots that have just enough soil to let them grow, but not enough to let them grow very large. There are lots of pygmy daffodils here. 🙂 Anyway, my idea was to do the same thing with these felt flowers. So, rather than a vase, they are in a little pot.

The small scale of these was a bit challenging, and I am still thinking about how to best shape the flowers themselves. The thing that I thought would be a problem – having stems that were strong enough to stand upright – turned out to be no problem at all. I figured I’d have to somehow put wire into the stems, but they are easily standing on their own.

Also, I’d like to pretend that I planned for this, but I have to admit that it is sheer dumb luck that I picked tulips instead of some other flower. Because tulips have a naturally thick stem compared to most other flowers, I think my tulips look better than if I had started with, say, roses. In short, chunky is okay here. I think.

The Netherlands also has these traditional tulip vases that have small holes for each individual stem instead of a big opening at the top. I may have to try that for my next set.

Local Beer

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I always enjoy drinking a new beer I’ve never had before.  It’s almost never undrinkable swill, and adds a nice element of surprise and discovery.  So it was nice to find some local beer in bottles we could drink at home, and not have to go to the castle to get it.

In our local organic/alternative grocery store, we found a few bottles from Brouwerij de Leckere in Utrecht.  I really liked the Witte Vrouwen, a cloudy wheat beer with a nice grassy, spicy taste and a little creamy.  The Paulus was less interesting — a pale ale with a little bit of biscuit malt, but not much flavor at all.

At the fabulous Bert’s Bierhuis in Utrecht, Wind found a couple bottles from De 7de Hemel (7th Heaven).  They’re not exactly local — they’re near the German border in the southeastern part of the Netherlands.  Donder (Thunder) was a great find — a dark, nutty, earthy Belgian dark ale, which reminded me quite a bit of Cigar City’s Maduro (one of my favorite beers from back home).  The Vorst (Frost), on the other hand, was very strange.  The aroma was spicy and sweet, but the flavor was dominated by bitter mint and resiny notes.  This was a big surprise since I was expecting a more traditional dark, gingery winter ale.

So half the beers turned out to be very good, and the other half not so much.  But De 7de Hemel has quite a few more beers, so we’re going to give them a try soon.  The Donder was good enough to give me hope that they’ll have a few more really fantastic brews.

Redbeard gets a hat

knitting,

Just in time for the thaw (it got up to a balmy 35 degrees today), I made Redbeard a hat:

It’s a criminally soft yarn (an alpaca cotton blend) that he chose himself while dutifully accompanying me to the yarn store as we made the rounds of shopping errands. Positive reinforcement is a good thing.

 

No lessons this time – it went remarkably smoothly and as expected.

Mittens, part twee

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Well, I ran out of yarn right at the end, but managed to bind off the fingers. However, I was still left with thumb holes. Faced with the choice of waiting until I could get back to the yarn store and having mittens right now, but with different colored thumbs, my daughter decided color contrast was good.

The end result is funky, but sort of cute. I had just a couple options, since I left the vast majority of my stash back in Florida.

The interesting this here is that this white yarn (that my daughter picked) is actually some that I spun myself, and this is the first time that I have put any yarn I’ve spun to real use. The mitten yarn is DK weight, but the homespun is…. thick. The end result, after a lot of cursing while trying to knit 2 stitches together over and over (I actually bent one of my needles a little – those puny size 3s just couldn’t handle my fearsome yarn!) was having really thick, dense mitten thumbs. I’m going to spin this as a good thing – extra protection against the cold while making snow balls!

Lessons learned: You CAN switch up a needle size (or two… or four) in the middle of a project if your needles are too small. For the thumbs, once I switched up to size 7, things went much better. Plus, at least in this case, you can’t tell when I made the switch. My other lesson? Sadly, I think it is “Always buy an extra skein” – I am going to be able to make a heck of a scrap blanket very soon, I suspect!

It Comes in Crates!

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I spent way too long trying to return empties today.  Our grocery store, Albert Heijn, has a nice machine that counts the bottles, randomly rejects a few, and then spits out a receipt you can exchange for cash at the checkout stand.  Except today it wasn’t working.

So there was a line of people with bottles and such to return, and a handful of Albert Heijn employees gamely trying to fix the machine — testing all sorts of bottles, peering inside, and even rebooting it (I sometimes apologize on behalf of all programmers at times like this).  In the end, a little glass cleaner in the right place fixed things and we were all able to get our empties turned in.

Though watching a couple of guys returning crates of bottles reminded me that I can get crates of Westmalle Dubbel and Tripel now.  We’ve been mostly buying one or two bottles of different things, and trying lots of different things.  But Westmalle Dubbel is one of my favorites, so it was nice to get a crate (though I was cursing myself as I lugged the crate home in the snow).

Now my only problem is I want to keep the crate instead of turning it in for refund…