On the move again

With European travel back on the agenda from July I thought it would be nice to break the long fast with a trip to Brussels. There's a symmetry in how it was the last place I came back from, pre-pandemic, and the Belgians seemed to have a decent handle on the whole re-opening of society business. What provided the nucleation point was the announcement of the BXL Beer Festival in late August. Tickets were bought, flights were booked, and then the festival was postponed for another year. Ah well. The trip was still very much on.

The Brussels of The New Normal was a little strange, but mostly pleasantly so. Grand Place minus the troupes of coach parties was more enjoyable; that every pub on my favourite crawl down Marché des Herbes was still closed, less so. But I made do.

An early excursion was to the 3 Fonteinen Lambik-o-Droom which has done a great job of utilising its outdoor space. First call was Cuvée Armand & Gaston, batch 4 of the 19|20 vintage. Not that the fine detail is of interest to anyone but the most committed lambic bore. It's still a cracking beer: 7% ABV and heavily textured, served surprisingly warm. There's tonnes of spice, of the gunpowder variety in particular, finishing crisp with a hint of citrus zest. That it's high strength, powerfully flavoured and extremely sour, yet remains so easy to drink, is all part of what one comes to 3 Fonteinen for.

I also came for the Oude Kriek because I don't think I've had it before (no. 9 of 19|20, if you must know). At the beginning it's deliciously sharp in a way that's more to do with real cherries than spontaneous fermentation, I thought. There's sweeter cherry in the aftertaste and that's where I felt a little let down by a lack of lambic character. The fruit is a bit overdone for me, though its freshness, especially in the aroma, has a definite charm. I suspect they intend this for long ageing to allow the bugs to get to work more thoroughly. I have no regrets about cutting short the lifespan of my bottle, however.

A few days later it was off to Cantillon for some more big bottles. This was the first time I had visited the spacious new upstairs bar, at least in its current form. I always enjoyed drinking downstairs but didn't miss the standing around awkwardly waiting for a seat.

Cantillon has gone in for grapes in a big way, and a very high proportion of what was available was grape-infused. I am a huge fan of the brewery's beers and of grapes in sour beer, but even I thought this was overkill. The brewery seems to have decided that 6.5% is the correct ABV for these.

The first I tried was Carignan. It's a red grape so the beer is deep red, though hazy with it. There's nothing fruity about the sharp and spicy lambic aroma; you have to wait for the foretaste for that. Juicy plump raisins is the initial effect, turning to mature Madeira wine and cheeky kirsch liqueur. Despite looking young, it tastes wonderfully mature and smooth.

Switching to white, Le Plaisir is next: this one a clear golden colour. It's a bit plain, all told. There's a mild floral perfume followed by a hard burn in the throat on sipping. It needed a little time to warm up before the long finish of Sauternes or Tokaji arrived -- that sort of honey quality. It's a Cantillon beer and of Cantillon quality, but not among their best work. That's surprising because back when they only had two grape lambics in the range, the white one was definitely my preference. Perhaps I simply chose unwisely from what was on offer.

There was one draught beer of interest: Camerisse, and hallelujah it's not a grape one. This uses honeyberry, the fruit of the honeysuckle, and was brewed originally for their Zwanze event last year. From the keg it's a deep purple colour and smells very... complex. I got violets, bergamot, aniseed and rotting vegetables but, y'know, in a good way. The taste is rather more coherent but no less multifaceted, having rosewater, Turkish delight and blueberry first, then finishing with a touch of ripe and squashy raspberry. There's a lot to take in, and I can see how you would design something like this for a special sippers' event. It was really enjoyable, though.

Only three beers but I felt Cantillon was done justice.

From Brussels's oldest extant brewery to its newest, or at least the newest taproom. Brasserie Mule had opened to the drinking public for the first time on the day we dropped by. By good luck or smart planning, most of the space is outside, next to a bar area that's sparsely furnished, but then it was only day one.

There's a lean towards German styles at Mule, and the run-through opened with two Kölsch. Mule Kölsch presents hazy, with a slightly estery aroma which didn't put it in my good books from the start. Crispness is present and correct in the taste, however, from the beginning and all the way through. I got a hint of peach and lavender with that, but it's otherwise clean. The classic Cologne smoothness is missing, but this is still a very decent take on blonde ale.

Then Kölsch Inna Jungle is a collaboration with another new Brussels brewery, La Jungle. There was basically no information on the beers available but I'm pretty sure the difference here is that it's been dry-hopped. Unlike the previous one it's clear and this time the disconcerting start is from a weird green onion aroma. This transmutes into a seriously resinous flavour, almost suggesting west coast IPA more than Kölsch. Though only 5% ABV it's heavy and a little sickly. If this was an experiment I don't think it's worth repeating.

The next pair to the table were weissbier -- strange to drink from a small glass but when in Belgium... Mule Hefe Weisse is a very dark orange colour with a strong and not unpleasant green-banana aroma. The flavour gives us lots of flowery perfume and a considerable bitterness before a sweeter hard-candy finish. Again, though modestly strong at 5.4% ABV it carries a lot of weight. I liked its hefty and wholesome rustic vibe.

Mule Hopfen Weisse looks pretty similar but is a different beast at 8% ABV. It doesn't taste it, though. Its flavour is actually a little plainer than the above but makes great use of new world hops to impart a spiky bitterness.The aroma is peppery, with a leafy dank side. We've lost the basic characteristics of weissbier here, but I like what they've been replaced with. While delivering plenty of boozy poke it's light and clean and daftly drinkable -- a successful nod to the Brooklyn/Schneider originator of the hopfenweisse style.

There had to be one Belgian style here and it came in the form of Straight Saison, a straight saison with a straight name. Not so straight in reality, though. The haze was a little thicker than I like for saison, while the flavour was a bit of a homebrew mess of banana esters and an overdone black pepper spice. There's no clean crispness here, which I deem a fatal error for a saison, even at the lofty heights of 6% ABV.

Finally, the inevitable pale ale, named Steuun. This, at least, was crisp, but in a very plain and lager-like way. The only real character I found was an estery quality which was present in all the beers to a greater or lesser extent. One could call it a house style, but it's a fine line between that and sameyness. I suspect the brewery's heart isn't really in pale ale as this had a feel of tokenism about it, like they had to have one in the line-up.

It will be interesting to watch how Mule evolves. I hope they stick to brewing what they like, rather than acceding to the dull demands of generic taproom culture.

Taprooms and lambic-o-droomen aside, the Brussels brewery scene is absolutely booming at the moment, coming from a point of near-zero a decade ago. I noticed a new tendency in several bars to skew local, preferring the city's breweries to the more well-known Belgian brands, which is of course how it should be. I'll finish on a handful of beers from Brussels breweries I didn't visit.

At top nosh shop Nüetnigenough they had the misfortune of having to unwillingly cellar a new canned house beer which was ready just as they had to close the doors in early 2020. Luckily it's a monster whiskey-aged barley wine so no harm was likely to come of it. Olifant was brewed by La Source and is 14% ABV. It presents the innocent hazy orange colour of a fruited sour ale but goes to work on the other senses with a jackhammer, beginning with a powerful sickly-sweet vanilla aroma. Tasting continues the theme, bringing boiled sweets, dessicated coconut, a strange dark-malt roast and lots and lots of booze. Add in the sharp lime sourness and you get something that really isn't for me but is ideal for anyone who has found their senses dulled by the virus. Subtle as the name implies, this one.

Moeder Lambic Fontainas was also on the "Wahey! Brussels!" pilgrimage route, another venue that has expanded its outdoor offer into any space available. There I had Vipere, also from La Source, a sour IPA. This is quite a bit stronger than I usually prefer, at 6.5% ABV, but still manages to hit the style points well. It's a bright hazy yellow colour with lots of lemon zest in the aroma and bags of spritz in the flavour. I got sherbet lemon sweets at the front, finishing on bathroom-cabinet lavender. It's perhaps more bitter than sour but there's plenty of both, making for super-refreshing beer with a fun dash of silliness. Yes it could have probably been done just as well at 4% ABV but it's nice to let oneself go sometimes.

Rumours of Gist's demise seem to be premature. The pub appears to be tipping along under new management and it was great to meet Eoghan Walsh for a couple of swift ones in there. I don't know if Epervier is meant to relate to Vipere in any way, but it's another La Source IPA, though not sour. Far from it, in fact: this is funky and dank, mixing the hop resins with burnt brown sugar in a very old fashioned west coast way. It's extreme, and challenging, but still highly enjoyable to drink. One for the grown-ups only.

Gist was also pouring Jawa, an IPA from La Source's neighbours, En Stoemelings. This is another west coast job, but altogether cleaner and more easy-going. Though the aroma is sweet, it's crisply bitter with classic grapefruit notes. Complexity takes a back seat, leaving something simple and very decent. Perfect conversation beer, at a modest-for-Belgium 6.5% ABV.

That concludes our initial go-around. The next post will take a look at the big guns of the new Brussels brewery scene, both of them working very hard at maintaining their presence in the city.

Year-end pints

This month makes it ten years since Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg suggested categories that beer bloggers might like to use for an annual run-down of the best in beer. I've stuck with it steadfastly since, even if I do change my criteria for the winners each year, and sometimes during the process of writing that year's entry. It's not meant to be taken seriously or considered meaningful, is what I'm saying.

2019 has been a dramatic year in beer, in Ireland and abroad. To mull it all over I've chosen something with a bit of wintery heft: Abbaye de Vauclair Biere Ambrée, a large bottle I picked up for loose change in Lidl. They're not lying about the "ambrée", it's a very ambrée hombre indeed: a beautiful clear polished-copper colour with a generous head which expertly laces the glass. I wasn't prepared for how sweet it is; it is extremely sweet, suggesting treacle, muscovado sugar and similar cake-baking ingredients you're not meant to eat raw. I was a few sips in before I noticed the balancing factor: a dry and slightly bitter tannic twang, which I'm guessing has both a hop and malt component. It doesn't stop the sugary onslaught but it does make it manageable, rendering the beer drinkable as a result. The sum total is a beer that's quite light-bodied for 6.1% ABV and tastes like a cup of very sweet cold tea. I quite liked it, but it's not one you can rush, which suited my needs perfectly. And so...

The Golden Pint Awards 2019

Best Irish Cask Beer: Porterhouse Yippy IPA
The decision to replace heavy, resinous Hop Head with pale dry Yippy was not without controversy. For the record I still miss HH's clean punchiness. To begin with, I treated Yippy like a newborn younger sibling, resenting its usurpation. It was some months later that I first encountered it on cask at Porterhouse Temple Bar and finally got it. I suspect the brewery has sneaked a Yorkshire bitter onto the Irish market dressed as an American. On cask it has that same blend of honeyed pale malt and waxy hop bitterness. It's clean, elegant, moreish and generally a fiver a pint. 5% ABV is a bit too high for a proper guzzlable session beer (bring back TSB!) so you have to pace yourself, but the result is very rewarding.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Land & Labour Coolship (2018)
The sour and the funk may become a bit of a theme in this year's edition as some Irish brewers are getting extremely good at this sort of thing. This one, sampled at this year's Hagstravaganza, was damn near lambic-grade and a very clear indication that local brewers are approaching that standard. There was also a blueberry version showing just how easy it is to mess up something this delicate. Steer your Coolship straight and true, and everything will be OK.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Wide Street Saison Sunday
It's their only bottle, but still the best beer they've released so far. I reviewed it here only a couple of weeks ago, but I hope I can avoid accusations of late-year bias by pointing out that I drank relatively few bottled Irish beers this year now that the can is king. I can see this category becoming the purvue of barrel aged beers. That said...

Best Irish Canned Beer: Wicklow Wolf Pointy Shoes
The canned Golden Pint has to go to a dark beer as we have had a slew of worthy examples from various local breweries in recent months. Larkin's Morrigan, White Hag Festa Nuda, Lineman's Astral Grains and Wicklow Wolf's own Apex and Locavore all deserve a share in this prize. But Pointy Shoes, brewed to mark Wicklow Wolf's fifth anniversary, and as the valedictory beer from the Bray premises, went beyond what any Irish stout barrel-ager has managed to create thus far.

Best Overseas Draught: Ca' del Brado Û baccabianca
Chasing the grape ales has become a travel pastime for me, one which doesn't always land great beer. I hit the jackpot in Billies in Antwerp, however, with this one from Emilia-Romagna. Ca' del Brado is a brewery now firmly on my drink-on-sight list.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: 3 Fonteinen Cuvée Armand & Gaston 2018
Every year should involve ticking a few things off the list, and I was happy to realise an ambition I'd had since the 2017 Toer de Geuze to go to 3 Fonteinen's tap room on an ordinary day and drink some beer there. And I did, and it was this, and it was very impressive. How much of that was down to the occasion? Who cares.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Crooked Stave Sour Rosé
I had to go all the way back to the start of the year to dig this one out. It's another super-complex mixed fermentation job, this time from the US. And it's permanently available in, among other places, the 4-for-€12 fridge at Stephen Street News. You're in a much better position to argue with me about this one than the previous two, but you have to buy it first.

Best Collaboration Brew: Jackie O's/Cycle Anything And Everything And Nothing At All
The runaway standout beer at the Fidelty beer festival during the summer. You think you've tasted everything that's possible to achieve with barrel-aged imperial stouts, and then along comes this. Fascinating and delicious in equal measure.

Best Overall Beer: Û baccabianca
I know. I'd love to have given this to something local, or to something readily available, but I look back on the finalists and think of my reaction to first tasting each of them, and this was the one that induced the cartoon-character-in-love effect. A-wooo-ga!

Best Branding: O Brother
The brewery's Off The Wall series of collaborations with graffiti artists began last year and has now clocked up two dozen beautifully designed cans.

Best Pump Clip: Five Lamps Tilted Drum
I liked the badge Five Lamps came up with for the Convention Centre's house beer, blending the building's distinctive shape with a beer keg.

Best Bottle/Can Label: YellowBelly Bushido
Well of course it was going to be a YellowBelly one. In picking a pastiche style for this black IPA, artist Paul really excelled himself. The beer was pretty damn good too.



Best Irish Brewery: Third Barrel
This was a tougher call than usual, with quite a few breweries doing amazing work. I'll save a special mention for Larkin's who've had some real stunners coming out especially in the latter half of 2019. But Third Barrel has really been putting the graft in. This year was the first time I found beers to impress me released under their Stone Barrel brand: Slammer and Awesome Sauce in particular. Third Circle's Needs More Cowbell and fruited Brett IPA were highlights, and then all the hyperactive hop activity under the Third Barrel label itself, as well as launching The Format, Pleasuredome and other client brewers. I'm exhausted just writing it down. I hope the pace is sustainable.

Best Overseas Brewery: Tilquin
Our dalliance was brief, but I had a lovely couple of sessions at the Tilquin blendery during this year's Toer de Geuze trying all their various experiments. They've never struck me as a particularly playful producer and perhaps it's the market that's pushing them into doing new things. Regardless, they're generally very good at it, that maple syrup lambic notwithstanding.

Best New Brewery Opening 2019: Wide Street
The promise of this all-wild-fermentation brewery in Co. Longford is enormous and the beers, in general, have been great so far.

Pub/Bar of the Year: La Venencia
Since I first visted this Madrid pub in 2009 it's been a firm favourite. I was actually apprehensive on going back last October, for fear it would disappoint. It didn't; it's still amazing. The best feature is that it doesn't serve beer, only sherry, so I get to put my notebook away.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2019: BrewDog Outpost Dublin
I've only been once and I haven't written about it yet, but I respect the sheer commitment of BrewDog in taking on 1,100 square metres of bar and restaurant space in the Dublin docklands and adding an in-house brewery to it. It's a big place and big things are expected.

Beer Festival of the Year: Fidelity
As usual I feared the worst: big queues and braying edgelords. But Ireland's first all-inclusive beer festival, organised by Whiplash and The Big Romance, was quite chilled in the end. There were lots of amazing beers and, if you didn't spend too long chatting, it was quite easy to get one's money's worth.

Supermarket of the Year: Fresh, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7
It's not what it used to be though I have found myself increasingly coming back to the beer section here, often finding things I couldn't source anywhere else. Supermarkets in general seem to have done away with continuously updated beer ranges -- it mustn't have been sustainable for anyone. Fresh is clinging on, though. Turnover isn't as rapid as you'd find in an independent, though I rarely leave empty-handed.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Redmond's of Ranelagh
I always have to make a special effort to go over, but it's always worth it. The exclusive beers created with DOT are what tipped it into the winners' enclosure for me this year. Shouts-out, of course, to my regular haunts DrinkStore and Stephen Street News.

Online Retailer of the Year: The White Hag
They sent me a free case to test their website, which was nice. It arrived very quickly after I ordered it, which was also nice. And the beer was good. Other than that, I had no cause to buy beer online this year, as usual.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Pierre Van Klomp Says No: Life, Death and the Meaning of Beer
Another default award this, being the only beer book I read this year, and that was in ten minutes over breakfast on the morning it arrived. It's still a beautifully put together piece with evocative photos as well as earthy Belgian wisdom. Thanks to Pierre's literary agents Boak & Bailey for sending it to me.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Food For Thought
You may have noticed the occasional snarky morning tweet from me about the drinks industry. And the occasional genuinely interesting industry news story. Many of these are fuelled by the daily email from FFT, so this is just by way of thanks to the team there for all the hard work they do collecting and presenting Ireland's hospitality news.

Simon Johnson Award For Best Beer Twitterer: @BeerFoodTravel
Liam has been a bit quiet on the long-form front recently, but his snippets of Irish brewing history throughout the year have been enlightening. He takes a good beer photo too.

Best Brewery Website/Social Media: Galway Bay Brewery
I don't think I've ever given the pub taplists on the Galway Bay website a nod, and they deserve one, even if they're not always up to date (has somebody lost the keys to the Against the Grain page?). The Black Sheep is generally spot on, I get a Twitter notification when something new is tapped, and I find that very useful.


And that's another year over. Thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.

Not the Toer de Geuze

The 2019 Toer de Geuze is coming up this weekend. I'll be returning to Belgium for it, but before that I need to clear the notes from my last trip a few weeks ago, for the spring meeting of EBCU. Arriving in Brussels on the early flight on a Thursday morning, Dr John and I had an afternoon to kill. I had wanted to return to the 3 Fonteinen Lambik-O-Droom since the last Toer, to see it on a normal day, not packed with Toer-goers, and this seemed like an ideal time to do it.

The train from Brussels arrives at Lot and it's a short walk from the station, over the river Senne, to the boxy taproom. It feels a little like a primary school inside, with the brightly-coloured furniture arranged around large tables made from foudre lids. We opened our account with Cuvée Armand & Gaston 2018. It was fabulous: a bright red-gold colour and with a rich warm oaky flavour contrasting with a sparking flinty sourness. There's a bitterness in there too: hard wax and and an unusual-for-geuze citrus note too. The finish leaves a pleasant acidic woody buzz. This smooth and mellow chap is a beer for relaxing into, not that we had time for that sort of thing.

The cask engines were pouring 3 Fonteinen Faro, so we got a couple of those before leaving. This was much classier than I was expecting: sweetened geuze has a tendency to be harshly sugary but this retained an Orval-like funk next to a sherbet sweetness and a kind of fruity, spicy, brown-sauce tang. A slight soapy note was the only part not to like. Although it's not saying much, this is the best Faro I've tasted.

Our destination for the weekend was Antwerp, and changing trains at Brussel Zuid we had time to nip in to Cantillon where there were a couple of new-to-me beers. One was 50˚N-4˚E, a geuze aged in Armagnac barrels. It's quite sweet, in a funky/fruity way. There's a peppery spice and quite a severe waxy bitterness. Nothing that I could detect suggested the brandy barrels, and overall it's an OK but quite dull lambic. Not Cantillon's best work.

Neither is Magic Lambic, blended from Lou Pepe kriek and a blueberry lambic with added vanilla. Highly unorthodox. It looks wonderful: a clear ruby red. The aroma is sweet, like ripe and squashy raspberries, and there's a fair bit of that in the flavour too. It's not jarringly sweet, however, and the blueberries bring a significant balancing tartness. There's a strange herbal and floral quality too, part Parma Violets, part urinal cakes. Thankfully there's no vanilla taste, but I'm guessing it's working in the background, accentuating the fruit sweetness. Overall it's easy drinking and the quality of the base beer is still discernible, but it's maybe just too much of a nod towards alcopop lambic for me to approve of it.

To Antwerp, then, and at the back of the grand station is a small off licence, Station 1280, with a couple of draught taps and drinking-in space. The selection is very much Craftonian: brightly-coloured cans from the UK and Scandinavia, and even a handful from Ireland. Colourful cans of Belgian IPA are a rarity, but they had one of them: Nonkel Hop from Gistgeest. 6.5% ABV, it's brewed with Citra and Hallertau Blanc. It may not have been the freshest as it tasted a little stale, with a sharp bitterness and sweaty malt. There's a trace of apricot and passionfruit, but nowhere near as much as one would expect from something purporting to be in the New England style. If it was fresh the brewer has bigger problems.

I'd never had a beer from England's DEYA Brewery before, so took the opportunity to try Into the Haze since it was on tap. It's hazy all right: the de rigeur orange-juice yellow. There's a strangely minty aroma and the flavour isn't sweet as these often are, but herbal and quite bitter, with notes of satsuma and melon rind. At 6.2% ABV it's quite a big beast, but it doesn't taste its strength, slipping down indecently easy. It's a good take on the style, though not a terribly exciting one.

In the tall glass next to it is Bizarre Love Triangle by Finnish brewer CoolHead. This sour one looks even juicier, a lurid shade of orange from the inclusion of mango, passionfruit and peaches. There's a massive tropical hit in the aroma and it tastes more like a cocktail than a beer: thin and flat; tart and salty, with lots of passionfruit flavour. I enjoyed it, and was shocked to learn it's a whopping 7% ABV. Handle with care.

Before we move on, just a taster of an imperial stout from Yorkshire. Turning Point's Aggressive Hospitality is brewed with figs, almonds and golden syrup so I guess qualifies as pastrified. It's lightly textured for all that, and does a good job of hiding its 10% ABV. I would have sworn there was coffee in it as that's the dominant flavour, along with some fun and fruity pipe tobacco. I would have liked to become better acquainted with this one.

That's Station 1280, then. Worth a look if you're passing through Antwerp, with plenty of beers you wouldn't normally expect to find in Belgium.

We kept things craft with the next stop: Beer Lovers Bar is a bright corner pub with the IKEA aesthetic common to beer specialists the world over. I opened with an unfamiliar De Ranke beer: Franc Belge. It's 5.2% ABV and a hazy orange colour. A little like the classic XX Bitter, it's dry and pithy. There are subtle floral notes of honeysuckle and jasmine, but the bitterness level builds as it goes, eventually drowning that out. I found it just too acrid to really enjoy, preferring XX's superior balance.

Finally for now, one of several Dutch beers I had over the weekend: La Truite II by De Kromme Haring of Utrecht. It's a Bretted pale ale of 6% ABV and really shows the specialist yeast at its best: the gummy, fruity mango and cedar effect, and a dusting of floral lavender. The base is dry, like a waterbiscuit, so the Brett and hops can work their magic on the palate unhindered. While complex it's very easy going, everything subtle and balanced. Delicious.

We'll have more from De Kromme Haring in the next post.