Wednesday beer — Westmalle Tripel

The first Belgian beer I ever drunk was Stella Artois. I was 15, it was in a hotel in Ostend during my first holiday on the European mainland. I can’t remember much about it but I did like it (I recall a little off-licence right next to Harringay Station in the late 1980s that used to sell little bottles of imported Stella, which I loved. I didn’t know that it used to be dry-hopped then, which perhaps explained my brief devotion to it). 

It was during this time when I really started to enjoy beers from Belgium. First of all there was Duvel, thanks to a friend who worked in Eindhoven (I know it’s not in Belgium but he introduced me to it, and one night we had eight bottles, which is not to be recommended if my hangover the next day was anything to go by). Other beers followed: Chimay, Dupont, Orval and Hoegaarden, the latter being hard to avoid in early 90s London. Since then I have been over many times, visited breweries, interviewed brewers and remain devoted to many of its beers (though my love for Belgian beer is not blind, there are some stinkers). 

I was last over in November and am currently hankering after Belgium, especially as I recently bought a copy of The Belgian Beer Book, by Erik Verdonck and Luc de Raedemaeker. It’s massive, full of lots of lovely photos as well as plenty of text on the beers, bars and drinking cultures of both Flanders and Wallonia. When it arrived last week, I just sat there, flicking through the pages, and my thirst for Belgian beer continued to evolve and has since taken me by the hand and led me to my Wednesday beer, Westmalle Tripel, bottles of which I have been getting delivered from Exeter’s fantastic bottle shop Hops + Crafts. 

Trappist brewing for me is a collaboration between the sacred world of Cistercian monks and the profane one of commercial brewing, a bridge between the spiritual and the temporal. After all isn’t brewing just another form of prayer, doing the same thing, day after day, with maybe the odd change of words or recipe? And for me, Westmalle Tripel is one of the most generously flavoured and elegantly structured of this union of beers, a corn gold apparition that shimmers in its Grail-like glass beneath a well-blessed billowing head of snow-white foam. There is lemon, barley sugar and a siren call of sweet orange on the nose, while on the palate there is rich orange, a hint of peach, malt sweetness and a Mousse-like mouth feel, before it finishes with a sprightly hop tingle that makes me want to dive straight back into the glass. 

I visited Westmalle five years ago. Actually, a correction: I visited the onsite cafe/restaurant but the closest I got to the brewery was on an autumnal walk around the site with a group of judges from the Brussels Beer Challenge. Apparently, some of us were jumping in the air with the aim of seeing over the wall and getting a glimpse of the brewing kit. Maybe this is how I got the photo below — I should have bought a stepladder. Next time I will, unless, of course, I’m allowed in the brewery.

Breaking hearts

It’s playing in the background, ‘never gonna break my heart again’, what Coward called the romance of cheap music, and I ponder on the beer in front of me, Zundert Trappist, and I wonder if a beer can break your heart, or for that matter can a brewery break your heart, or is the hurt that some of us feel when a beer or a brewery vanishes similar to the two minute emotions of a song — transitory and enduring only as long as the song echoes in our thoughts?

And as I drink I think back to the morning as my coach pulled into Victoria at 6am and I saw a guy walking up the road, in full early 60s rockabilly (or was it greaser?) regalia — peaked hat, leather jacket with badges and slogans written on it, including one for the Pirates (Johnny Kidd and the Pirates I think), old school bike boots with white socks rolled up at top, jeans tucked in, denim new and durable, an outfit that was popular when the Beatles drank Mackeson, London Pride had an ad campaign based on an LP and Albert Seaton swigged his body weight in beer on a Saturday night and fell down the stairs in his local pub…

And the point is that this man was both celebrating and mourning a past he would never know, but things have moved on and those who want to drink the beers they drank in the past will find that they too have moved on, meanwhile the Trappist beer is ok, sugary and blanket-like in its smoothness, but I feel like I’m back in that coach watching the rockabilly guy, reliving a beer that never knew its past but is content to stride along the pavement, unafraid of what contemporary time thinks, undaunted in the pomp and passion of asking the past if it can answer the phone or come to the door or unfurl its flag and never break your heart again.

Is it time to take holy orders?

Last week Orval, this week a Trappist dinner at the White Horse. Is something telling me I should take holy orders? A tasting of beers from the seven Trappist breweries with a Chimay-accompanied meal was a chance to reengage with this most contemplative branch of brewing. Rochefort, Chimay, Westmalle, Orval, Achel, Westvleteren and Dutch uncle La Trappe: all served and dissected with care and attention by Belgian beer sommelier and Beerpassie Magazine editor Ben Vinken. Biggest surprise of the night? A bottle of La Trappe’s Dubbel, as complex as advanced algebra and a lot more fun, a beer my nose had been perpetually turned up at for as long as I can remember. A beer burdened with being bought and owned by Bavaria, purveyors of orange skirted Dutch lovelies to the world; a beer whose bottle had as much style as a sunburnt, lobster-red, cargo-panted Englishman on Dover beach, scowling at France. I stand corrected. My nose was caressed and cuddled by sweetish caramel-toffee notes with a background of banana, the sort of ripe banana where dark bruises are starting to show, making for a sweet treat. The palate was sweet fruit, plums, roastiness balancing the sweetness; in the background a hop-derived pepperiness, alcohol and an almond-marzipan dryness, while the dry and bitter finish had dark plummy notes, a soft cloistered toiling of the bell, calling all to compline. I picked my jaw up off the table and carried on. And the finale to this most excellent of tastings, a glass of a 1998 and 1988 Chimay Grande Reserve, side by side; the younger brother, earthy, alcoholic, vinous, Madeira-like at first and then Calvados sprung to mind (the bocage of Normandy, tilled soil after the first rains of autumn), minus the fieriness. And then the eldest of the lot, the head of the family (or should that be chapter?) — I probably had my first Chimay around 1988 but I should have held onto it and it would have turned out like this: chocolate and Cognac, still some carbonation, imagine a cold, alcoholic stewed fruit compote with a touch of brandy and then turned into a beer, the ideal beer to accompany a wild and windy night in the depth of winter with Dickens on your lap (one of the author’s books that is). Or if you are lucky to get hold of one in the summer, pour some on a scoop of good vanilla ice cream and drink the rest. Perfect.