Category Archives: Beer

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.

Quad Tasting Notes, Part 2

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After our first round of quads, we wanted to try a few less popular versions, with mixed success:

  • Kasteel Donker: Neither Wind nor I cared for this at all — it has an overwhelming black cherry flavor, and not much else going on.
  • Malheur 12°: This was very nice, with a lot of spicy, almost peppery notes.  Definitely taking the typical abbey complexity and spiciness to an extreme, and I think it works well.
  • Gulden Draak 9000: My favorite of the new brews, with a co2 bite and a boozy kick.  Uncharacteristically medium amber color.  Very smooth, clean flavor, in sharp contrast to the Malheur.  As with the tripels, these two are a very good example in contrasting takes on the style that both work well.

We also had a couple of favorites (including another bottle of St. Bernardus to replace a spoiled bottle from the first round):

  • St. Bernardus Abt 12: An unspoiled bottle showed a wonderful complexity, with raisiny sweetness, spiciness, and earthiness.
  • Rochefort 10: A clear favorite of this batch for both of us, with a big boozy kick, but blended perfectly with sweet malt and spiciness.

Overall, I think I found the quads to be a little less varied than the tripels, but still differing quite a bit (and differing in the same way as the tripels — with some being very boozy but otherwise mild, and others being more spicy and earthy).  The Kasteel Donker was the only beer in this group that I’d say was disappointing.  I still haven’t had them side-by-side, so I’d be hard pressed to pick a favorite among the Westy 12, St. Bernardus 12 and Rochefort 10.  I’d happily drink any of them any time.

Quad Tasting Notes, Part 1

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We’ve had quite enough tripel for now, so we decided to move on to quads.  These are heavy enough that we’ll just do a few at a time.  So we started with a few of our favorites:

  • La Trappe Quadrupel: The most commercial of the Trappist breweries (and the only one in the Netherlands).  This quad was actually on sale at our local grocery store last week (no Guinness here, even for St. Paddy’s).  It’s got a good CO2 bite up front, yielding to a nice malty sweetness.  A little toffee.  A very nice, well-rounded quad, with a lighter color than most.

  • Straffe Hendrik Quadrupel: This beer was first brewed by De Haalve Maan in the early 80’s for the inauguration of a statue of St. Arnold (patron saint of brewers) in Bruges.  Sweet and creamy, with an herbal note that is almost like licorice (but not overpowering).  Reminds me of some of the sweeter Russian Imperial Stouts I’ve tasted.

  • Westvleteren 12: Widely regarded as the best beer in the world.  It’s got a ton of sweetness with malt, candi sugar, and some fig. Also spicy, earthy, and a definite boozy kick. Packs the usual abbey aromatics. Since it’s such a pain to come by, I keep hoping this beer will disappoint me, but it hasn’t yet.

  • St. Bernardus Abt 12: The former contract brewer of Westvleteren’s beers (before they brought them back in-house in ’92). I was definitely looking forward to trying this side-by-side with the Westy 12. Alas, our bottle was chipped, and the beer poured totally flat. Though I have to say this was the best spoiled beer I’ve ever had — with the candi sugar, caramel and a hint of vanilla. Really brings out how much of the beer experience depends on carbonation, since this was drinkable, but completely unrecognizable as a quad. We’ll definitely have to get another bottle for the next round.

Café Olivier

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Although Kafé België is our favorite place to go in Utrecht, with its unmatched bottle list, we find ourselves going more frequently to Café Olivier.  They have a good selection of Belgian beer, with 50+ bottles and a dozen taps (including 4 rotating taps with new stuff coming on all the time).    So their beer selection isn’t quite as good, but in every other area they are vastly superior:

  • Instead of a limited menu of mostly snacky food, Olivier has a full menu — and everything we’ve had has been good.
  • Their location is impossible to beat: right next to the train station, so it’s on the way no matter where we’re going.
  • It’s housed in a converted church, complete with soaring vaulted ceilings and a pipe organ in the choir loft.

These all add up to Café Olivier being a place where we are completely comfortable taking the kids.  In fact, we’ve seen groups of moms with toddlers in strollers there before.

Tripel Tasting Notes, Round 2

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We had enough disagreement over some of the tripels from our first round, that we did wind up doing a second round of tasting.  Just for fun, we got the top seven and did them all side-by-side.

Upon further reflection, a few interesting tidbits came out:

  • We didn’t agree on an exact ordering, but we did wind up agreeing on the best three tripels (Westmalle, Chimay and St. Bernardus).  These are all slightly different takes on the style, and all very good.
  • I didn’t like the Tripel Karmeliet as much in the side-by-side comparison.  It is much sweeter than the Westmalle and Chimay.  Especially as it warmed up, this didn’t hold up very well.
  • Brouwerij ‘t IJ’s Zatte also did not stand up well to the side-by-side treatment.  Wind and I had almost diametrically-opposed impressions in the first round, and I came around to her way of thinking, as I found the herby, rosy flavor very grating.

Though these last two items really amount to the stronger-tasting beers not doing as well.  This might be because drinking seven beers at once just takes longer and they have time to warm up.  Regardless of the reason, the Westmalle really stood out as the clear favorite.

Tripel Tasting Notes

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There are a million tripels around (I was a little surprised when I started looking at my notes and Untappd checkins and realized we’ve had two dozen in the last week or two). Truthfully, it’s not my favorite style. It’s inconsistent and has no unifying characteristics other than being strong and pale.  In theory, they should be roughly similar to Westmalle Tripel, but that’s a pretty loose standard. Many use pilsener malt that has a creamy sweetness, but not all. Most are lightly-hopped, but some have a lot of floral, herbal notes.  So I’ve generally been more interested in the dark abbey beers. Wind, on the other hand, generally likes tripels and tends to gravitate to them when she’s not sure what else to get.

But as I think about moving back to Florida in June, and being able to brew a batch of beer, I know we should brew something on the lighter side. So, since Wind likes them a lot and I do like some tripels quite a bit, we decided to try a bunch and see what we liked.  We’ve seen some American beer around (especially at De Bierkoning in Amsterdam), but we stuck with Belgian and Dutch tripels for this experiment, since there were a ton to choose from.  Hopefully, it’ll help us narrow down recipes when the time comes.

In general, we found them very drinkable, and agreed on our assessments of them. But, there were a few that only one of us liked, and a few that were standout cluckers:

  • De Leckere Razende Swaen (Raging Swan): this is local, and we’ve liked some of their beers. But it was too herby, and funky.
  • Muifelbrouwerij Broeder Everardus: this is a little bready and biscuity, with more aggressive hops than typical. The typical pilsener malt shows up in the aroma. But the flavor gets lost in the hoppy bitterness.
  • Hertog Jan Tripel: the best thing about this beer was the bottle (it comes in a squat, black earthenware bottle). It has a nice, rich golden color, but the flavor is bland and syrupy.
  • De Koninck Tripel  This seemed OK at first. But it has a lot of unfermented sugar and caramel. I wound up finishing Wind’s glass (she would have poured it out), mostly because I was trying to remember what it reminded me of. Alas, it was a bad batch of homebrew that had an incomplete fermentation, and mostly wound up sweet and overcarbonated.

The vast majority were very nice, and varied quite a bit. I’d divide them roughly into two groups: the boozy and the herbals.

Boozy (clean, simple, and with a definite alcohol kick):

Herbal (a wide variety of fruit, floral, herbal flavors):

There were a few tripels that we really liked.  We’ve been talking about doing a second round and trying these all side-by-side to really compare them closely.

  • Tripel Karmeliet: this is probably my favorite (and I think the first tripel I ever had). It’s sweet and light. Nothing overpowering. But very tasty.
  • Westmalle Tripel: this is one of Wind’s favorite beers. It’s sweet, boozy and creamy.
  • La Trappe Tripel: just a bit of sourness, and a bit earthy and herbal, but not too much.
  • Chimay Blanche (Cinq Cents): a little bitter and floral, but very balanced, with some creaminess.
  • St. Bernardus Tripel: rich, malty, meady and velvety.
  • Val-Dieu Triple: fizzy, and light, with some candi sugar like a dubbel.

There were also a couple of tripels that were split decisions. We’re thinking of adding these into the second round, too.

  • Brouwerij ‘t IJ Zatte: floral, rose and herbal. I really liked this, but Wind hated it. I even tasted some from her glass to make sure that we had the same thing.
  • Triple d’Anvers: Unlike De Koninck’s other beer we tasted, this was not terrible. It had a definite twang you don’t usually see in triplels, and was also very sweet. I didn’t like it much, but Wind thought it was pretty good.

De Bierkoning

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I was expecting De Bierkoning to be awesome, but it exceeded my wildest expectations.  It’s about the same size as Bert’s Bierhuis in Utrecht, but several times more dense.  In fact, it’s claustrophobic with every available inch of space covered in bottles, with shelves going up to the ceiling.  And crates of loose bottles tucked under the lowest shelf.

I was mostly looking for tripel (since we’re starting to think about what we want to brew when we get back to Florida in June).  So I got as far as the Belgian section and hunted around, finding all the beers on my list.  My basket was getting heavy, and I knew I’d have a long journey home, so I only got a few other bottles.

But then I saw the American section and decided to take a look, just for fun.  And I was amazed to see a better selection of West coast beers than I’d ever seen in Florida.  They had a selection of beers from Russian River, Lost Abbey, and others I’d never seen in a shop.  Unsurprisingly, the prices were sky-high (€29 for a bottle of Supplication! There wasn’t a price tag for Pliny the Elder, and I didn’t want to ask…).  So, with great restraint, I only got a reasonably priced bottle from Lost Abbey (Red Barn Ale).

On my way out of the shop, I spent more time at the cash register and had time to appreciate their glassware selection.  Like the beer, the glasses are on dense shelves all the way to the ceiling, with what looked like hundreds of different kinds of glasses.  I briefly considered buying some American-style pint glasses (since I haven’t been able to find anything that large here), but decided I didn’t want to have to manage heavy beer and delicate glass on the same trip.

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.