A Letter From Belgium

The Beeriest Weekend, Part 2

Beer Travels December 30, 2004
Written by JorisPPattyn

Wilrijk, BELGIUM -

At Aubechies, I buy six bottles, which I will not keep long to. As a bonus, a bottle of hydromel, produced locally. Lut is getting nervous; she wants to make dinner and feed us before we go on evening excursion. No way with me, I have to do an intermediary stop. Indeed, the way home leads past Oudenaarde. And on the Oudenaarde – Gent road, there’s a little exit to Eine. Dull sleeping town if any, industrial, but also the home of the Cnudde brewery, one of those relics of a forgotten past. How the three inheritors, sons of the last brewer Louis keep this brewery going on in HACCP days is unclear to me, but the result is what counts: one of the last real Oudenaards bruin beers. Officially named “Louis V”, this beer is just known as Oud bruin, and is never bottled. As usual, we go and drink it at the brewery tap, a hyper-rustic pub called “Casino”, under the brewery tower. As good as ever, despite its apt rusticity, it causes us to stay longer than meant – as landlord Tony is honoured to find his old-time visitor, then from Antwerpen, these days living in his own native village, in company of an honest-to-God American brewer, and insists on offering us a second round.

<IMG border=0 width=350 SRC=/images/features/Cnudde.jpg>
A glass of Cnudde Oud Bruin. How long will Europe allow it?

We are now definitely late for the meal, the more as Lut bursts a bomb upon me. It appears she has plans of her own for the evening, and instead of taking the both of us AND the bicycles to the Aalter station, we have to take a quick bite of hard gingerbread, a glass of water, and to set out pedalling in near-freezing temperatures. One has to earn those beers. Destination of the evening: the legendary Brugge pub “Brugs Beertje” where Regenboog brewer Johan B. (shortened on expressly stated demand) is waiting for us. We find him at the bar, with Daisy in attendance. While David is sampling some varied beers, I set out for a fully Regenboog/Smisje coloured evening, starting against all rules with the best: the Calva Reserva, the Smisje Kerstbier lagered months on real Calvados casks. As I say in the rating, why some people call these initiatives a threat to genuine Belgian beer is beyond my understanding. As to Johan’s. The beer proves to be outstanding. I sample subsequently two more Regenboog beers, as Daisy states herself sadly out of stock of untried beers, adding a saucy remark about the difficulties of serving the likes of me. Phew! I’m so easy – I’ll try anything… provided it’s new to me. “Exactly!” she says, ending the conversation, leaving Johan rocking with laughter.

I have to make amends. Probably lucky for me that not all pubkeepers are as extraordinarily efficient as Daisy, or I’d live in the pub by now. Or at the Salvation Army. After the last Smisje (a Bourgondier), we go looking for another pub. I should have known better to try Erasmus that late. Closed. So I get on the extraordinary idea to make some more amends, and look up De Zolder, whose landlord I clashed with once on the Net. This ends in a hilarious way, as it turns out that I only thought to know this pub. I aim for it unerringly, and then learn the place I had in mind lives under a totally different name. I will have to refer to Filip Geerts’ site once more.

You might have remarked by now that there’s precious little mentioning of food in all this beery violence. Well, we had a little snack at Daisy’s, but that is not a full meal of course. Lut’s admonishings about not leaving my companion unfed have gone unanswered, however. In fact, David confesses to be modestly hungry at best, so we end up doing a “Jeremy’s”, meaning a typical Belgian fastfood of frites-and-mayonaise on the market square. Then the station is winking… We manage not to fall asleep, and all thoughts of sleep get temporarily suspended on two icecold bikes for a monstrous 6.5 km.

Part 3 Friday

Friday’s the day the serious work starts. Already soon after getting the kiddies to school, we leave ourselves for the capital. I manage not to miss the motorway exit for once, but no avail, roadworks in Anderlecht oblige us to some more uncalled for sightseeing. As it turns out, we could consider ourselves lucky – the whole capital grinded to a standstill because of several manifestations. Why is it people always demand to be treated right by making life impossible for innocent bystanders? And Brussels with its notions of wanting to be the European capital!

We bring the Cantillon brewery to an early mess – Jean was working on filling some pipes, but clambers down. It gets traditionally haywire once Jean-Pierre and Claude come in. Especially Claude has an unbelievable endearing habit of trying to help everybody (visitors, special visitors, customers, callers) at once, each for a full thirty seconds, before dashing off to the next, and in the end, making everything take twice as much time as it ought to. Often more as for every second decision, she needs a second opinion of either son or husband, the latter excelling in answering her off the question on purpose. It’s one of the charms of this brewery. Infinitely worse than the wasted time (filled adequately with some tries of Cuvée des Champions, or Lou Pepe Kriek) is the announcement that my goal for today will have to be postponed. Not that Olli from Helsinki did not stand up to his promise – a bottle of Tyrnilambic for yours truly, as well as a bottle from his new experiment !CHUT – censored ! , but neither had been bottled already! No way of a taste, sniff.

They try to cheer me up with a new announcement – two more experiments, one from a Swedish-Austrian conglomerate (superb idea! Lambic with Edelrot grapes, noble putrefaction AND a dash of sweet wine), and another from Cantillon’s American importer (some typical American berry...). As this guy is my sworn beery enemy, that’s going to be some hunt. But there again, no tastings today. The world is looking gloomy. My wife adds to my growing feeling of unease (unlike her or David, I’m the only one who has a good idea of the gargantuan tasting task lying before us), when she insists on having a dinner after this visit. Moreover, she “suggests” Restobières, a beer-restaurant I think the world of, but : 1° I have an idea she might be less charmed by one of its aspects (it gives the impression of untidiness, without it being really that), and 2° if I go there, I usually end up a couple of hours longer inside than intended, the landlord being one of my fans, it would seem. We get there soon enough, and then it goes – at first better than expected, as Lut has no qualms about the place. Not more than me and David, who have had (legendary) dinner there already together. Even when deciding on sticking to a simple main course, this unbelievable wizard of the beerkitchen, turns out some great things for us. Lut is extraordinarily happy – but kept wondering in increasing terms about what I’ve done to get that kind of treatment in this place. She’s getting very suspicious about the time I spent here. Not anywhere enough, really. We delve into a great lunch.

This place has a beerlist. However, all the die-hards never bother about it. In a corner of one of the dining rooms, there’s a double fridge, with glass doors. This thing gets filled to the brim with everything the beerhunting owner collects. So far, he’s never failed me – there’s always something never encountered before. No difference today: a bit in the back, there’s a big 75cl bottle with an unusual neck-label, and I go for it unerringly. It proves, however, non-Belgian: Carlsberg “Semper Ardens” Winter Rye. The waiter pulls a strange face, but the landlord has already acquiesced in inevitability. He says it’s been a present from one of the EBCU-lords, and he will present the bottle to me, provided he can have a taste. Eeeuhhh, well, he can. On top of all that, the beer proves unbelievable good – we all agree. Virtually unthinkable it’s from the Copenhagen beerfactory.

Not to be deterred, at the end of the culinary fest (Lut insists on dessert), David and I share another mystery one: Kod(j)eel Strijtems bier. We suspect – and get proven right afterwards – De Proefbrouwerij. Not without some misgivings, as the beer is more than uncharacteristic for this rather “straight-technical” brewery. In itself not a bad beer, however. And now we are in real trouble. In less than half an hour, we’re expected by Frank Boon. That is in Lembeek, small town quite some way out of Brussels. Not only that, we need half an hour to get out of the inner city. After some unprintable exclamations, we turn on the Ringway, and speed south. Of course, Boon is found, and in my haste to stammer excuses for our late arrival, I dash after some kludde, who has vanished around the first corner. Luckily, before this vagrant spirit from this disused ironmongery has lead me into some slugpit and throttled me to death, the real Frank Boon has come out, welcoming us, commiserating with the Brussels’ traffic.

He leads us not in temptation (no brewery visit planned today), but straight into some buro-cratic inner sanctum, where even the Obergruppensturmführer from the health inspection could live with old things hanging around. Indeed, we have come with a double purpose: to talk about a project dear to Frank: put his unbelievable archives to some practical purpose, as well as to taste some liquid relics lingering in Frank’s cellar. He wastes no time, and goes searching for some corklifting implement, that might have some chance of getting out the forbidden-looking cork? cimentstop? on the prehistoric bottle waiting for us. After a lot of trouble, the cork moves out. Hurray! Finally I’m going to taste the legendary De Koninck-Proost Gueuze of another time. Then Frank sniffs, and starts laughing. “Gentlemen, I believe we are the proud possessors of a bottle of homemade cider!” he says. I feel the walls tumbling down around me. NO!!! Yes. It is cider – of another age. I’m near inconsolable. For luck, he has still a bottle of Kriek in the fridge, later.

Frank wouldn’t be Frank if the cider incident wouldn’t enable him immediately to link a historical lesson to it. Even in days immemorial, brewers had a hard time recuperating the Champagne-type bottles: they were sought after avidly by the Belgian home cidermakers. Having tasted this cider, I must confess it is way more similar to a sweet British farmyard cider, than to the here all-conquering Normandy ones. Franks stresses that it was always pressed juice with sugar added, to aim at 8-9 % ABV, always remaining sweet. I have also to concede that however sweet, this is far from bad. Age has given it a patina I’ve never encountered before.

We’re all in times of yore, now, as Frank and me set out to discuss our “project” (to do with the history of lambic). This is neither place nor time to reveal much, but I can only say that Frank launched the idea after reading a certain Ratebeer article! Base of the project would be the phenomenal collection of old archives and books Frank collected over the years. His library is gigantic, and is only outshone by his virtual encyclopaedic memory. Frank is not as much a walking encyclopaedia, as a walking library. All this is by no little means helped by the fact that he reads German texts in Gothic lettering as easily as I read the paper in Times New Roman.

When the second bottle is opened, I have to empty the chalice to its bitterest lees; no De Koninck-Proost, just the pedestrian De Koninck Gebrs. Well, seen the fact that that one stopped producing its own beers some 20-odd years ago, it is not exactly a current feature in pubs or shops. We talk (that is: Frank talks, I interject some remarks every other five minutes; David, not understanding a word, fights a heroic battle against nodding off; Lut tries to curb my enthusiasm), and time creeps on. At last I call it a day: Brussels and Antwerpener pubscenes wink. Frank has pointed out by then that going the same way back would be a monumental waste of time. He shows us the way to the Halle railway station. Lut having deposited us, drives off to find the motorway, David and me go searching for the ticket office, in a deepening gloomy dusk, worsened by a steadily increasing cold: the tone for the weekend is set. We board the IR-train to Brussels.

Mentally, I had already phased out my first stop. I had heard rumour of a one-off Christmas special at “Brouwers/Les Brasseurs v/d Grote Markt”, but seen the usual deplorable quality in this place, we leave it at its dark doings, and aim straight for the Delirium Café. Having reported on this phenomenon in these pages before, I will not reiterate about its specs. To cut it short (for the first time in this account, I suppose) we settle at the bar, and go leafing through the pages describing the current (Doppel)Bockfestival. David is happy as could be by retrying his favourite Celebrator, while I go for a more potent Michelsbräu Hexator. The classical bready, nutty malts start warming us, so I eye the rest, deciding to go even higher up the ABV scale with the Kaltenberger Ritterbock, whilst having persuaded David to have a go at a former GDR-brewery with its Zwickauer Bock Dunkel.

Sitting there, I fail to perceive owner Joël Pecheur, but not a stout gentleman with gently southern looks, accompanied by a dignified lady. Ha! Encounter of the first degree with platoonleader MRomero, private JPPattyn reporting for duty, Sir! No more missing in action, kissing I.A’es. We exchange some jokes, the ice is broken instantly, typical for beergeeks encounters. Over the second row of Bocks, I suggest David sharing a 75’er to close off, and dash for the station. Black Mortal, the umpteenth novelty by my overproductive, but genius brewer-pastrycook Jpie. But nothing is going to be what it should, this weekend. A blow as from an earthquake felled three, shatters my shoulder blade against my ribcage, and turning as in a Venusian atmosphere soup, I see David making a similar lunge forward. No, old age hasn’t finally got the better of me, Al Qaeda has not blown Brussels to smithereens, it’s just babbler MatW, freshly delivered by train from the UK, who decides to join his two chaps by giving them a friendly prod. By the time I have recovered my dignity as well as my dentures, and saved my beer, he’s nearly drowned his first try of the evening, and I manage to salve a sip of Gribousine. Nearly wish I hadn’t, it’s pathetic.

Mark urges us to have one on him, but before I can order Kosberger Broen – an even worse beer than the Gribousine, Mat has plunged into a shouting match with Cali, the landlord, who makes him a bet he can produce a beer even Mat hasn’t had before. With De Graal Tripel, he cannot fail to win, and I join the queue to have a sip. Whilst I finally start the “Broen”, I urge Mark to have one himself, and have to hurry in order to try Mat’s next one – Special Mortal, again a new one from Jamagne. Incroyable. Mat is of course joining us to Antwerpen and Kulminator, I have presented him with a bottle of old gueuze, for which he will richly bestow me with United Kingdomial brewings. We make plans, worrying increasingly about the time left in Antwerpen. Indeed, the last train from the Scheldetown back to Ursel-in-the-Woods – or Aalter, is pretty early.

When finally we depart, having bade Mark and wife a safe journey home, I’m doing mental gymnastics to figure out how we can gain time in Antwerpen. Not that we’re not having a good time – and while Antwerpen was to be the scene of a babblefest, some idiotic political boycott by some Brits seems to have aborted it partially. However, I’m set to meet people whose luggage is full of beers from all four corners of the world. Or nearly so. At the station, Mat loads my rucksack full of wrapped bottles, and we go down to the platform. Disaster – another half hour to wait. David and I decide for a piece of worst-case ferrovial fastfood, and whilst we eat our cholesterol bombs, I happen to look up at the board. Then, total disaster strikes in full strength: the awaited train to the North, is not stopping in Antwerpen Centraal, but goes on immediately to the Netherlands and A’dam. Which would leave us stranded in Berchem, a rat’s hole with virtually no direct links to the civilised centre. I retreat from a useless fight. I hand over Mat some more bottles, with specific instructions and wishes to their destinataries, begging him to explain our dead-end, and reminding people everybody’s going to be there at Essen on Saturday anyway.

David an me exit the station again. In the end, trying the Christmas at Les Brasseurs seems a good idea. As this is very little walking distance, we are soon to be found at the sumptuous counter, where the girl in assistance manages to look busy, serving an estimated 1 ½ customer. Finally, the “special” proves to be nothing but the ordinary brown, but I do discover a new entry all the same: no doubt with the goal of becoming the ultimate useless brewpub in the world, they have added a kriek to their portfolio… In the end, this almost saves the place, as it is halfway decent, which can hardly be said about the rest. What on earth possesses the inheritor of De Neve brewery, as well as Mark Knops, all-round brewer if any, to brew these abysmal excuses for beer, I will never get.

Tail between legs, we drift down to Brussels Central station. At least; there’s one pinprick of light: I can phone my wife, telling her we’re going to be at a quite decent hour in Aalter, as she has to pick us both (short of bicycles) up at the station. Whaddayathought! Instead of jumping for joy (or her prodigal husband) she complains bitterly about her ruined movie, she’s watching “Moulin Rouge”. David and I agree movies with the divine Nicole Kidman are meant for dirty old men, as ourselves, not for their spouses. Hours later, seated around the kitchen table, we decide to go for another Dupont product (Bière de Beloeil, a blended beer from Moinette), in honour of yesterday’s superb visit. It’s great, but we are knackered, even when Antwerpen is missing sorely. I gain some spirits with unpacking my beery gifts: a series of Pitfield Historical brews, the Australian fad of the moment (Little Creatures P.A.), and another British bottled microbrew from Braggart. Great, time for bed.

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Encounter of the first degree with platoonleader MRomero, private JPPattyn reporting for duty, Sir! No more missing in action, kissing I.A’es. We exchange some jokes, the ice is broken instantly, typical for beergeeks encounters.

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