Before and after

As always, attendance at the Borefts Beer Festival in Bodegraven meant a certain amount of participation in the outside world of Dutch beer. Arriving into Leiden a couple of days early, I dropped by Stadsbrouwhuis, which tends to have the city's most diverse beer list. From the menu I chose Summer Breeze, a Berliner weisse by Spanish brewery Oso. Though 6% ABV, this looked thin, a translucent hazy squash of a beer. It was hard to shake that notion on tasting it too as it's much more watery than I thought it would be, and the alleged blueberry, raspberry and coconut don't really materialise, nor any sourness, leaving just a mildly tangy citrus, just like orange squash. It's an inoffensive beer, but it's not low-strength and it wasn't cheap, so I feel I'm within my rights to have expected something more engaging.

On the other had, I knew the beer at Freddy's would be crap and was fully prepared for that, if not the precise details of the crapness. This is the brewpub on the ground floor of the Heineken Netherlands office building. It's a nice place, very conveniently located for where I was staying, and the food is decent. My only justification for ordering Freddy's NEIPA instead of, say, a glass of wine, was pure morbid curiosity.

Where to start? The amber colour? The nitrogenated serve? It's almost comically off kilter. It has a lot in common with mid-1990s nitro bitters, with the same gloopy texture and cloying sweetness, adding the fake lemon perfume of the dreadful Guinness Nitro IPA from a few years ago. The only trueness to form I can think of is that it resembles real New England IPA in the same way Heineken resembles real pilsner.

On a free afternoon before the festival, I made an excursion down to The Hague to visit a brewery I'd missed on all my previous trips there. Haagsche Broeder only opens three evenings a week, and although it's on a main shopping street, it's well tucked away down an alley so is easily missed. This is a quasi-monastic set-up, its founders renting space from the community of the brothers of St John, although plans to fully integrate the brewery and the community in some sort of variation of the Trappist brewing rules have been abandoned. Still, it's a charming little tap room and had a range of interesting beers available.

I started with Postulant, the "refterbier", so modelled after the single or extra style which is normally the lightest in a Trappist brewery's range and claiming origins as the daily table beer of the monks. This one is 4.8% ABV and a hazy amber colour. The monks in this refectory like their hops on the American side, because there's a wonderful buzzy citrus aroma here, unfolding into full-on juicy mandarin on tasting. A tea-like dryness brings with it gentler peach and apricot, and the overall effect is one of Belgian Pale Ale, one of those styles we don't see much of any more, for no good reason. This is a clean, refreshing and summery thirst-quencher, and a signal that this brewery takes its cue more from contemporary craft than low-countries tradition.

I couldn't as easily pinpoint the influences on Bierkade, which the brewery describes as a farmhouse ale, solely because it's fermented with kveik. It's a similar colour to the last one, and slightly stronger at 5.2% ABV. I miss the hop boldness, and the Belgian-style spice, while pleasant, isn't an adequate substitute for it. I don't really associate any particular flavours with kveik, and the additional gummy fruity overtones here remind me of certain strains of Brettanomyces. For all that, it's not a particularly complex beer, showing a little red apple as it warms, but with a watery finish and some unwelcome earthy dregs. It strikes me as more of a yeast experiment for the brewers' benefit than something brewed with the drinker in mind.

The strength scale leaps to 7% ABV next, and Novice, a saison. The beer gets darker too, though still in that hazy amber end of the spectrum, and not quite garnet. It differs from the saison norm in other ways too, lacking spice and having an odd kick of aniseed in the foretaste. It is at least properly dry, with similar tannin to the first beer, and a sunflower-seed huskiness, plus lots of fizz. I would have expected more body for the strength, or even a little alcohol heat, but neither materialises. This is another one for the decent-but-unexciting file.

There should be some excitement in the third beer, the 10% ABV tripel called Hildegard. They've used spelt in the grain bill but, like kveik, I don't know what that's supposed to contribute. It certainly doesn't change the colour from the hazy pale orange that's normal for tripel. We're back on a hop kick anyway, with a lovely pithy aroma and a concentrated orange flavour. That allies with the heavy malt but avoids making the beer sticky, just warming, like triple sec or similar fruit liqueur. There's a little spice to bring us closer to typical tripel, and a measure more of that would have been nice. It was still a good session-finisher, the clean blue-flame heat giving me a satisfying inner glow as I wended my way back to Leiden.

After the festival, we had a day to meander around the familiar pubs of Amsterdam. No surprises that that began at Arendsnest, the outside table idyllic in the early autumn sun. Local brewery Walhalla collaborated with Utrecht's Uproer to create Daemon #23: Barbatos, a double black IPA. It's a dark red-brown colour and has a strong aroma of white pepper mixed with liquorice. The liquorice continues in the flavour, where it's joined by lots of dark chocolate, spritzy lime zest and a more serious green cabbage bitterness. It's remarkably light for 8.5% ABV, and superbly clean, letting all the bright hop and dark malt flavours flow through without any interference. Textbook stuff and just how I like this kind of beer. I'm very glad someone out there still thinks they're worth making.

Beside it is Hipodèrmia by Menno Olivier, the founder of De Molen, now working from La Pirata in Catalonia. This is a coffee imperial stout, and packed with possibly too much coffee. The aroma is fine, mixing fresh and strong coffee with an edge of hazelnut. On tasting, there's an odd herbal liqueur quality, reminiscent of Jägermeister or Fernet Stock: very concentrated and aggressively bitter. The coffee arrives after this and is every bit as bitter too. Throw in a prodigious alcohol heat, even for 10.5% ABV, and you have a beer to be sipped carefully rather than thrown back with abandon. I found it hard going, though maybe it's for the best when very strong beers don't taste like patisserie confections.

I had one of the house beers in the next round: Bretty Eagle Claussen II, brewed by the MoreBeer pub chain's current main contractor, Poesiat & Kater. This is amber coloured, light textured and 6% ABV. There's a token lemon zest from the hops up front, but then the Brett kicks in, bringing a greasy incense and meadow flowers character, funky yet fresh, like young Orval. It's an excellent showcase for the wild yeast: accessible yet unmistakably Bretted, and delicious with it. Apart from anything else, it's an incredibly brave move for a pub chain to commission a beer so playful. It'll be interesting to see if they take things further in this direction. I hope so.

The other beer in the picture is also a Poesiat & Kater one: Nog Eentje Dan ("One More Then"), a 10% ABV straight-up imperial stout, also produced especially for the chain. This has a toasty aroma with a hint of coffee, and then a clean and mostly dry flavour with a touch of caramel to thicken it up. I got a very slight tang of soy-sauce savouriness, and it would have benefitted from some more aggressive hopping, which I think it could have carried off. As is, it's plain and decent, but might seem bland compared to the Netherlands' multitude of more involved imperial stouts.

My finisher here was a rauchbier by De Kromme Haring, called Marrella. It's a reasonably strong lager, at 6.3% ABV, and is a pale chestnut colour. The aroma is rich and hammy, which is enticing, and the texture as full and smooth as that promises, while still being clean and polished, like the lager it is. The smoke turns a little fishy, which I guess fits with the brewery's marine-life theme, but there's a caramel sweetness to balance the savoury side, and some bonfire smoke dryness to balance that in turn. It all works together very well, especially on an autumnal afternoon. They don't seem to have been trying to copy Schlenkerla here, as other breweries do, with varying degrees of success. This is its own thing and carries it off with aplomb.

For herself, 10 Years 1850, another imperial stout, this one brewed by Kees to mark a decade of brewing an imperial stout which I don't think I've ever encountered in its original form. This is another novelty-free one -- I guess they didn't have donuts and bubblegum in 1850 -- although it's a very heavy beast, the mouthfeel fully reflecting its 12.8% ABV. A dry roast aroma leads on to a more complex flavour of light chocolate and floral rosewater. That's your lot, however, and I couldn't help thinking there should be more going on, given the very substantial gravity. Again, some more aggressive hopping would have helped, and made it taste more like a beer from the mid-nineteenth century.

It was over to In De Wildeman next, where we picked two imperial stouts from a Dutch brewery I hadn't heard of: The Hollows. My choice, on the left, takes its wonderful title from Werner Herzog's autobiography: Every Man For Himself, And God Against All. It's 12.1% ABV and is brewed with coffee, although there's a light touch on that. It's smooth and sweet, for the most part, the slick caramel malt balanced only slightly by hot tar and aniseed bitterness. I deemed it passable, though it's far less involved than the name implied it would be.

Burning Worlds is the same strength and shares the same almost syrupy texture, but has a much more complicated recipe, including three types of chilli pepper, cocoa nibs, vanilla, nutmeg and cinnamon. That sounds busy and difficult, but the chilli side doesn't really come through, leaving the added sweet ingredients to meld with the winter spices to create an effect like Mexican hot chocolate. It has its own coffee side too, and that conjures flavours of tiramisu and Irish coffee as well. It's gut-coating, dessertish and extremely delicious, in modest quantities at least.

The final stop was Gollem where they were serving Kasteel Cuvée, the quadrupel formerly known as Cuvée du Château. I'm not often a fan of this style, finding it too hot and too sweet, but this one is well balanced, even if it tastes unmistakably strong at 11% ABV. The fruitcake character is fully to style, and pleasingly multidimensional, with all the figs, prunes, cloves and cinnamon of actual fruitcake, and all done simply with a good Belgian ale yeast. While its body is dense, the alcohol heat is restrained: present, but not excessive. One wouldn't drink a lot of it, nor at any sort of speed, but it's an excellent unfussy sipper; a beer to relax with.

Gollem was also celebrating its 50th birthday, and had a Belgian beer to mark the occasion. Gollem 50 Jaar is by The Musketeers and is an amber ale of 6.5% ABV. It is indeed quite a dark amber and smells sweetly of toffee and red liquorice, like an old-fashioned sweet shop. The flavour introduces a certain amount of bitterness to this -- a tang of forest fruits -- but it's still predominantly sweet, adding notes of spearmint and bubblegum to the picture. It's a bit too hot as well, turning thick and soupy. One has no choice but to drink this one slowly, and perhaps that makes it well suited for the half-century birthday of this comfortable old pub. It is right and proper to allow time for it.

But that was all the beer time I had on this particular trip. I will now need to come up with some other excuse to go drinking regularly in the Netherlands. My hope is that the Dutch entrepreneurial spirit will notice that gap in the festival calendar in September and seek to fill it with something similar to Borefts. I'll be keeping my ear to the ground.