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