Around London in 1 Book.

I've never been to London. Well, that's not exactly true. I was once there for two days. But my mission then was not to pub crawl, crazy at it may seem. So that doesn't even count, does it?

Now I'm ready. The other day I got my copy of Around London in 80 Beers in the mail. The authors are thirsty pilgrims Chris "Podge" Pollard and Siobhan McGinn, who you may know from such books as Around Bruges in 80 Beers. The publisher is Tim Webb's Cogan & Mater, alias booksaboutbeer.com. Buy them all, straight from the Web site.

Attention: Around London is essential for any beer lover visiting or living there. Or even thinking about it. The city's loaded with nice pubs, but how can you be sure you'll get the good stuff? This book skips the chaff and offers only the wheat, plus all the handy maps, transit info, and contact details you need to call ahead and make sure they're open. Not to mention a nice prelude from London barman pub-gaffer and beer-blogger Jeff Bell, a.k.a. Stonch, future author of Around London in 80 Packets of Pork Scratchings.

Did that sound like a sales pitch? That's odd.

Oh, what's this on the book's last page? It says, "Coming from Cogan & Mater..." then blah blah blah, oh here it is: "Around Brussels in 80 Beers, by Joe Stange & Yvan De Baets (April 2009)."

So. There's some more news.

More People to Blame for the Westvleteren Phenomenon.

According to legends now shrouded in mist, the great Westvleteren beer was once a well-kept secret. Or at least it was easier for the few people "in the know" to get their hands on the stuff.

Then one day, so the story goes, Ratebeer.com sprang up from the ground as if from nowhere. This site and its tickers proclaimed Westvleteren the best beer in the world. Suddenly the abbey had mile-long lines to get the liquid gold, which was going for $50 a bottle on eBay. The monks had to set up a (not so) complicated reservation system. The secret was out! Worst of all: the people who used to be in on that secret could no longer get their beer without a lot of trouble. Very annoying.

Ratebeer, in short, ruined it for everyone. Anyway, that's the conventional wisdom. But that's a bit too simplistic for me. Boring! So I've thought of lots of other people and things for you to blame.

Here are some ideas:

Why not blame the monks for making such great beer and making it hard to get?

Why not blame the fact that everyone loves a great story about a beer that's hard to get?

Why not blame all the major newspapers for covering it every so often, because it makes a good story?

Why not blame all the beer lovers who like that good story and want to get their hands on some?

Why not blame Tim Webb for giving it five stars in his incredibly useful books?

Why not blame Michael Jackson while we're at it, for initially getting beer tickers all excited in the first place?

Why not blame Al Gore for inventing the Internet, which created an age in which it's virtually impossible to keep a really tasty beer secret?*

Why not blame the loudmouths who keep going on about it?

* OK, I worry that future generations will think that Al Gore actually did invent the Internet, for all the cracks made about it. So listen here, future generations: Al Gore did not invent the Internet. Ratebeer did.

How to Get Westvleteren, the Holy Way.

This is for all you do-gooders out there who want to do it the monks' way. I raise my chalice to you.

1. Plan a trip to Belgium. You know you want to anyway. Rent a car so you can roam at will.

2. Call 070 21 00 45 (or +32 70 21 00 45 if you're outside Belgium when you call). Listen and find out when you can call back to get which type of beer.

3. Have your car's license plate number handy, and call again at reservation time. It will be busy. Perfect the art of quickly hanging up (or hitting the "flash" button) and hitting redial. If you're quick enough and do it for long enough, you will get through. Set aside some time, be patient, and remember the great beer that lies at the end of your quest. For the record: It's never taken me longer than 45 minutes to get through. Sometimes it's only 5 or 10 minutes.

4. When you get through, make your appointment. Don't worry, he speaks English. Tell him your license plate number and how much beer you want.

5. Courteously show up on time. In fact, be an hour early so you can enjoy one in the café across the street before you pick up your booty. Then go over and fulfill your quest. The 12 will run you €33 per case. That works out to a very reasonable €1.375 per bottle--about one-tenth of what those suckers are paying on eBay. Go on, buy a set of glasses while you're at it. They make nice gifts.

6. Take the treasure home, or ship it. Later, stop to admire the beautiful sight: multiple cases of the elusive Westvleteren, just sitting there. In your cellar.

7. Drink one. You earned it. And the brothers approve.

Sly Foxes, Disappearing Drunken Tour Guides, Trumpeteers in Cossack Outfits, and Other Belgitude.

Didn't have to be a bender on Saturday. But plow some fine people with plenty of lambic and €1.50 goblets of Witkap Stimulo, and that tends to happen.

We begin at the Rare Vos café in Schepdaal for some tasty vittles and a unique beverage found on cask there. This place is a bit legendary among the geeks; Michael Jackson wrote about it, Ommegang named a beer for it, and Tim Webb gives it a strong recommendation. The weather is perfect so we're more than pleased when they hide the loud Americans on the back terrace.

Girardin makes a special drink, named for the café, by blending lambic, gueuze (which is a refermented blend of old and young lambic), and faro (which is old lambic with some candy sugar in it). Confused? Me too. I'm not sure how old that base lambic is. But the final product comes out fruity, refreshing, and damned interesting. You can even get mussels cooked in the stuff. Me, I can't pass up the raw ones next to some 3 Fonteinen gueuze. After and before glasses of Rare Vos, naturally.

Then we're off to the open house at Slaghmuylder, where the Stimulo has begun to flow and some odd folk in costumes are carrying in various wind instruments. Inside the brewhouse, an old steam engine chugs away on an alternator. It's not clear whether this is a quaint antique or actually connected to the brewery. We'd like to find out, and a young curly-headed dude offers to give us a tour in English... once he finishes this next beer. Trouble is, he keeps getting a next one, and a next one. So do we. Before long, all hope of a proper tour is flushed down the port-a-potties, and we're lost in a crowd of drinkers enjoying a bizarrely costumed Balkan-style oompah band called Yah Tararah. To be frank, we are unprepared for that level of raw, eccentric belgitude. Somehow I manage to make a short video before we escape.

Finally in a stroke of pure indulgence we stop at the Heeren van Liedekercke on the way home. Yet another legend of beer geekery, thanks to its incredible cellar of vintage Belgian ales. By then I'm loose enough to drop the extra duckets on a special one-off gueuze made by 3 Fonteinen five years ago. This is the intense and ponderous J&J Oude Gueuze Roze. The other members of my crack drinking squad go for cheese and salami, but I'm trying to save myself for dinner...

Dinner? Oh hell, we're having friends over. Nearly forgot. I'm in charge of pairings: 3 Fonteinen gueuze (again? uh-oh) with fresh goat cheese, La Rulles Triple with a spicy Thai squid dish, and Struise Black Albert stout with homemade burnt-sugar ice cream. (Yeah, that's how we roll. You should come over sometime.)

Next morning, I'm trying to think of something better for a Sunday hangover than non-stop Olympics coverage on TV.

Nope. Drawing a blank.

Put This Post in a Barrel with Some Wild Yeast and Forget About it for a Few Years. See What Happens.

Barrels. Wild yeasts. Sour stuff. That's what's new and hot in craft brewing these days. But those are old magicks, aren't they?

The Bourbon Barrel-Aged Angel's Share from Lost Abbey in California just won the gold medal for best American cask ale at the Great British Beer Festival. There are a growing number of sour ales on RateBeer's excitable Top 50. (And if you adjust that to include retired beers you'll see several more lambics.) Several people have found this blog just by searching for the words "Dirty Horse." And thanks to those successes we'll be seeing more and more breweries experimenting with barrel aging and wild yeast in the next few years.

Maybe it represents a return to old knowledge, old ways. Wood and air instead of steel and laboratory yeast strains. Or more accurately, the best of both worlds.

Have young guns like Lost Abbey in the U.S. and Struise in Belgium surpassed places like Cantillon, 3 Fonteinen, Verhaeghe, Rodenbach... I don't think so. Apples to oranges, maybe.

That doesn't matter anyway. This does: There is a hell of a lot of interesting beer out there to try. Your new favorite could be just around the corner.

Going Where Unsmiling Women Dance for Hops in the Fields.

This weekend we're off to the open-doors day at Slaghmuylder, makers of the underrated Witkap beers. I've got a soft spot for the hoppy and sessionable blonde Stimulo. Nice from the bottle and even nicer fresh on tap.

The brewery's a straight 25-minute drive west of Brussels in Ninove, roughly where Flemish Brabant starts to become East Flanders. Like the Stimulo itself, this region is underrated. Between Brussels and well-traveled West Flanders you've got the lambic country of Pajottenland and the dark, barrel-aged ales of East Flanders. And plenty of other oddities, like the bone-dry "Flemish saisons" of Glazen Toren, whose brewery shop we aim to visit. Another possibility is the Casino café in Eine, home of the Cnudde old brown ale. Sadly we're told by friend and tourmeister Podge that the village's Kaffee Barbier beer café/barber shop has shuttered.

Maybe while we're out there we'll also see some unsmiling Flemish women dancing for the children, hops and wheat in the fields. Or something like that. That's right! Again with the Brel.

Promising New Brewery in Brel's Flat Country.

So not too long ago I'm at the Poechenellekelder, one of the city's top beer cafés, sipping a beer called Betchard. It's a refreshing blonde with a hoppier character than you typically get in Belgium. That's a good thing, since many blondes here lean toward sweet, overspiced, or just kind of boring. Not this one.

But I didn't know the story behind the beer or where it was brewed. The label said Brasserie de Tubize, which I was pretty sure didn't exist. Turns out I was right. It didn't exist... yet.

Evan Rail in Prague reports that Jean Rodriguez of Spinnekopke fame is close to achieving a dream: His Tubize brewery should be completed in October. In Belgian terms, that means it may be finished next spring. My fondest wish is that the Web site for his brewery someday adds a swell Jacques Brel song, just like the one for his restaurant.

I still don't know whether that particular Betchard I enjoyed was brewed by the smart Senne or prolific Proef. There ought to be laws requiring labels to penetrate such mysteries. But I do know to expect tasty things from Rodriguez and Tubize. This is a man who wrote a book on Belgian beer cooking, and I reckon his beer recipes will be written with food firmly in mind.

Meanwhile, Spinnekopke trucks right along. Its prices may be slightly inflated by guidebook-infused popularity, but in my experience the food usually leaves you happy. The 3 Fonteinen lambic and faro on draft don't hurt either.

Gueuze, Shellfish, and Other Perfect Marriages.

Raw mussels.

That's what lambicmeister Frank Boon said when I asked what food he liked best with his gueuze. This was after a tour of his brewery in January, arranged thanks to Andy Niel at Bier-Mania tours. Until then I didn't know mussels could be eaten raw, like oysters. Indeed they can.

Lacking the gumption to try raw mussels at home, the notion camped in the back of my mind. It sounded like something best left to professionals. Later I learned that you can find such professionals running a top-notch raw bar at Belga Queen in Brussels. And what do you know? They also serve Boon lambics.

So that's where the Missus took me for my birthday, back before our summer vacation. We didn't confine ourselves to mussels, ordering a heaping platter of various mollusks and crustaceans. We took our sweet time about it too, cracking them open one-by-one and washing them down with bottles of Boon Mariage Parfait. The beer's name was apt for many reasons.

An aside: The climate in the Brussels region is mild thanks to the air sweeping over from the Atlantic. This is the case even in winter, when lambic brewers chill their wort under the open breeze to collect the wild yeasts that ferment the beer. Local legend holds that the Senne River makes it all possible.

Nonsense. I think it's the ocean, only because I can taste it when lambic and seafood come together. Something about a tart, funky gueuze brings out the best in those squishy critters, and vice versa. White wine can't even touch that marriage.

But whatever you do, don't take my word for it.

Toward a Unified Theory of Food-and-Drink Pairing.

That's something I'm working on. Well OK, it's not really a theory. Just a simpler way of thinking about it. Less pretentious and mystical. More user-friendly, less snobby. In the end, it's all hedonism anyway.

Here's what I've got so far:

Taste really is subjective, so experiment. Palates vary widely. So do contexts and moods. Recommendations (Try that Rodenbach with some shrimp, my friend!) can be useful and occasionally spot-on. They make great starting points. But in the end, it's all about what you like. Experimentation--testing and tasting--is more than half the fun. Obviously this is true for any food and drink on its own. But I reckon it's especially important for pairing.

Connected with that idea: Pay attention to what you eat and drink. Most of the pleasure we get from beer, wine and food happens because we remember to check our senses. Taste especially, but also sight, smell and texture. It's sensual in the most literal way. The ability to stop, ponder and enjoy what we're doing is what separates us from animals.

Food and drink often taste better when we're on vacation. Usually that's because we want it to taste better, so we're paying more attention. I'd argue that you can have that in your own kitchen any day of the week.

I know, I'm probably reinventing the wheel. But some people earn a living by appearing to wield secret knowledge. Making it more complicated than it needs to be. Here it is, demystified: Play with your food. And enjoy it.

Ménage à Trois.

We're on a train to Paris in less than an hour. There I will continue hunting places to find good French beer in the French capital. It's not easy, friends. And I imagine some wine will cross our path along the way.

The main reason we're going down there is to attend a wedding, with a couple of friends, via the Internet. Seriously. Strange times.

Meanwhile we just got back from a perfect afternoon down at 3 Fonteinen in Beersel. Armand's Lambik-o-Droom is open. And one of these days I really ought to learn how to spell that name properly.

A sunny, pleasant day with some vintage gueuze. Then some mussels cooked in gueuze and a pitcher of kriekenlambic and then more gueuze. Then back to the tasting café for more old gueuze. Gueuze gueuze gueuze gueuze and sunshine. Incredible.

One day we will look back on our time here and be jealous of past selves. But you can be jealous of us now if you like. We don't mind.