On a visit to a brewery

The space/place/location is where we imagine ourselves living; imagine ourselves being part of, imagine how each morning we will look out of the window and reimagine how the day will go — the aroma of the wood smoke awakens within memories of a place that we didn’t really visit, but we feel that somewhere in our lives we were there. We mourned for the dog hit by the car, we scowled at the cat and imagined its role in our lives; we drank the beer our employees, whose names we know, but whose names we don’t really know, make, the beers that they package, the recipes they devise; we belonged and yet we didn’t. The land across which we looked towards the small white-washed chapel is not ours, the land in which the brewery is placed is not ours, but yet we feel for that one sparkling sunny Monday morning that we are part of it. We drink the saison, the dubbel, the farmhouse IPA, the wood-aged noir and we know and bask in the nuances and nourishment of the beer inside these sturdy bottles. We feel and field the flinty vinous notes, the shades of vanilla and coconut, the bitterness and the dryness and chocolate and coffee and dried fruit and wood and we grasp the nature of this brewery to which we feel for that brief morning in the middle of Ohio we felt we belonged to (and as we leave the brewery a fleet of empty yellow school buses trail along the road going from who knows where to god knows where, it was that kind of morning). 

God knows when I first drank a saison

God knows when I first drank a saison, sometime in the early 1990s perhaps, maybe after reading Michael Jackson and thinking that the beer he described was rather interesting; at the time I was drinking wine (as well as beer) and also thinking about the wine I was drinking and I wanted to do the same with beer.

The first beers I really thought about were Bavarian Weizen (back in 1988 they were a revelation and I can still pour a bottle into a glass super quick as was shown to me by a barman in an Eindhoven pub then), but Belgium followed — there was a deli in Stoke Newington in 1992, which is where I then lived, that sold Delirium Tremens, and of course there was Belgo, whose Camden branch was very close to where I worked.

In 2005 I co-organised a British Guild of Beer Writers trip to Wallonia that included visits to Silly, Lefebvre, Du Bocq and Cantillon (my second, I was first there in 1996). I do remember being excited about Silly Saison but several years later when I wrote a piece on saison for All AboutBeer I thought it had become much sweeter. 

On the other hand, saison as a beer style/variety/expression was starting to really dig away at me. What on earth was a saison? And when I wrote my AAB piece I contacted Garrett Oliver who came back with the following quote: ‘In my mind, there are really only a few things truly required of a saison. It must be dry – residual sugar would have a considerable effect on the beer’s ability to keep through the summer. They should also be fairly hoppy. Moderate alcohol, 5- 7%, would make them strong enough to last for a while, but not so strong that they’d stun the farm workers who drank it. So perhaps it is not a style that lends itself to orthodoxy, but rather one that originally existed to answer a question – “what can I brew that’s nutritious, refreshing, tasty, and will last for at least a year in the cellar?”’

So with that in mind I tasted Firewitch from Cheddar Ales, a brewery more known for their solid cask beers and when I got a press release and the offer of a bottle I was interested to try it. As soon as I popped the cap I could smell Soriachi Ace; it dominated the nose, a sort of soft, meringue lemon, dank hop sack character, and then it was followed by a soft lemony and bittersweet and flinty and bitter and spicy template of flavours on the palate, a billowing of flavours with a high dry finish — a modern saison indeed and I must say that it’s rather good.

Brussels Beer Project

Delta force

The beer flows into the shapely glass, a long stemmed, full-bodied glass marked with a simple logo; the beer is golden-orange in colour, dulled and hazy, the sun seen through a layer of thin cloud; a tub-thumping, No 1, prop-forward meringue-white collar of foam squats on top of the beer, while down below minuscule chains of bubbles rise upwards, seeking to escape the beer; bubbles giving up their existence to anchor the beer’s effervescence onto the drinker’s tongue, talking of which there’s a rugged and robust spray of passion fruit and pineapple on the palate, with a dry and voluptuous finish and a scattering of bitterness, as if a palm full of coins were thrown onto a table (with less contempt of course). This is not an easy beer (it’s a Belgian IPA with saison yeast for Odin’s sake), it’s complicated and constant in the demand it makes on the palate but I discover that continued study of it makes me very happy.

The name of the beer is Delta and it’s a beer I tasted yesterday in Brussels, in the company of Sébastien Morvan, co-founder of the Brussels Beer Project, which at the moment is having its beers brewed by BrouwerijAnders (there are plans for a physical brewery next year, which will only be the third brewery in Brussels). So what you might ask, another gypsy brewer, another cuckoo in the nest, another contract brewery, but there’s something different about the BBP (nice logo by the way). Morvan and old friend Olivier de Brauwere started out last summer and went straight for the crowd funding model, using Facebook to raise funds and gather support (there is also an element of regional funding). There’s been a minimum of PR and a flutter of social media but from the brief time I spent with Morvan it seems that the idea (as well as the beer) has captured the imagination of Brussels’ beer people.

Sébastien Morvan gets the beers in 

‘We told people that for 140 euros they would get 12 beers every year for life,’ says Morvan, ‘and when we posted this we got 369 people signing up instead of the 200 that was our objective.’ As well as this, there is also regional funding and the guys have become celebrities (of sorts) with their own radio show, while the Belgian monarch Albert II was presented with a specially designed beer. There’s even been a collaboration brew with Quebec-based Du Lac St Jean, which resulted in an Imperial Chocolate Porter.

If this sounds slightly corporate or beer made with a branding market in mind, then time spent with Morvan will soon disabuse this. ‘We are funky, cosmopolitan Brussels, we are not the Brussels of the Grand Place,’ he says; the use of the word funky being literal as he has plans to produce a Berliner Weiss with added Brett. ‘We are very interested in using acidity in our beers, obviously in the right way.’ All this is said quietly and confidently and you get a sense of the patience and — dare it be said — passion that drives the BBP.

‘You cannot discount tradition,’ he continues, ‘and we also look around the world for ideas.’ Which is perhaps why Delta has Citra (plus the Bavarian variety Smaragd, formerly known as Emerald), but there’s an added story here. Part of the BBP’s brief is incredibly democratic: they brew four prototype beers and then ask people to decide which one will become a regular. At their first tasting 850 people turned up and 66% chose the Delta as the favourite. That’s it. The other three beers are not brewed again, while Delta is now a regular. At the time of our conversation, Sébastien was toying with the idea of the next quartet of beers for consideration, including the aforementioned Berliner Weiss.

Now this is how to get information
out to the drinker

I try another beer, which didn’t get through the preliminary rounds of the BBP’s voting: this is Dark Sister, a black IPA the colour of dark, stained mahogany — it has an oily texture, through which restrained bitter chocolate, grapefruit and orange notes flow; it’s also earthy and elemental without smelling of the dung heap while the finish is grainy and dry with a short scattergun of sweetness.

This is post modernist brewing, a journey undertaken without maps but instead with memories, moments and fragments of ideas and influences. It’s the making of beer with a sense of adventure and excitement as well as a sense of naivety (it’s refreshing that the word branding is not uttered once); of course it could all be so much hot air if the beers were poor but as Delta and Dark Sister showed they’re not.

Belgian beer

In a high-ceilinged wood-panelled room, tall windows overlooking the frenetic human chessboard of Grand Place, a man talks: ‘Belgium is a small country that likes to conquer with beer and food.’ There is then talk about Pils being on the decline in the country and craft beer sales starting to grow; the backslapping continues with news of the success of beer exports. This then starts me off thinking and recalling several other strands of thought from people I had tapped into over the past couple of years: is Belgian beer sitting on a time bomb? The following couple of days judging at the Brussels Beer Challenge while talking beer and drinking beer and being beer reminded me that there might be something in the future of Belgian beer that needs to be addressed in the near future (or it might even be addressed now, as those in the Belgian brewing industry in that room were well aware of the issue). 

For those for whom beer is an infrequent source of either refreshment or liquid pleasure, I would guess that for them Belgian beer rests on a nest of laurels laid there by the likes of Leffe, Chimay, Stella and Kwak (nice glass, that would look good on the sideboard mum, perhaps next to the faux wineskin gran brought back from Spain in the 1970s) plus whatever sweet gueuze you can get in those tiny shops that dot the centre of Brussels (this is Belgian beer in the same way visitors to Munich during Oktoberfest probably see Paulaner as representative of Bavarian beer). Outside the city, beyond the trails of tourists checkmating their bodies around the Grand Place, more enterprising brewers are throwing in hops, inculcating yeast strains, aging and withering their beers, turning them inside out and op, applying a variety of grains and spices and then selling their wares to America and other parts of Europe rather than to the local café, where the regulars like their Jupiler. I think I first was aware of this trend when visiting one small brewer in 2006 and learning that the majority of his beers went to the US.

There are some great Belgian breweries, both craft and longer established, but I sometimes feel that the country is eclipsed by what is happening elsewhere and that some of its more established brewers are happy to sit back, look at their fob watches and think ‘we are Belgian’ in a German or Czech manner, but after my sojourn in Brussels I’m starting to have these thoughts: might Belgian beer find itself in a bit of a pickle if overseas’ markets collapse?

Things I like about Belgium

I spent most of last week in Ghent researching a gastronomic travel feature that included a visit to Gruut (love the fabulous Brune), various restaurants, churches, bars, sweetshops and a ‘nibbling’ tour, but here are five things that make me love Belgium so much. 

• In the Belga Queen, after I have finished my glass of Boon Kriek (memorably matched with cured trout and a blue cheese sauce), the waiter asks if I would like a glass of draught Rodenbach because it comes from his home town. ‘It would make me very happy if you had one.’ And it made me very happy and went well with the shrimp croquettes, while the Boon Mariage Parfait was a dream on the right side of the bed with the Charolais tartare.
• Then there are the two middle aged women in the Surinamese restaurant Faja Lobi where I go for a restorative lemongrass soup — one is drinking Westmalle Tripel and the other is drinking Orval. No big deal, no need to go on about women and beer, it’s a given — where did we go wrong in this country?
• Then there is the guide who takes me on a gastronomic tour around old Ghent on Tuesday morning and tells me how her grandmother is a big lover of Westvleteren and that she uses two cars (and two separate license plates) so that she can get two cases of beer when they are available; about how her dad comes from Poperinge and likes Hommel and about how her mother loves Westmalle Tripel and might have had one not long after she was born (the guide that is). At 11am, after we have visited a butcher and a cheesemaker and she says how about a beer…
• When I arrive at my hotel, the manager is having a drink which is Chimay Bleu, I don’t see many hotel types in this country doing that (oh and isn’t having a coke with a meal a sort of infantile breast-sucking gestural reaction — I noticed a couple of English-speaking corporate types doing it).
• A man and his marital problems and his lovely dog buys me three Rochefort 10s in the pub and that is what pubs/bars/whatever are about — stories, beer and instant friends. 

Oh and on the way home at the Raven in Bath, the landlord goes around offering a meat pie free because an order was mucked up. Art Brew’s Monkey IPA is a decent English-style IPA as well. 

A warehouse is where you will find Brasserie de la Senne

A warehouse. Said with a slower sense of occasion than you would normally say the word. A warehouse. And oh it was once an industrial bakery.

This warehouse is the home of Brasserie de la Senne. It’s on the south side of Brussels, an anonymous area — anonymity the brewery’s stock in trade as well. Nothing that says: here is a brewery.

Inside there’s a massive space, dotted with brewing equipment. Over there a double-headed hydra of brewing kettle and lauter tun (German made, second hand); in another ‘room’ the fermenting vessels (especially made to replicate open fermentation) simmer, while a further ‘room’ is expressed by a silent family of maturing tanks — ‘we are convinced that maturing makes our beer’ I’m told. And as a great advocate of beers being ripened who am I to disagree. Back in the big space a bottling line awaits.

Yvan de Baets, one half of the brewery (or maybe one third if you include the guy who does their artwork), waves his hand at a largish empty space to the back: barrels with all types of beer undergoing the big sleep will be stored here within the next 12 months (one of the superstars of West Coast craft brewing who also has a penchant for barrels is coming over to collaborate). Old wine barrels are part of the plan.

By a makeshift bar (‘we are building a pub’), at tables, a group of raucous beer drinkers carouse and I know by their faces that bear (and bare) a sense of joy that they are well versed in this sort of occasion. Later on, they reveal themselves to be members of a Flemish beer club who we’d seen earlier in the day at Cantillon.

Do you like the beers someone asked? Of course came the reply, guttural and spat out with a good-natured undertone of ‘who wouldn’t’. We try them. Taras Boulba. Zinnebir. Jambe de Bois. All superb with the latter having a full sweetish body and the mouth feel asserting a flinty aromatic peppery quality. These are beers that like a high bitterness but there is also something else about them, which is why I ask de Baets an innocuous question.

So looking at the stylish bottle labels with their nods towards 30s propaganda posters and Soviet constructivism I ask: are you a political brewery? I had wanted to say are you a left wing brewery, but that seemed rather trite. He in his turn gathered around him the children of the tribe called nonplussed and said something like ‘I make beer for defending values’.

Then he moved onto riff on bitterness.

‘We like bitterness. I have always try to understand the enjoyment of bitterness. Bitterness differs between humans and animals.’ He then started talking about animal instincts, and how humans liked various flavours. It was one of the most intellectual approaches to beer and brewing that I have ever come across and I (along with the rest of the group) was fascinated.

‘People who like bitterness get more pleasure that people who don’t like it,’ he continued. In this way he unleashed a whole theory on why animals and humans are different in their approach to bitterness — and the beery corollary of this was that de la Senne’s beers are bitter, much more bitter than most Belgian beers. I love that — my disillusion with the sugary nature of some Belgian beers kicked in a few years back. De Baets talks with measured calmness, with a certainty and belief that marks out great brewers (of course it helps he can make great beer as well).

And as the Flemish party started to disperse for pastures wide with the odd song, our taxis arrived bringing one of the most magical conversations I’ve ever witnessed with a brewer come to an end. For now. 

Why Orval is the best beer in the world at a certain moment in one’s life

I’m in a restaurant in Wallonia, not a beer restaurant, just the sort of well-run place that caters both for visitors like myself and locals who fancy something different. As it happens I am the only one in there that night, having dashed in from a long rain shower and — shaking myself like a terrier who has been just been hauled out of an Exmoor river — I explain in my kindergarten French that the tourist board has reserved a table for me. I am offered the run of the house, were would I like to sit? Remembering that Wild Bill Hickock met his fate because he sat at a table that faced away from the door, I choose one that faces the door. Would I like wine I am asked by a young lad with spiky hair? No thanks a beer please, this is saison country after all. Carlsberg comes the reply. Even here in Tournai, it’s depressing that I am being offered a beer that I would be offered throughout most of Western Europe whatever the beer culture. No thanks, any Belgium beer I say, dreading Leffe, whose Tripel was a mainstay on a southwest France holiday in 2005, but whose blonde I find a Demerera-sugared irritation. He comes back with a tray on which sit bottles of Orval (ideal shapes for West Country skittles), Chimay Bleu, Stella and possibly Leffe, but as soon as I saw Orval my mind was made up. Orval it was — I love that beer, a beer that has the influence of Brett, a beer that is both so satisfyingly complex, moreish, creamy, bittersweet, palate refreshingly citrusy and as this restaurant shows quite commonplace. I am served turbot in a creamy shrimp sauce which is bossed over by the Orval, bringing out the creamy and citrusy notes of the beer and also cutting through the cream of the sauce. It is delicious. I remember that this is not haute cuisine, biere cuisine or even good gastro-pub stuff, it’s just ordinary for this part of the world. I sat there wondering where in the UK in an ordinary restaurant, you know the small town high street gaff with French cuisine pretensions, would you get such a wonderful and complex beer. In the UK some might have the local ale, a bitter or a golden ale, pasteurised to high heaven, but this is the local ale. No one else comes into the restaurant while I eat, which is fine — and besides I wouldn’t have noticed, so engrossed was I in contemplating and considering the Orval. Another thing that occurred to me, later on, in another bar, with more people about, well-fed and well-watered, as I enjoyed the rich orange liqueur-like character of Triple Karmeliet, was that there is no such thing as the best beer in the world — just the best beer at the right moment and in this case Orval in a touristy restaurant in the town of Tournay fitted that bill as snug as a bug in a very snug rug.

St Bernadus 12

St Bernadus 12 — what a lovestruck poem of a beer, a rhapsodic outpouring of liquorice, mocha coffee, chocolate, spice and alcoholic richness that deserves to be worshipped; an end of evening thriller that sends one to bed mellow, beaming with a smiling sense of how wonderful beer can be. In my cellar it stands on the shelf, the deep rich blue label with the smiling monk on the front a high note of colour in a muted forest of other bottles with their labels of pale burgundy, light denim blue, Stygian darkness with golden lettering picked out like searchlights in the sky. This is a beer made to be studied. And next time I contemplate a glass of 12, I have a hankering for serving it alongside a plate of rabbit ravioli. I cannot wait.