Unfinished business

Last year I went to Brussels in the hope of attending the BXLBeerFest only to find it postponed for a further year. It was back on for 2022, however, and what I found there will feature here later in the week. I built a long weekend around the festival, mostly to catch up with the bits of Brussels that were closed last time around, and I had partial success with that. Toone was back in fine form, cat and all, and on the final afternoon I managed to catch the re-opening of À La Bécasse. Still closed doors at À L'Imaige de Nostre-Dame and Aux Bon Vieux Temps, alas, and that's not even mentioning the tragic, and hopefully temporary, closure of La Fleur En Papier Doré.

Gist has a new lease on life, however, and a new owner. The vinyl is gone but the cask engines are still there and the beer list is about as diverse as it was in the good old days. The Drogenbos brewery features prominently and, seated outside, I opened my account with Gruit Passion, an extremely old-fashioned Belgian beer style given a tropical twist. It works really well too, the passionfruit taking a back seat and allowing the spicy herbal flavours sparkle. There's a kind of vanilla sweetness, but again not too much. I found a lot of complexity on show here for just 4% ABV and the thought that it tastes a bit like shower gel was only momentary.

The purple beer beside it is another from the same brewery along the same lines: Blanche Cassis. It's much less interesting, and if as the name suggests, it's based on a witbier, there's not much character showing through from that. Instead you get blackcurrant cordial and a hint of green celery and that's your lot. It tastes like the kind of thing industrial breweries produce to attract the girls to beer, though they don't usually make them as strong as 5.2% ABV.

Morbid curiosity had me ordering a beer from Wallonian brewery Borinage next, called Urine. This is 7% ABV and badged as a double IPA. It's clear and golden, demonstrating a very heavily resinous aroma with dry cereal in the background, suggesting something a bit severe was to come. It proved much mellower, however, beginning with the smooth texture and sweet floral and strawberry foretaste. A harder waxy bitterness rises behind this, but it's gentle and balanced, not jarring or harsh. Overall it works surprisingly well. The only thing I'd change is the name.

Herself opted for stout: Ardenne Stout by Brasserie Minne. It's a big lad at 8% ABV and very much in the British tradition rather than Belgian, eschewing fruit and running instead with cocoa and tobacco. High notes of lavender and rosewater help to temper it, and while it's still a little busy, it's fun with it.

She continued to their Ardenne Tripel next, stronger still at 8.5% ABV and really doubling down on the sugar. Though the aroma is pleasingly savoury, showing white pepper and spinach, the taste is pure syrup with a hot and sticky density to match. Tripel's notorious drinkability is missing, and I enjoyed it less for that.

There were a couple of beers from the new spontaneous brewing facility of Brussels Beer Project on Rue Dansaert and I had one of them before going: Distant Echoes. Seems like they're going for a bit of a prog rock theme with these. It's a sour ale with grapes at 7% ABV, ochre-coloured and smelling powerfully of vinegar. Again, the flavour switched directions, mixing apple jelly and saltpetre spice on a warm and rich malt base. There's a mature classiness to this which does not suggest it's from a brash new start-up. It seems they know what they're doing. I didn't get to try any more from the brewery on this trip but look forward to seeing them again.

A different sort of unfinished business was conducted at the Wolf foodhall, where last time they only had one beer pouring from the in-house Flow brewery. Now they had three on.

Flow IPA is amber coloured and 6% ABV. A vague lemony aroma suggested at first that it might be English-style, but a too-sweet profile of caramel and fruit candy on a thick texture makes me think, if it's in a sub-style at all, it's American IPA done badly. I found it just about potable when cold and in a small glass but didn't want to countenance what might happen if it warmed.

Deep Amber is a lager and 5% ABV. It's slightly hazy in a way I've almost come to expect of brewpub lagers and has quite a bock-like malt weight, slightly sweet at first, before a sudden noble hop explosion of nettle, grass, rocket and spiced cabbage. The full spectrum of Germanic complexity there, and quite delightful, untroubled by any undue sweetness from the malt.

To complete the set out of sheer doggedness I had a glass of Wild Blond finally. This is a clear dark gold, thick and heavy but staying dry. A lager crispness meets Belgian golden ale density but neither really go anywhere, fading to nothing quite quickly: the meh of both worlds.

The brewery is very much an afterthought at Wolf. The venue is fun but the beer is just making up the numbers, by and large.

Have you ever had ubiquitous Belgian pilsner Cristal? I hadn't but chanced it when it was the only unfamiliar thing on a restaurant menu. I had never really thought about Belgian pils as its own style but here it is: like stablemate Maes it's dry with a corn sweetness. It's not unpleasant but you need to be either in the mood for it or very thirsty. To my palate there are strong similarities with the Mexican style lager that seems to be currently in fashion for no good reason. Maybe when that has passed, Belgian pils will have its moment too.

On to new territory next, and I had never set foot before in Les Brasseurs, a quite famous beer café right on Boulevard Anspach at the Bourse. I barely did this time, just to rustle up some service before sitting back down outside. Said service brought me a can of La Source 200 IBUs which was over three months out of date and as a result tasted of caramel with some slight resin. Bitterness doesn't fade with time so I call bullshit on both the beer's name and the bar's stock rotation procedures.

The nearby rooftop beer garden I enjoyed last summer hasn't returned but the management have a new venue, taking over the roomy courtyard of a former hospice in the city centre and making it a massive, yet still charming, beer garden. The beer list was decent and my nightcap there was Bobbi Tripel, a nicely juicy example of 8% ABV. Canteloupe features big, alongside more traditional features of tripel like clove rock, lemon rind, celery and pepper. It keeps things light and not boozy, exhibiting exactly the sort of drinkablity missing from the Minne one above.

That's all for today. More Brussels-based wanderings in tomorrow's post.

Yer Man in Havana

Ten days in Cuba was quite enough for me. I stayed mostly in sweltering Havana, with just a brief side-trip to El Che's mausoleum in similarly-sweltering Santa Clara via a nightmare rail journey -- Cuban public transport seems to have been meticulously designed to prevent people from travelling anywhere. The intense heat meant that my preferred drink for the trip was the daiquirí: basically crushed ice with perhaps a dash of rum in it. But obviously it was impossible to pass up the opportunity to try the nation's beers, despite their less-than-fantastic reputations.

I mentioned in relation to Oslo last year that it's usually possible to tell the big players in the local beer market from advertising seen on the journey from most any international airport. The ban on advertising alcohol in Norway makes it impossible there, and similarly in Cuba where there is no form of advertising at all of anything. The occasional branded fridge, ashtray or other point-of-sale breweriana is as close as any commodity gets to being advertised. The three main lagers are made by (state-owned, obviously) Bucanero in the south-eastern city of Holguín. Bucanero Fuerte is the commonest, and the strongest I found. The big 5.4% ABV is made by adding copious amounts of Cuba's abundant sugar, and I doubt that anywhere near all of it gets fermented as the result is extremely heavy and thickly sweet with little refreshing fizz. It just about stands up when it's very cold, but nothing stays cold for very long in the tropical heat. On the plus side, for that little reminder of home, there's a portrait of Colin Farrell on the label. Bless.

Stepping down the heaviness chart we come to Cuba's next most ubiquitous beer, Cristal: la preferida de Cuba no less, if the label is to be believed. I captured this photograph of a rare bottled specimen in an upmarket Havana restaurant, but it's almost exclusively sold in 355ml cans. Again, added sugar is on the ingredients but it's used much more judiciously here and a hint of malt character is allowed through. There's a good, cleansing fizz to it and, at 4.9%, this is the one to drink by the poolside when the weather forbids anything more strenuous. Think of it as somewhere south of Heineken but north of Bud: the mainstay hot country lager which forms the backbone of world beer.

Bucanero's final offering is the rarest, and the only one I saw sold exclusively in the on-trade and in bottled form. The beer is a very light lager called Mayabe. This is a mere 4% ABV and shockingly pale with it. With concentration it's just about possible to discern that some class of grain went into this but which ones is anyone's guess as no ingredients are listed. Other than that it's watery, tasteless, and a waste of anyone's time but the ticker's.

Of course, if you want something darker, more flavoursome, with a bigger hops dose and a good thick head on it, you're best going for Bucanero's Malta. The bad news is that this isn't a beer and contains no alcohol. I saw quite a few children drinking it. Malta is especially popular in parts of the Caribbean and Africa where stout has a strong foothold in the beer market. I was surprised to see it here where there is no stout of any kind to be had at all. I was also a little disappointed that Hatuey beer, as referenced by Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea is no longer brewed or sold in Cuba. Its owner, Bacardi, moved all operations off the island when the government's programme of nationalisation struck in 1960. A photo of the old Hatuey brewery decorates the wall in Havana's, indeed Cuba's, only brewpub: Taberna de la Muralla.

The taberna is a joint Cuban-Austrian venture on Plaza Vieja in a classically Cuban high-ceilinged colonial mansion house. Tables spill onto the arcade out front and further into the square itself. A barbecue dishes up excellent and cheap meat and seafood, and behind the bar a Salm brewing kit merrily puffs away.

There are three house beers, all presented with the typically Cuban approach to information: there's no indication what they're made from, how they're brewed, how strong they are or even what measures they're served in, though I think the latter is somewhere in the region of 400ml. Each one is titled with a slight misnomer as well.

Negra is light brown rather than black and tastes to me very much like a typical Vienna lager. There's lots of caramel in there, balanced with a hoppy dryness. A lack of gas makes for an almost aley smooth drinkability. My only criticism is one I have for all of these beers: it loses its cool very quickly and the all-important refreshment quotient is severely reduced by the time the glass is even half finished.

My favourite of the three was the middle one, Oscura. "Dark" is a relative term, I suppose, but this looks to me the colour of light ale. There's not much by way of hops going on, but there's a pronounced tannic quality which lends it the thirst-quenching properties of ice tea. Light enough to chug down, this is the perfect pick-me-up for the heat-sensitive northern European tourist. Well, this one, anyway.

The last beer is the pale and cloudy Clara. It isn't a wheat beer, as far as I can tell, but it exhibits a little of the lemony character found in the Belgian variety. I found it a bit too sweet to gulp in quantity like the Oscura, but it rewards sipping so long as, of course, it's not allowed to get warm. Some foam insulators for their glassware would be a good investment for this bar. And a bug zapper: you get flies with that whether you ordered any accompaniments or not.

My sucker-for-novelty streak wouldn't let me go past the beer cocktail section of the menu. From the trade news I read on US blogs, micheladas are sweeping the beer scene in the Americas, with their strange mix of lager, salt and citrus fruit juice. Taberna de la Muralla offers a tomato-based entity along the same lines based, I assume, on Clara. It's not up to much: rather bland in a way that suggests to me that some Tabasco wouldn't have gone amiss, but also that this doesn't offer anything even resembling a beer experience: replace the lager with rum and you have a cubanito. Why anyone thought to do this with beer is beyond me.

Still, speaking as a veteran of the Cuban railways, it's far from the strangest thing I saw in this utterly unique country.