The comedown

The day after the Borefts beer festival was another cold and sunny one. We got a late morning train to Amsterdam and started with an early lunch. The restaurant's beer of the month was Goudkoppe, a blonde ale by Texels (do they have a dark one called Badkoppe? They should). 6% ABV and a very nicely put together version of this common style. Lots of fresh mandarin comes out first, followed up with the earthy Belgian yeast tang. Spritzy and refreshing, and just the thing to whet my appetite for more beer tasting.

In past years Beer Temple has been the first port of call on post-Borefts Sunday, but as I reported earlier in the year, the wonderful Gollem is now back in business and most wonderful of all opens its doors at noon on Sundays. Not too many drinkers it must be said: lost tourists, some other Borefts stragglers (hi Chris!) and one lonely determined alcoholic. The first beer on the modest taplist that caught my interest was Foxy Lady, seemingly a follow-up to the lacklustre Tasty Lady brewed at Breugems which I encountered last year. This one is rather better, with a complex mix of fruit and spices incorporating incense, concentrated tangerine plus sharp grapefruit zest on the end. The malt element provides just enough biscuit sweetness for balance.

After that, there was nothing new to me on tap and I wasn't in the mood for taking a gamble on an unfamiliar bottle so I settled for a draught glass of Troubadour's Magma and was very glad I did. I had a bottle of this a while back and reckoned it was a bit past its best. It was a whole different experience this time, the hops beautifully fresh and flavourful, giving the perfect bitter and citric counterbalance to the heavy malts.

From there to our traditional final destination of Arendnest, the pub which offers an exclusively Dutch selection of beers. Lo and behold, there was a third in the lady series: Smoky Lady. I couldn't resist. This is a clear blonde, sweet and massively smoky, blending heady perfume with Laphroaig whisky, the phenols turning a little towards TCP in the aftertaste. I rather liked it but wouldn't expect anyone else to.

The hops from the Magma were still at the front of my mind, however, so I decided to check out what they had by way of pale ales while the missus got stuck into the barley wines. Oedipus Brewing is a new one to me and their pale ale is called Mama (of course). It's a full 6% ABV though doesn't do much with that. It's a simple beer, verging perhaps on dull. There are some pleasant peach and orange sherbet flavours but no burst of zing and no bitter staying power. You'd have a decent pale 'n' hoppy session beer if it wasn't so strong.

I expected bigger things from a beer called High Hops by Maximus, based in Utrecht and another unfamiliar one. High Hops is the same strength as Mama and darker in colour: more orange than yellow, and this is accompanied by a slightly sickly toffee-candy aroma. Uh-oh. But it's not a crystal malt sugar bomb: the toffee is present in the flavour, but restrained. Unfortunately the hops are too, offering little more than a vague orangeade sweetness. Disappointing and not as advertised.

So it's back to De Molen to finish off. Cease & Desist is yet another imperial stout. 11.5% ABV this time but smelling and tasting much much stronger. It's extremely hot, and intensely flavoured, full of the distilled essence of coffee and treacle. I felt it lacked the usual finesse of a De Molen imperial stout. From the bottle menu I had to give Angst & Beven a go: my first imperial gose, at 12.2% ABV. Well, "gose-ish" says the label. There's no salt listed in the ingredients. It pours a dark honey amber and has a barley wine's sweetness at its core, flavoured with blood orange and mango notes from the hops. This is balanced by a wonderful barrel-aged woody sourness which keeps the whole thing dry and refreshing for the most part, though it does lean a little towards cough mixture at the end. A very interesting experiment and a beer well worth trying.

And that concludes Borefts weekend for 2013. It's back to my sadly neglected beer fridge from Monday.

Not on the level

Flat surfaces are hard come by on the streets of Amsterdam. When having drinkies outside Arendsnest last September with the wife, Zak Avery and Rick Kempen, I harboured a constant fear of my glass sliding sideways off the table and into the Herengracht. Thankfully we all managed to keep it together long enough to get a few down our necks.

Pairs of beers are always interesting, so picking randomly from the Arendsnest blackboard I had an Ongelovige Thomas by Jopen. "Doubting Thomas" is a 10% ABV barley wine which manages to pull off being unctuous and hot while still remaining drinkable and flavoursome, throwing plenty of fresh mango in with the marker pen. Its credulous counterpart is Gelovige Thomas by De Molen: two points stronger but similar in a lot of ways. There's no doubt that all the alcohol is in there: it has cockle-warming caramel aplenty, but once again the hop fruits are also very present bringing balance to the picture, causing the beer to disappear much too fast, when one is seated on an incline.

Sticking with these two first-string Dutch breweries, the next round brought De Molen Dubbelbock, another one in the strong mahogany genre, though with a single-figure ABV. At first I didn't make the link between this and normal red, sticky Dutch autumn bock, but that's what it is, just done very well with everything turned up a little higher: more toffee and more herbs. Mooie Nel, say Jopen, is an IPA. 6.5% ABV and hopped with a heady mix of Citra, Simcoe, Nelson Sauvin and Glacier it throws out masses of gorgeous tropical fruit: the pineapple effect when Nelson Sauvin is behaving itself (when it isn't you get cat wee). The base is soft and heavy, like a Belgian blonde though without any major Belgian yeast notes spoiling the hop party. Jopen is the Dutch brewery I keep forgetting the brilliance of. I must pay them a visit in Haarlem some time soon.

Rick explained that the dodgily-named Tasty Lady is the creation of a group of women (here they are) at the Breugems Brewery in Zaandam. Without meaning to stereotype or anything, it's a very bubbly blonde which smells quite perfumey. My notes say there was a toasty characteristic as well, but to be honest I've no memory of how it tasted, just that no one at the table of either gender was very impressed.

De Snaterende Arend is the brewing company in charge of the house beers for Arendsnest and its sister pub Beer Temple. Among its other beers -- brewed at various sites around the Low Countries -- is Roodburst, a gorgeous red-orange number smelling strongly of toffee but heavily hopped-up giving it a dank and funky quality which I really enjoyed.

Big surprise of the session was the new IPA from Amsterdam's veteran microbrewery 't IJ. Their labels have always had quite an old-fashioned theme, with only the colours and wording changing around the ostrich logo. For 't IJ IPA they've gone for a different sort of leggy bird: a mid-life crisis Harley Davidson of a design. There's a bit of the signature 't IJ funk about this at first, with obviously plenty of suspended yeast in the hazy orange liquid. But underneath the pithy hops are also making their presence felt, adding a stimulating sharpness. Really it's not a million miles from the kind of bitter and funky IPAs that lots of Belgian breweries are turning out these days.

So that was the slanty Arendsnest. We had started out previously in Beer Temple, a short walk away. The menu has got a little more diverse in the three years since it opened, incorporating more local fare among the American beers, but also including unfamiliar breweries from unexpected places. Like Bridge Road in Australia, and their Beechworth Pale Ale. This is a sticky and bitter golden concoction with a heavy accent on the oranges. How it manages to be as thirst-quenching as it is I do not understand.

From the US offerings I picked Southern Tier's Back Burner, an oak-aged barley wine. It's smooth and sweet to start with; the hop kick coming in late and gradually, building from jolly juicy mandarins to more serious pithy jaffa and then on towards more bitter, herbal territory. It's only when it warms that the oak shows up, and it brings quite a harsh, sappy flavour which is often a risk with barrel-aging. I presume it's some combination of these elements that gives it an odd burnt coconut flavour as well. It has all the elements of a great beer but doesn't quite put them together in the right way, unfortunately.

Drinking in Amsterdam is rarely wall-to-wall gold, but there's always something interesting.