I didn't really know what to be more surprised at when a review bottle of St Erhard arrived via the company's local distributor: the hip, Absolut-esque branding on a lager from uber-traditional Bamberg, or the claim on the back that the clear glass is somehow UV-protected. A bit of asking around on Twitter regarding the latter turned up the suggestion that it was legit and that a glass coating does indeed exist to skunk-proof beer bottles. This one end up sitting in my glass-fronted beer fridge for two months so at the very least I had the opportunity to test this claim.
The other progressive Belgian brand I always look forward to new beers from is Brasserie de la Senne. They have an adapted version of their classic Taras Boulba pale ale, produced in collaboration with Birrificio di Montegioco and called Taras Runa. Like Taras Boulba this is a hazy shade of yellow, and like Taras Boulba it blends new world citrus hop flavours with light Belgian yeast spicing. Like Taras Boulba it's an approachable, sessionable strength. Actually: this is almost identical to Taras Boulba. It's perfectly decent, but I'm marking it down for being far too close to a beer they already make. What's the point?
De la Senne also have a new black IPA out, called Black in Japan, with yet another gorgeous label. It's 7.2% ABV and was a bit of a job to pour, what with all the foam. I was expecting a much bigger hop punch than it delivered. What we have here is a perfectly decent export-strength stout, with plenty of dry roast in both the aroma and flavour, plus a crunchy veg complexity from the hops. It's not a million miles from good old Wrasslers XXXX, a beer I'm coming increasingly to believe would be badged as a black IPA if it were brewed today for the first time.
This was in Poechenellekelder where one of the seasonal draughts was from the St-Feuillien/Green Flash collaboration series. The black saison they did previously was wonderful, so I had high hopes for Belgian Coast, a 7% ABV IPA. It arrived very cold, rather flat and quite a dark shade of amber and is definitely more Belgium than San Diego in the aroma: sugar, spice, fruit esters, but only a bit of hop greenness. The flavour mixes the sticky Belgian candy with the vegetal hops in an odd way, but it's not without its charms. There's a long metallic afterburn in the finish. Not as much fun as the saison, and not all that different to a zillion other Belgian IPAs, but quite nice to drink.
Dupont's archetypal saison needs very little introduction but I was acutely aware of how few of their other beers I had tasted and decided to put that right. Redor is the basic pils, well-assembled if a little nondescript. A sharp, almost sour, aroma and a flavour which combines light peachiness with some dry grain husk. There's also Monk's Stout, another simple one. 5.2% ABV and nicely dry and crisp: not always a guarantee in a country that seems to tolerate overly sugary stouts. Bons Vœux is a strong cloudy blonde, almost 10% ABV, and nicely warming with it. There's not much going on the the flavour, however, just a bit of cereal and a token sharpness from the hops. And finally Bier De Miel which, as the name suggests, is brewed with honey. Quite a lot of it, I'd say: from the beeswax aroma to the smooth sweet middle to the herbal aftertaste, this definitely shows how good honey can be in a beer without taking it over completely.
I confess I hadn't had any of the beers from the Brussels Beer Project before this trip, but I had heard of them. It's an on-trend collectivised collaboarative contract brewing operation that has been going for about a year and so far produced six beers. I got to try two of them: Dark Sister is a dark ale of 6.66% ABV and uses Citra, Simcoe and Smaragd hops. It pours a blood red colour with lots of dark malt coffee flavours to the fore. This is followed by a kind of plummy sourness and a bit of blackcurrant jam. I'd probably be calling it a dark mild if I had to guess a style, but either way it's a very interesting combination of flavours. Delta is the beer it's a sibling to, a 6% ABV pale ale using the same hop combination. The first one I got was a dud: all stale oxidation and sharp lactic sourness. Reuben rescued me by donating a portion of the one he was drinking. It's another one of those orange barley sweet Belgian IPAs, though a burst of grapefruit zest in the finish, combined with the modest strength, lifts it a little beyond most of its contemporaries.
Three new ones from three of the big-hitting geek-facing Belgian breweries next. VI Wheat (picture, right) is the latest in the numerical sequence by Jandrain-Jandrenouille and it's a weird one. There's a herbal urinal cake aroma and a lot of funk in the flavour. I don't really remember what it tasted like when I drank it in Moeder Lambic Fontainas but my notes say "lemons and cowshit" so perhaps that's for the best. Speaking of sequences, De Ranke have followed up their classic XX Bitter with XXX Bitter, though at 6% ABV it's actually slightly weaker than its predecessor. It's nearly a perfect Belgian blonde, beautifully smooth with clear, clean, polished flavours of light citrus fruit and candystore sugars. And so to Struise, one of the more one-uppy of Belgium's breweries. Their offering this trip was nothing more complicated than a 10% ABV bourbon barrel aged dark rye tripel, and they too have appropriated the XXX name. It's a murky brown and the aroma is full of that loud wood effect you get with so many bourbon-aged beers. On tasting there's no sign of any tripelish qualities, and I couldn't taste any rye. Instead it's smooth and warming with some really beautiful port and sherry notes. And bourbon? Yes, a little: enough to impart the flavour without it completely taking over. Nicely done, Struise.
Girardin is very much an old friend when I'm in Brussels. Their Gueuze is top-notch and can often be found for a euro or so cheaper than its main rivals in the pub. I was intrigued when I discovered that Bier Circus was serving straight Girardin Lambic on cask, pleased when I noticed that they were charging €2 for a 200ml glass of it, and ecstatic when it actually arrived. I never knew Brussels had an answer to Cologne's drinking style and the following review is based on the dregs at the bottom of my third glass. It's an unassuming clear brown colour and almost totally flat. It's also not especially sour, but dry and tannic instead with just the suggestion of oak. More than anything, like your Kölsch and your Alt, it's refreshing, in a grab-sink-and-go sort of way, a pint of Brussels plain, if you will. I wish more places than the Moeder Lambics and Bier Circus served cask lambic.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been to Brussels over the last 12 years. I'm sure it's into double figures by now. And while fixtures like A La Bécasse (right) and Toone are still favourites and oft returned to, there's always somewhere new. Occasionally new to the city, but mostly just new to me. Reuben and I were over on Beoir business earlier this month and as well as the above mentioned fixtures, and several others, I also got to drop in to Café Monk, a beautiful tiled bar near Place Sainte-Catherine, and pay my first visit to The Hoppy Loft, an oasis of calm and good beer above the pandemonium that is Impasse de la Fidelité on a Friday night.
Buffalo Bitter, one of many Belgian IPAs I drank while in-country. I discovered this while basking in the sunshine outside Le Lombard. It's 8% ABV, highly fizzy and sharply bitter. Other than that, standard Belgian IPA rules apply: a warm candy-sugar sweetness rests uneasily beside the hops. Still, it was better than Buffalo Stout which is a percentage point stronger and a worrying pale reddish colour. Like lots of continental stouts it has that unpleasant burnt caramel, though not as strongly as some, and there's also a strange sour quality. It's quite plain fare and might even pass for refreshing if it weren't so damn fizzy.
One of the best dark beers of the trip came from NovaBirra, a brewery south of Brussels, near Waterloo, which has been going since 2008. Big Mama is another 9% ABV stout using entirely Alsatian hops which give it a fantastic floral, lavender-and-bubblegum flavour, set against the smooth chocolate from the malt. There was more lavender in Moeder Fucker 3, a heavily hopped saison produced for, and found in, Moeder Lambic Fontainas. Resin on the nose and thick, heavy granny's-bathroom perfume and lavender soap. This sweary beer won't have a problem if someone tells it to wash its mouth out.
Hops are very much in vogue in Belgium at the moment, and among the hop-forward beers I encountered was the aggressively-named Hop Verdomme by Kerkom, on tap in Bier Circus. Again there's that orange boiled sweet effect in place of clean hop freshness, with an exotic incense spicing as well. It's a little sticky despite being a mere 7% ABV, but I detected a hint of sourness about it, a waft of salt and vinegar crisps. Odd, and not the intense hop experience the name promised. While I was drinking this, Reuben chanced his arm on Kameleon Ginseng, a dry hazy blonde beer which tastes powerfully of ginseng: all the herbal, earthy, rooty punch of it. It's a ginseng beer for people who want their ginseng beer to taste unmistakeably of ginseng. It's not for the rest of us.
Back to the hops, and Gandavum was one of the better ones. This is the house beer of Waterhuis aan de Bierkant, encountered when we stopped off in Ghent on the way back to the airport. They advertise it as a dry-hopped blonde but it shows many of the Belgian IPA qualities, better than in some bona fide Belgian IPAs, in fact. Yes there's that candy sweetness, a a Belgian yeast spicing, but there's a lovely simple juicy peachiness as well.
It seems the big boys are well aware of the hop trend, and chasing their own hop-driven La Chouffe brand extensions, Duvel also now make Vedett IPA, the stripy label adapted to the colours of the Indian flag. Having ordered it out of morbid curiosity, I was very surprised to discover it's actually quite tasty. Warm for a beer that's just 6% ABV, and there's the usual Belgian yeast thing going on, but it's a cleaner flavour profile than most, making it possible to pick out a definite citric tartness and soft thirst quenching nectarine flavour as well. This is wonderfully complex in a way I'd never expect a Vedett beer to be. Meanwhile the dunce cap goes to Palm for Palm Hop Select made, it says on the Internet, using hops grown at the actual brewery. Well, maybe they should leave things to a professional grower in future, because this is a dull sweaty mess.
We'll finish this post back in Ghent, where we ended up at the Trollekelder, a rather fun knockabout multilevel boozer north of the city centre. Among the beers vying to be Ghent's official one is Gentse Strop ("Ghent Noose"), even though it's brewed some distance away in Oudenaarde. The gallows-shaped display stand is ubiquitous around town. It's a pretty straightforward blonde: as clean and clear as you like, with a lovely crisp celery bite. Trollekelder also had a gueuze that was new to me: De Cam Oude Lambiek: spendy at a tenner a bottle, but I was on my way home and still had money in my pocket. I don't know that it's much better than all the other old lambics out there. It has maybe a bit more of a pronounced barrel flavour and is smooth rather than sharply sour. Best of all it's packed with that brick-cellar and gunpowder nitre spice that I love in the style.
I mentioned on Monday that I found Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà in the middle of celebrating German beer. It would have been rude not to join in. Besides, turning down a Schlenkerla beer I'd never tasted before is simply unthinkable. And so a large glass of Schlenkerla Fastenbier was acquired. Funny, I thought this style was usually super-strong, but this one is a mere 5.5% ABV, arriving a rich chestnut red colour. It has a lot in common with other beers from the Bamberg brewery: bags of beechwood smoke, of course, and a little bit of the tarryness you find in the Urbock, though not as pronounced. The real genius of this beer -- I opined to myself as the glass emptied itself more rapidly than one would expect for something so powerfully flavoured -- is the finish: there's virtually none. All the action happens while it's in your mouth, and when it's gone, it's gone. Which means you have to take another mouthful. And then order another glass when the first one empties. "Moreish" barely begins to cover it.
Later that evening, wandering alone in the depths of southern Trastevere I popped into Birrifugio for one. There's a small but eclectic selection in this vaguely English-style neighbourhood pub, with a beer each from Adnams, Carlow Brewing, Weihenstephaner, Dark Star and Amager on tap. What caught my eye, however, was Bayerischer Bahnhof Original Gose, as far as I know the only example of this style-of-the-moment brewed in the city most associated with it: Leipzig. It arrived looking and smelling like a simple witbier: hazy straw-coloured with mild herbal aromas. Its true nature is much more apparent on tasting as the salt and coriander are right up front giving it a lip-smacking crispness and offering cold ocean-grade refreshment. I'd loved to have stayed for another, and loved even more to be in a city where this is the sort of beer you get when you ask for a beer. I could drink a lot of its simple complexity.
Sticking with del Borgo, I realised that I've never tasted their original beer ReAle, and since it was here on cask I decided I'd put that right. Another English beer clone, this time a quality brown bitter, it's a clear burnished copper colour with all the proper nutty flavours, waxy bitterness and refreshing tannins. Only the massive 6.4% ABV strength detracts from its balanced sessionable qualities.
One last glass before running for the airport bus and I wanted to make it count. Say hello, then, to Baladin's Xyauyu barley wine. This 13.5% ABV version has been given time in rum casks and arrives dark brown and completely flat, smelling like all of its strength plus brown sugar and marker pens. The barrel has certainly left its mark as it tastes like nothing so much as aged dark rum: hot and woody. The beeriness is almost lost, with a caramel malt sweetness just peeping through. A tasty drop, but mostly it left me wondering what the unaged version tastes like.
First up, one that made its début, briefly, at the St. Patrick's beer festival in Dublin last month: Carlow Brewing's collaboration with Poland's Pinta brewery, called Lublin to Dublin. It's a 6.5% ABV oatmeal stout and has all the fullness and smoothness you'd expect. In fact, it's all about the texture; the flavour is a sideshow. Not that there's anything wrong with the flavour: mild roast, cocoa, a little putty and some beautiful summer fruit topnotes. It's wonderfully sinkable and so finely balanced you could nearly lose sight of it. I hope they'll be making more.
Meanwhile, The Larder restaurant on Dublin's Parliament Street has teamed up with Galway's Independent Brewing Company to produce a range of house beers under the "Dublin Brewer" brand, cheekily subverting the city crest by swapping one of the castles for a beer mug. First out of the blocks is their Irish Pale Ale at 6.1% ABV. It arrives a hazy dark orange colour, the bottle conditioning leaving a modest skim of yeast on the bottom of the bottle. The aroma is all apricot and mango but the flavour is more intense, with big grapefruit bitterness, spiced up by the use of rye in the grist. Alongside the hops there's a beautiful thirst-quenching tannic quality, resulting in a lemon tea effect in the finish. This is an invigorating pale ale, with a squeaky teeth-cleaning bitter intensity which paired perfectly with The Larder's ribeye steak.
"Beer Journalism" is Heather's choice of topic for this 86th round of The Session, asking us to turn a critical eye on how the media cover the beer industry. Madam, that's the only kind of eye I've got.
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| Cask left; keg right |
A couple of pubs have had it, but I stumbled upon this glass of Victory Headwaters Pale Ale in Farrington's a few weeks ago. Apparently, the beer celebrates the Pennsylvania brewery's water supply, though I think they've thrown a hop or two in as well. The aroma, for one thing, is strikingly sharp -- an invigorating zap of lemon rind and sherbet. It's a little calmer on tasting, not exactly jumping with hops but with a pleasant blend of grapefruit and blood orange flavours, fully realised in the manner of the posher brands of breakfast juices.
