Tag Archives: utrecht

Café Olivier

Beer, , ,

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.

Geuze and Kriek

Beer, , , ,

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.

Local Beer

Beer, , ,

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.

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.

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.