Mos’ Delft

Following on from Monday's post about New Year in The Hague, I also did a mini pubcrawl in Delft, the charming historic town at the city's edge. I've been here a couple of times before, but always seemed to miss its top-flight beer destinations. This time I was better prepared and ticked off a couple of new venues.

Delftse Brouwers plies its trade at Delfts Brouwhuis, with an extensive draught list of seemingly brewed-in-house beers. We started dark. For me, on the left, is Plagende Pestvogel (charming), the black IPA. It's properly black with a tan, stout-like head of fine bubbles. The aroma is a magnificent mix of rosewater and dark chocolate, just how I like 'em. 6.9% ABV gives it a heavy and smooth texture, another stout-like feature, but the flavour doesn't follow that. It's flowers and chocolate again, a little sweeter than the aroma suggested, so milk rather than dark. There's some candied red fruit too: strawberry and raspberry flavouring, finishing dry. More of a roast bite would have been nice, likewise a proper citrus bittering, but as a sweet example of the style, it does an excellent job. Any halfway decent black IPA will do, in this era of scarcity.

I was intrigued by an imperial porter called Tsarina Esra, remembering that De Molen made one such, way back in the day. Turns out its creator moved from there to here and brought the recipe with him. It's still 10.1% ABV. The aroma gives little away, just a hint of syrupy dark sugar. Syrupy goes the texture too, with a matching molasses and treacle flavour, laced with strong coffee and medicine-cabinet herbs. A bite of black liquorice finishes it off. For all its thickness and heft, there's not a whole lot going on in it. Herself noted that it's a good base for barrel ageing, but is rather plain in this unaugmented form.

Round two brought me Bubbelende Bonobo, described as a champagne tripel, which made it enough of a curiosity for me to order. It's pale gold and mostly clear, and strong for tripel at 11% ABV, presumably due to ravenous champagne yeast. The aroma is oddly sweet, with ripe banana, which I wasn't expecting. That stays in the flavour, though it's definitely dry, sort of like those desiccated banana crisps. Behind this lurks a spirit heat, burning a clean blue flame, and the finish is dry and cracker-crisp. It's an odd beast, missing the comforting soft warmth of tripel, and presenting sharper, more angular, fruit flavours instead. The crisp finish is another twist, and presumably is what the brewer set out to achieve. Full marks for creativity, then, but it's not great as a tripel. Clean around all the banana and you just make it more sickly and cloying. This is an interesting experiment, but not a successful one, in my opinion.

From the bottom end of the guest beer list comes Iced Coffee Connaisseur [sic], Moi? by Dutch Bargain, an 18% ABV icebock with cinnamon and pistachio. Fun fact: 25cl is the default measure; you need to specify (we didn't) if you want the saner 15cl pour. This is stout-black and smells like the inside of a Mon Cheri chocolate liqueur sweet: phwoar! The flavour continues fully in that line. Sweet and slightly salty milk chocolate, hot cherry liqueur, a bonus marzipan richness, and a dusting of drier cocoa powder. It's so rich and smooth I need to upgrade the analogy from supermarket Ferraro candy to high-end rum babas by the sort of Belgian chocolatier who operates from a shop with their name over the door. This is a magnificent confection and, while it's sticky and slow-drinking, there were no complaints about the measure received.

At Café de Wijnhaven I was caught off guard by 't Preuvenemint, number 6 in the Wijlre's Specials series from AB InBev's Brand brand. They've advertised it as a grape ale, so it was a surprise to get a big hit of rasher smoke from the first sip: the summer wildfires must be really affecting the crop here. The flavour is dominated by the harsh, kippery smoke of many a poorly-conceived rauchbier, and I found that difficult to get past. The texture is soft, and I detected a similarly-soft fruit character in the distant background, but I would be hard pressed to pin grape on that. This is not subtle, and was hard work to drink. The texture is horribly thin for 7% ABV, leaving a finish of fishy water that I doubt anyone enjoys. While a brave move for a multinational, it's not a good beer. Advertise the smoke up front, for one thing. I still would have ordered it and been disappointed, but it might have saved some civilians an unpleasant experience.

Back in The Hague, I also had a smattering of beers for hotel-room drinking: especially useful as the weather worsened ahead of the regional shutdown which extended our trip by one extra day and one extra country.

It's not often I find a new beer from Amsterdam's Moortgat-owned 't IJ, but here was IJndejaars, a 9% ABV winter ale they have apparently been making for years but which I'd never seen before. The visuals look a bit wet and weedy: a thin amber colour, topped  by a mere skim of shortlived bubbles. It looks cheap. There's a plums-and-raisin fruitcake aroma, while the flavour is dryer, adding breadcrust and black tea, for a kind of barmbrack effect. It's as light as tea, too, and I would never have guessed the strength: there's no chewiness to the malt nor warmth from all that alcohol. This is plain fare. I remember when clean beers were not 't IJ's forte. Since the takeover, they've added a lot of polish and poise to their recipes, but this one takes it a little too far. I could have done with some amateurish, home-brew-like fuzz in it: strong and dark beers don't need precision in the way lighter and paler ones do. This feels a little too corporate and processed, with a lack of warmth which is fatal to any purported winter beer.

A random supermarket pick got me Jopen's Triple to the Tropics, an IPA of 9.5% ABV, though an innocent hazy yellow colour. The promise of a "tropical fruitbomb" is fully delivered upon. The flavour here is a sticky mix of concentrated mango, passionfruit and pineapple, with the booze element strong enough that it could pass as a sticky Mediterranean liqueur. And that's it, really. No bitterness is mentioned, and none is delivered. Sweet fruity booze is your lot. On the one hand, I quite enjoyed the clean, one-dimensional, simplicity, but on the other I thought that if beer is going to go for the big numbers strengthwise, shouldn't there be a complexity of flavour which comes with that? It's quite an exotic delight that a triple IPA was being sold in a supermarket at all: that's a sign of a mature beer market. At the same time, this is supermarket-grade triple IPA: good, but basic, with no individual characteristics. If someone had thrown it in the shopping basket because it's the sort of thing I like, I wouldn't object, although it's not something I would have purposefully chosen for myself again. Good on Jopen for continuing to brew such adventurous crowd-pleasers, and selling them to the big retail multiples.

Via The Hague's specialist beer off licence FreeBeer, one from Espiga. Black Break is pitched as an Irish stout. For that, it's a broadly correct 4.5% ABV, but it's heavy for it, feeling properly creamy from the can. It's a bitter chap, combining an assertive dark roast -- ristretto coffee and high-cocoa chocolate -- with the green bitterness of boiled cabbage and spinach. There's no sweet side to balance that, and I don't think it's missed. This is Irish stout just the way I like it: austerely bitter with fully tasteable old-world hops; dry all the way through, with a spark of galvanised steel. Mwah! I don't think I've ever encountered this sort of profile at such a low strength; I didn't think it was possible, but I'm all in favour of more if it. Irish brewers have something to learn from what the Catalans have done here.

The Rott brewery of Rotterdam is so pleased with its name, it appends it to all of its beers. I only had the one: Rott.Eclipse, an imperial stout. Nothing fancy has gone into it or been done to it, and it's 10.2% ABV. The flavour centres on big chocolate, smooth and luxurious, and perfectly balanced between sweet and bitter. There's a little coffee and a hint of cherry fruit too, the extra complexities borne up on a heady cloud of alcohol vapours. That's really all I have to say about it. It's a classy number, and very typical of the kind of excellent imperial stouts that Dutch breweries produce. It's a beer to properly relax and unwind with.

Rotterdam was one of the cities we passed through while making our escape via Brussels. For train drinking, I brought Bird of Prey from Uiltje. This is another of their IPAs, 5.8% ABV, and constructed very much in the old-school American way. Which is to say, it's almost clear and smells of concentrated citrus: grapefruit and lime. The bitterness hits first in the flavour, a tongue-pinching pine resin. The pithy fruit gives it a zingy middle, fading gradually to reveal the malt base, leaving quite a retro caramel finish. The brewery makes no claims to west-coastism, and indeed the can copy mentions hazy and tropical. It is sweeter than a full-on west coast IPA but I think the flavour profile is closer to that than New England. That's a good thing, and it's an enjoyable beer. Not one to be overlooked just because it's ubiquitous and produced by a big brewing conglomerate.

That was it for this trip. I recommend The Hague and Delft as beer destinations, though I'm now more wary than I was about going there in the depths of winter. Being snowed in, even for a day, isn't as much fun as it might sound.