Tag Archives: beer

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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.