It's here!

So before I left Zagreb, I ordered a handy little book to guide my beer search here in Belgium. Unfortunately the copy I ordered was never shipped and wasn't waiting for me on my arrival. However, after searching around amazon for another one, I finally received a copy on June 11th. So hopefully now Tim Webb's Good Beer Guide to Belgium will offer a bit more insight into the beers I'm trying and where to find them. I'll let you know :-)

Kwak

A few years ago, I read about a little pub in the center of Belgium in Draft Magazine and my memory was recently jogged when my friends and I were out in the center. The pub, Poechenellekelder-or the puppet cellar-is located directly across from the famous Mannequin Pis. This is the famous Belgian statue of a little boy peeing that is pictured to the right.The pub is exactly what is sounds like with a puppet motif and a life sized marionette seated at one of the tables that can come to life at any moment with a quick move by the bartender. His hands are in picture below and gave us a few good slaps throughout our visit. My choice here was a beer most well-known for its unique glass, Kwak.

 Kwak is an amber ale that comes from the same brewers of Tripel Karmeliet, Brouwerij Bosteels. It is 8.5% ABV and served from the bottle in a glass that is shaped like a typical pilsner glass with a bulb on the bottom that comes on a wooden stand. The beer itself doesn't have much of an aroma but the flavor is one of a roasted malts and the color is what I called "burnt honey" but it's really a typical amber color. I may be getting carried away with my posts. I really have not idea what I'm talking about. The carbonation in average, not to much, not to little and the aftertaste is a bit sweeter than than the beer. Overall it's enjoyable and the glass makes it fun! 

Breakdown:

Appearance: 6

Aroma 18

Flavor 37

Mouthfeel 8

Overall Impression 18

Total 87 Highly recommended

Nuetnigenough: An evening of beer, food, and friends

For Amy's last night of her visit to Belgium, we wanted to find a great restaurant and sample a few more beers to complete her experience. The restaurant we choose was Nuetnigenough in the city center, which calls itself, "the Brussels Brasserie for greedy gluttons and fine beer lovers" and it definitely delivered. This choice allowed us to share some large bottles of beer paired with tasty treats and good conversation. It really was a great night and such a wonderful experience to be able to pair these beers with our dinner.

Our first choice was a 75cl bottle of Hop Harvest 2012 from the brewery De Ranke. I believe this was a limited edition beer and it's not listed on the brewery's website as a ongoing selection. These types of beer, closer to an IPA style, are one I don't usually gravitate towards but it was a good choice after out initial order, a Guldenberg 8.5% tripel from the same brewery, came to us apparently a bit skunked. The waiter open the bottle to a large amount of froth and foam and promptly took the bottle back for another one before it even hit the table; however, that skunked bottle was the last one. Its replacement was this pleasant surprise that I really enjoyed.

The Hop Harvest is 6% ABV and poured to a golden, cloudy color in the glass that you can see above. The head lingered on the glass and the flavors were citrus and hops which made think it was a bit like a light IPA. The taste was dry without over-drying your mouth and the alcohol flavor comes through in the aftertaste so here it resembles a stronger IPA. It was very good overall and paired amazingly well with the salted gruyere cheese we had to start the meal.  We followed that up with the shrimp "devil style" which had a nice, spicy kick to it that was calmed by the beer.*

The breakdown:
Appearance 6
Aroma 20
Flavor 36
Mouthfeel 8
Overall impression 18
Total 88 highly recommended

The next beer we chose for our entree course was the Ondineke Oilsjtersen Tripel. This beer is shown in its fantastic paper bag packaging and a small chalice. Like the Hop Harvest, we ordered this in the 75cl bottle. It is 8.5% ABV and comes from the Glazen Toren brewery. This beer accompanied my selection of the steak and mince meat rolls in the "belle fleur" beer sauce. The dish itself was very good-think meatloaf wrapped in a piece of sirloin and drowned in gravy....the meat lover in me says YUM just thinking about it. It was a hard choice between this and a classic steak but I was definitely pleased with my choice. The meal had a very rich, savory flavor so I was lucky that the beer had a strong, rich flavor as well. It came with an strong aroma of yeast and looked very creamy in the glass with a pretty thick head. The color was a cloudy golden brown or honey, almost like a natural apple cider . The taste was sweet and not at all bitter, which complemented my meal well.

Breakdown:
Appearance 10
Aroma 20
Flavor 36
Mouthfeel 8
Overall impression 18
Total 92 highly recommended

So while were definitely had a good amount of food, we couldn't resist ordering some dessert and finishing off the meal with one more glass. We decided to stick with our beer themed dinner and ordered the cherry pie with the Old Kriek beer cream. Kreik is a cherry flavored lambic that is quite popular here in Belguim and I'll write about that one soon since I sampled it at one of the breweries here in Brussels. In this instance, it was just added some flavor to the cream on our pie and I ordered a Dupont Saison to enjoy with it. This beer is a saison style pale ale that is is now a widely available style from several different brewers. This on comes from Dupont and is 6.5% ABV. I had this beer in a 33cl glass and it was one of the few brews the restaurant had on draft. The aroma was a little lacking, I couldn't really get a good whiff of it but the appearance is a little cloudy and honey colored but with a bit of a strange, bright tint to it. The head hung on the glass well and the taste was spicy and bitter. The aftertaste is dry and lingers in your mouth but the sweetness of the pie reduced the bitterness, making this a little bit more enjoyable for me. 

Breakdown:

Appearance 9
Aroma 15
Flavor 30
Mouthfeel 7
Overall impression 16
Total 77 it was ok

*You can check out the menu for Nuetnigenough here.

Brugge Tripel

Brugge Tripel was another beer enjoyed in the park on this same lovely day.

This tripel is 8.7% ABV and come from de Gouden Boom brewery, but I couldn't find a website for them. The beer is made in Brugge and one of the most well known products of the city. It has a malty and bitter flavor that hits right on the tip of your tongue. It's not nearly as sweet as other tripels but does get sweeter in the after taste. It was hard to judge the look or aroma in the bottle, but overall this beer left a good impression. I would recommend giving it a try and will definitely try it from the glass next time.

Ginette Natural White

This beer was purchased at the grocery store and saved for an afternoon picnic with Amy in one of Brussels largest parks. The beer, an organic white beer, is brewed by Ginette beer, a brewery that apparently specializes in organic products and also makes a blonde and a fruit beer. I simply picked it up because I had never seen it before and thus had never tried it. It is a white beer but on the lighter side. It is 5% abv and we enjoyed these straight from the bottle with a few cupcakes from Cafe de la Presse at Bios de la Cambre on a warm and slightly sunny day (seems the best that Belgium ever gets as far as weather goes). I asked Amy to take a few notes on this one and her thoughts are below.

The aroma was difficult to observe since we were drinking from bottles and through the dark glass it appears light but cloudy. The feel is smooth and the taste is unoffensive. It's not really that flavorful but it did pair nicely with the cupcakes-one which had a nice raspberry filling surprise.

I also enjoyed one of these that was left in my fridge a few days ago and would agree with Amy's assessment. It's not a fabulous beer but also not bad. It's light and easy to drink, perhaps a decent choice if you value organics.

Judas Blonde

This Judas Blonde bottle was picked up at the corner store and enjoyed on a lovely evening at home. It's 8.5% ABV and brewed by Alken-Maes brewer which is one of the large brewers here in Belgium. The aroma was that of a typical blonde, slightly sweet, slightly citrus and the beer feels creamy and full. The flavor is sweet with a hint of hop that makes the beer just slightly bitter. The color appears much like any other golden, filtered beer and sips smoothly from the glass. Overall it's a nice beer that registers high on my drinkability scale. 

The breakdown:

Appearance 5

Aroma 20

Flavor 35

Mouthfeel 9

Overall Impression 17

Total 86

De Halve Maan Brewery, Bruges

 On Saturday, June 8th, my friends and I took a day trip to Bruges. We got up early and took a train from Brussels. Our local friends alerted us to a deal where you can get half price tickets on weekends for domestic trains if you book online, so it was only about 15 Euros for return travel and the journey lasted about an hour. Upon our arrival, we had a quick snack and then headed to De Halve Maan for some beer tasting and a brewery tour. This brewery open in 1856 and brews its beer in the center of Bruge with a bottling facilities just outside the city. It offers four different beers at the cafe, which also has special editions from time to time. The four on offer when we where there were:

Brugse Zot (which my guide book tells me means Bruge's fool) Blonde: draft blonde 6% ABV

Bruges Zot Dubbel: draft double 7.5% ABV

Straffe Hendrik (stronge Henry) Tripel: bottle tripel 9% ABV

Straffe Hendrik Quadrupel: bottle quad 11% ABV

The tours starts on the hour every hour and we arrived about 30 minutes before the 2pm tour. We grabbed our ticket, 7 Euros each-one beer included, then hit the cafe to grab a beer. To your left are my smiling friends Will, Julien, and Amy. Will and Julien are enjoying the quadruple while Amy and I tasted the tripel. The Tripel had a fruit/citrus aroma with a good hop flavor that was really smooth. The taste was also a bit sweet but very full and the carbonation was too smooth, as you can see in the photo (above right), this beer went down quite easily. The aftertaste was sweet as well and I really enjoyed this one. The color was a nice amber and looked great in this glass. 

To break it down Draft Mag style: 

Appearance 6
Aroma 22

Flavor 37

Mouthfeel 10 

Overall Impression 19

Total 93

I really enjoyed this and would recommend everyone try it if you ever come across it. My Oohers friends, Lauren my Belgian partner in crime/flatmate and Aimee, sampled the Bruges Zot Dubbel. The brewery has a nice cafe in their courtyard so we grabbed a table and finished our beers just in time for our tour. The tours are offered in four languages, Dutch,French, English, and German and our tour guide was a lovely women with a great sense of humor. There were many North Americans on our tour and an nice American couple offered to take a photo of the whole bunch (below).

The brewery also serves a part museum and has lots of artifacts from brewing days gone by. Throughout the tour we learned De Halve Maan is the half moon in Dutch and the brewery was founded by the Henri Maes family in 1856. He was Henri I and three more generations of Henri II, III, IV followed until a daughter, Veronique, took over in the 1980s. She introduced a stronger beer, the Straffe Hendrik, which means strong Henry and today the brewery is run by her and her son, Xavier. Of course, this information is also available on their website.


Once the tour was over, the fun continued in their indoor cafe. We were each given a drink ticket and were able to sample the Bruges Zot Blonde. This beer was also quite nice and an added bonus exists at the brewery because the beer served here is unfiltered. This is the only opportunity you will have to try it unfiltered since all other editions are filtered before being bottled. This means the look was more cloudy than your average blonde and a deeper golden color. The aroma was fruity like the tripel but the taste wasn't as sweet. The beer is made with the addition of orange peel and coriander and this comes trough in the taste. The mouthfeel is light carbonation with a dry aftertaste that brings through a bitter taste....dry aftertastes always make me want to drink  beer faster, which is good and bad.


Breakdown:
Appearance 5.5
Aroma 19
Flavor 34
Mouthfeel 6.5
Overall 18
Total 83-solid recommendation

Before we left the brewery, we stopped in the gift shop to pick up the special edition brew for which our guide made a good sales pitch on our tour. This one is a special edition quadruple ale at 11% ABV and was aged in old, oak barrels that served as red wine casks in a previous life time. This was called Straffe Hendrik Heritage because it is aged at one year in these barrels and was released in limited supply. The bottle we tried was a 2012 edition and is sold right at the brewery in set of three with a great little wooden souvenir box. Once we returned home from Bruges and had dinner, we cracked open bottle no 08796 and have bottle no 08959 chilling in our fridge, waiting to be shared at a dinner party. 

A quadruple means that the beer was made with 4x the ingredients of a regular blonde ale so the fermentation is stronger and it produces a stronger alcohol content and richer flavor. Deep roasted malts were used in this one, giving a rich brown color and a strong malt flavor. Our tour guide describe this particular beer as the port of beers because its flavor and strength relative to the normal blonde is similar to the difference between your standard and fortified wines. The aroma of this beer was largely reminiscent of the wine casks it was aged in. That scent was overwhelming (in a good way) as soon as the cork was popped and alluded to a very rich taste. The appearance is a deep brown when viewed straight through its glass but more of a golden color from above. It looks a lot like your average cola in the glass. Due to our equipment constraints at the apartment, we had just small wine glasses to use but this would definitely call for a deep chalice.

 The mouthfeel was very effervescent and you could feel the aroma throughout your nose as the beer tingled on you tongue but the carbonation was low. While the feel wasn't very heavy, the flavor was very intense and you would never want to make this one a session beer. Overall it's a unique beer with a full flavor and would be great as a dessert beer. This was definitely a unique opportunity for all of us to try this beer and I'd recommend giving it a try if you ever see it around. 

Here is my breakdown:
Breakdown:
Appearance 4
Aroma 24
Flavor 33
Mouthfeel 10
Overall 19
Total 90-high recommendation