Monthly Archives: April 2012

Fuzzy Ocean Scarf

knitting

I just realized that I never posted a picture of the scarf I made for my daughter for her birthday –  Well, which is to say I made it for the one week anniversary of her birthday.

I did wrap the yarn, though, and let her open that on her birthday. The look on her face as she tried to figure out how to articulate “Mom, you are crazy” without being ungrateful was priceless.

She does love the scarf, though. Since it took me a couple months to remember to get a picture, you can tell from the wrinkles that it has been well-used (my daughter doesn’t mess around when it comes to wrapping scarves around things). The magic here is in the yarn itself, which shades oh-so-slowly between blue and aqua-green. The pattern is just a garter stitch until the yarn ran out.

Weisse Roundup

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As the weather turns a little warmer, our thoughts are turning to lighter beers.  We’re also planning on making a trip to Germany in a few weeks, so naturally we’ve been drinking Bavarian hefeweizen, aka weissbier.  As it turns out, we’re going to Cologne not Munich.  But we can’t find much Kolsch in shops (other than the very nice Früh), so we’ll just have to work on that when we get there.  Weisse, on the other hand, is available everywhere, from the specialty beer shops to the grocery store, and even on the train.

Our favorite is probably the Paulaner Hefe-Weissbier — it has a little more character than your average hef, fruity and even a little sour.  Their Dunkel is also very good, nutty and a little dry.

We also quite liked Weihenstephaner Vitus (a stronger weizenbock), which was malty and creamy, while retaining the usual grassy weisse notes, with just a hint of herbs to round it out.

For a straightforward, no-nonsense weisse, my favorite is definitely Löwenbräu LöwenWeisse.  It’s sweet and grassy, light and refreshing, and I can imagine happily drinking it by the liter in a tent somewhere.

Of the other weissbiers we’ve had recently, the most striking thing about them is their consistency. We’ve been drinking mostly Belgian beer lately, and it’s easy to forget what a well-defined style is like, with beer after beer hitting all the standard notes, with only small differences. This means they’re all pretty good. On the downside, however, there’s much less excitement with these beers – very little chance of getting a surprisingly  outstanding beer. Wind has taken to calling weissbeir the “merlot of beers” – never terrible, but never fantastic, either

I’ve also been reading through the Oxford Companion to Beer, which talks about Germany’s very traditional brewery apprenticeship program and speculates that this might be why German breweries tend to stick with traditional styles and fine-tune their recipes, rather than experiment more widely (or wildly) like the Americans, or even the Belgians.

In any event, the rest of the lot are all perfectly good.  Based on our experience, I’d trust pretty much any German wheat beer to be good and conform to style.

If at first you don’t succeed…

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So I wasn’t having much luck calling Westvleteren — I’d be embarrassed to tally up all the time I spent dialing over and over, getting a variety of busy signals.  But finally, I got through.  The process of making a reservation was very quick and easy — you tell them your license plate number, and pick one of three days available to come pickup.  I’d read online that they will sometimes be flexible for out-of-country visitors, but that wasn’t the case for me.  So the call was over in about a minute.  Only then did it really hit me that I had pretty much given up on getting through, and was now very excited to finally have a reservation.

The drive out to Westvleteren went very smoothly.  I’d made the drive before, so I knew pretty much where I was going (and I had a GPS to help me once I got off the highway and had to navigate the last few crazy miles of twisty, narrow roads right around the abbey).  The flat, green fields rolled by, punctuated with windmills both ancient and modern.  My route took me through historic towns I’d heard about in school, like Antwerp, Ghent, and Ypres.

I got to Westvleteren around noon and had a small lunch at the abbey’s cafe, In De Vrede. It was still more than an hour until my pickup time, so I decided that I’d do the recommended 7km walk around the abbey, even though it was a little windy and overcast.  We’d done the first part of the walk last time, down a nice tree-lined lane to a little grotto shrine at the corner of the abbey property.  Then the path led through some woods and out to the fields beyond.  Of course by now the wind had picked up and it had started to rain.  But I pressed on, and the wind blew harder and harder until it was literally blowing my hat off my head and down the street.  Nobody else was in sight, except a large black dog (looked like an American bulldog, but I’m really not up on my Belgian dog breeds).  I fought back a brief moment of panic when I thought about what would happen if he attacked me out here in the middle of nowhere with no one around, and just ignored him and walked past.

After completing the circuit, the Westvleteren beer shop was open and a few cars had already pulled in.  I asked if I had to wait for my scheduled time, and they told me I could come right then.  So I pulled up and found a stack of empties and a couple stacks of Westy 8, all in their traditional wooden crates.  I tossed my two crates in my trunk, and headed inside to the counter to pay my €96.  That’s obviously pretty expensive, but it’s about 1/7th the price you see in shops (and I’ve never seen a whole case, let alone two, in a shop).  And 10 minutes later, I was on my way home.

The trip back was a lot less fun.  It rained most of the way, and there was a gnarly accident two cars ahead of me.  I didn’t see how it happened, I just saw a little hatchback slide out from around the front of a semi, completely sideways, still zooming down the freeway at 120kph (75mph).  Luckily, everybody was able to stop and I don’t think there were any secondary accidents.  And the little hatchback was able to drive off.  The traffic was heavy pretty much the rest of the way home, but luckily just in the ordinary, boring way.

So, we are now the proud owners of two crates of Westy 8.  I look forward to getting the crates and as many of the bottles as possible home.  On a purely objective level, I have to admit it’s a little ridiculous to drive to the next country and spend almost €100 on a couple cases of beer.  But I have to admit it was a pretty entertaining experience.  And the beer really is quite good.

Poechenellekelder

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This was a cute little place right across the street from the world famous statue of a boy peeing into a fountain in the center of Brussels.  There was a big crowd of people milling around outside taking pictures and despite its nice appearance, I would have dismissed it as a tourist trap if it hadn’t been recommended by a friend who’d visited this winter.

Inside, the place is crazy with beer paraphernalia stacked on, and glued to, anything that doesn’t move, including the ceiling.  I understand there’s a puppet show downstairs, but we got there right before the show was going to start and there was no room.  So we had to content ourselves with lunch.  The menu was simple, with the usual cafe staples, but also had a lot of local cheese, and I was glad to get a chance to try some.  So I probably wouldn’t go there just for the food, but we didn’t have any trouble getting lunch for the kids.  If we planned ahead a little better and came in time to get seats for the puppet show, I imagine the kids would love it.

The beer menu was very impressive, with the best selection of lambic I’ve seen.  So we both had new Gueuze (Drie Fonteinen for me, Gueuze Tilquin a l’Ancienne for Wind).  They also had a good selection of Trappist and abbey beer, German beer, etc.  They even had the last beer on the list I made last year, that I hadn’t seen anywhere else.  So we might have to come back if we’re passing through Brussels again.

The last thing I’d mention is the service.  One of the things that struck me when looking at reviews of cafes and restaurants in Brussels is how often people complained about poor service.  So I was already thinking about this, and found our waitress very competent, but not friendly.  No smiles or chit-chat (did I mention the place was packed?).  But she patiently let me order in barely-passable French, even though it would have probably been easier for both of us if we’d switched to English.  Everything came as we ordered it, the beer was poured perfectly, and there were no other issues of any kind.  So I chalk up the service complaints to the standard cross-cultural problem of Europeans not smiling all the time and chumming it up with their patrons the way many Americans expect.

Cantillon

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This weekend, we visited Brasserie Cantillon in Brussels. This is a small, family-owned brewery that’s been in business since 1900 (and is still brewing beer pretty much the same way as when they started).

Cantillon is not far from the center of town, just a couple of blocks off a major boulevard near the main train station.  The neighborhood is pretty nondescript, none of the shops were open at 10am on a Saturday.  But once you open their big wooden door, it’s a completely different story.  Right away you see the brewery is not like other breweries.  It’s much more cozy, with a small tasting room and gift shop right as you enter, with aging bottles stacked all along the corridor leading back to the brewery proper.

The self-guided tour takes you through the brewery, where you can see their wood-clad mash tun, their beautiful copper kettles, their kegging and bottling lines, and fermentation tanks for the fruit beers.  There is an endless array of barrels and bottles aging:

The real difference comes when you get to the attic, where you see their coolship — a giant shallow copper dish where the wort cools, and begins fermentation from wild yeast brought in on the wind.

Of course, no brewery tour is complete without a tasting.  We tasted their gueuze and frambozen.  We’d had their gueuze before and liked it quite a bit, but the frambozen was really fantastic.  Unlike other frambozen we’d had before, it wasn’t overly sweet or cloying.  Instead, it had more of an earthy, raspberry-leaf flavor that blended well with the lambic tartness.

Of the breweries I’ve seen, Cantillon has the most character, by far.  Every other brewery I’ve seen, from a giant mega-brewery like Guinness to the tiny Swamp Head, is basically the same: a variety of stainless steel cylinders in a warehouse, connected by a crazy assortment of pipes.  But Cantillon is completely different.  Their equipment is from a completely different era, and is truly beautiful.  The open fermentation runs completely counter to the sterilized and controlled fermentation standard everywhere else.  They have some modern equipment too (including some modern cylindrical fermentation tanks for aging their fruit beers).  But the core brewing operations are a living antique.