The usual valediction

On the way home from the Borefts Beer Festival in September I spent a night in Amsterdam, and the days either side of it going to mostly my usual haunts in the Dutch capital.

That started at Arendsnest where, with Oktoberfestfest season imminent, I picked a Märzen: Sancti Selectus, from the Egmond brewery. It's the requisite 5.6% ABV, amber coloured and slightly hazy. At the centre is lots of bready richness, decorated with a meadowy floral perfume. While full-flavoured, it's also incredibly easy drinking and deserves to be sold in much larger measures than the pub was offering.

From there across to its sister pub, Beer Temple. Hola Fantasma comes from the Long Live Beerworks in Rhode Island. It's a Berliner weisse of 6% ABV with added blood orange, pineapple, strawberry and blackberry, turning it a murky dark pink. All of the added fruit get a say in the flavour, though the orange speaks loudest, being both citricly bitter and juicily sweet, like real mandarin pieces. The various features hang together well, creating an invigorating but gentle sour beer, one with an upbeat summer quality.

I didn't want to miss the opportunity to try this year's anniversary beer from the MoreBeer pub chain: Big Fat 15, a triple IPA of 9.99% ABV, brewed by Poesiat & Kater. It arrived an innocent-looking clear yellow but showed its true colours early, with a heady aroma that's both brightly zesty and weightily dank. The texture is chewy, and you know you have a strong beer on your hands. Its flavour follows the aroma, bringing fresh lemon, a harder grapefruit bite and then an equal amount of resinous pine. For a deliberately extreme beer, it's very well balanced, bulked up with malt to counter the souped-up hopping without impeding it. It's a worthy celebration, then.

The dark beer next to it is Fourth Press, a blend of strong stouts and ales, produced by Private Press Brewing in California. There must have been some powerful beers in there, because the average of them has left this at 15.2% ABV. It's black and headless, with an aroma of date, raisins, coffee and non-specific brown booze. Taken together, there's a bit of chocolate liqueur about it, with some vinous dark fruit as well. It's not a beer to drink a lot of, but it's absolutely gorgeous, combining imperial stout's dark richness with barley wine's warming fruit. I didn't think it would work this well, but it has.

Next stop was In de Wildeman where I started on Jopen's Farmhouse Rock, a saison. It's a big one, at 7% ABV, made with buckwheat and grains of paradise. Still, it's completely clear and a very pale yellow. Unsurprisingly, it's very clean for the style, missing all of the rustic earthy fuzz they often have. That leaves space for all the estery fruitiness, here suggesting white grape and honeydew melon in particular. While very obviously a strong beer, it's refreshing too, and generally tasty and enjoyable.

For herself, Morning Joe, the one by Basqueland -- it's not the most original name for a coffee stout. It's a serious one: 6.2% ABV and heavily infused with real coffee, presenting dry dark roasted notes as well as greasy coffee oils. A slight herbal quality lifts the flavour out of the gloopy depths of the filter machine, but you really would want to like coffee to get anything out of this. As a stout-first sort of guy, it left me a little cold.

Passing by the pub later on the way somewhere else, I swung in to try an interesting-looking barrel-aged beer they had on: Kees's Barrel Project IPA. This is a medium-strength IPA given a quick sojourn of ten days in a bourbon barrel. The result is 6.5% ABV and looks hazy yellow, like a witbier. Generally, I'm sceptical about the benefits of ageing hop-fronted beers like this, but the way they've done it here worked spectacularly well. All the hop fun is still there, the flavour teeming with fresh grapefruit. And then the bourbon adds a fully complementary lime sourness, making the whole into a kind of American whisky-based summer cocktail -- maybe an Old Fashioned? It tastes much lighter than the ABV suggests and is tremendous fun to drink. This is the second year of the project and more would be very worthwhile, I'd say.

We strayed a little off our usual route when I decided we should call in on De Prael on Monday afternoon. I haven't been to this pleasant little brewery taproom in several years, although that's largely because I don't really like their beers. But it's important to check in now and again with breweries you don't like, just in case they've become superb. So here we are.

They like to stick to their core range, and the only thing that was new to me even after a prolonged absence was bottled De Prael RIS, the imperial stout. After the weekend I'd had, impressing me with an imperial stout was a tall order, and at only 8.7% ABV it didn't start well. It's extremely fizzy, a common De Prael issue, and took forever to get poured into a glass. Along with the high carbonation comes a thinness, which I thought excessive even at the compromised ABV. At the centre of the flavour is a big, unsubtle, liquorice bitterness, segueing into a kaleidoscope of hop flavours, like one might find in a black IPA. The finish is dry, burnt and astringent. While I do detect the slightly amateurish character that De Prael beers can have, it does hit the style points of serious, old-fashioned, imperial stout quite well. For that I give it a pass.

Dining got me my final two ticks. The restaurant A. van Wees was a worthwhile discovery, for the good food and extensive genever menu. There is a good beer offering too, and I went for Strip, a witbier from Oedipus. It's a decent example of the style, and heavier on the floral side than most, doused in lavender and violet from the outset of the flavour. It finishes quite quickly and quite dry, and there's a nicely soft body, making the whole thing very thirst-quenching, like iced tea on a hot day. I'm guessing this is part of the regular line-up though I hadn't seen it before. For something produced by a Heineken subsidiary, it's very good.

And the last meal before Schiphol came with Hertog Jan Bockbier, it having been the season for the Dutch amber lager, and all the big breweries were heavily promoting their annual release. I hadn't tried the one from the good Duke before, and found it... decent. Not terribly different to the ones from Grolsch and Amstel, which probably shouldn't be surprising. It is particularly dark, however; almost black. There's an amount of complexity that's very unusual for an AB InBev beer, starting with a bite of crisp burnt caramel, and then showing liquorice bitterness and tangy autumn fruit: plum and damson. It shouldn't have taken so long for me to give this a go, but I commend it. I wish we had a seasonal style that forced all the boring breweries to make good beer once a year...

And on such musings I take my leave of the Netherlands once more. And this time I won't be a back for, oh, a couple of weeks. Can't wait.