Where to Hide in Limburg.

This is my favorite table at the Wedelse Molen, one of at least 600 reasons not to limit a Belgium visit to the big cities.

It's in Overpelt, a rural part of Limburg province, and surrounded by corn fields along the Dommel river. The Wedelse Molen is basically two things: (1) a protected landmark, as there has been a mill here since at least 1259, when the Count of Loon sold it to the Floreffe abbey; and (2) a pretty excellent if out-of-the-way beer bar. On my visit last month it was stocking more than 160 beers, including 14 drafts and lambics from Cantillon and Girardin.

The mill still cranks along, as you can see, although I'm not clear on whether it's just for show or provides some measure of hydroelectric power. In any case, it also provides a nice backdrop for a beer and a snack. Or if the weather is fine, the back terrace offers views of corn and a lot full of cars with Dutch plates.

That's where I sat, until I saw this table. To get to it, you have to climb and step though a couple of timber beams. A good place to hide; it might be smart to order at the bar first.

I Take the Long Way to Veurne, and There Is a Party On.

Two things I always said I'd do in Belgium, and never did when I lived there: Take the coastal tram from end to end, and visit Veurne. Knocked both off the bucket list on the same day, two weeks ago.

You can have a day pass on the Kusttram for a measly five euro-bucks. I start up in Knokke and ride down from there, popping off now and then to walk the seaside and look into certain cafés that need looking-into. I skip Oostende altogether to focus on the smaller towns along the way. If you can call them towns. At times the Belgian coast looks more like one long, skinny metroplex of high rises, blacklight mini-golf, cocktail bars, and trampolines. I'm there at the beginning of August, smack in the middle of high season. Tots are popping like corn on those trampolines while their guardians throng the beach bars and theoretically look on.

The whole area is ripe for specialist beer bars that know what they're doing. There are surprisingly few. Among those worth mentioning:

Toogoloog in Middelkerke is getting buzz among the geeks, and rightfully so. It keeps a smart list of 120 beers at last count. Recently being the only café in Belgium, as far as I know, to have Dupont Speciale Belge on draft gives you the idea. Naturally, the day I make my coastal swing is the one day a week that Toogoloog is shut. May you have better luck.

In Blankenberge, a block inward from the beach, next to the Casino, is the Royal and its wraparound corner terrace. You are watching crowds rather than waves, but it keeps 150 beers these days, including a couple of saisons and the odd curiosity, such as Seefbier. I make due with a St. Feuillien Saison, again noticing that the brewery has started listing Vitamin C as an ingredient. What's that about? Clever way to say "orange peel"?

In De Haan, a.k.a. the Cock-by-the-Sea, the great advantage of Torre is its location bang next to the tram stop. From my terrace table I can see the schedule of upcoming southward trams. Its card has 52 beers including Drie Fonteinen, hypothetically. My first couple of choices are out of stock so I enjoy an Oerbier and notice that Moinette is on draft.

Middelkerke has the ever-reliable Iceberg, with nearly 100 beers and seaside views. Like many in this region it is a Palm-Rodenbach-heavy list, but this one includes the stable from Gouden Carolus. I go with coffee. The day is long, and so is the Kusttram.

For now I'll leave out another handful of worthy cafés, because I said "specialist beer bars that know what they're doing." I'm not even sure that applies to all the ones I mention above.

The tram ends (and starts again) in De Panne. Now, many geeks will immediately think "Pannepot!" And they will hope that surely someone in De Panne is smart enough to stock it for the odd beery traveler. Well, they'd be... right, as it turns out. The Verloren Garnoare -- yes, the "Forlorn Shrimp" -- is where you drink while waiting for the train. It has Pannepot among its 50-plus beers, which also include Verhaeghe, St. Bernardus and Boon.

My train ride is a short one to Veurne, where a carnival is on in the Grote Markt. It seems I have just missed the town's procession of the penitents by a few days. (If there is anything the Flemish love more than beer, a friend once said to me, it is penance.) A sign says the party also marks an international kayak polo tournament. Initially I worry that I misread the Dutch, and that the reality is surely less weird than an international kayak polo tournament. I needn't have worried.

I check in at the Old House, which I can now recommend (classy and spotless former government building, converted to B&B, with a solid breakfast). It is now evening. Hunger pangs demand that I dispense with a scheme to rent or steal a bike and make for the Kunstemaecker. Instead I go with a local's recommendation: the Vette Os, a candlelit grillhouse attached to a shop specializing in unconventional world wines.

A well-marbled Irish ribeye and a not-so-unconventional bottle of Côtes du Rhône are my guilty pleasures on this night. It is easily the best steak I've eaten in Belgium, and I can recommend it as heartily as any coastal beer café. It's all a bit self-indulgent, but hell... I can celebrate penance and international water polo tournaments with the best of them.

Up Late, Doing Whatever You're Doing. I Don't Want to Know.

What's up, teenagers? Let's rock.

In an ideal world I'd be throwing up little posts every day. But who has time? Other bloggers, I guess. Not me, not so much. Plus I need to save a lot of stuff for later -- articles and such. Still, here are a few bits that come to mind:

The world-class Kunstemaecker is in Steenkerke, near Veurne. Steenkerke, Steenkerke, Steenkerke. Not in Lo-Reninge. That's where the new Seizoensbrouwerij Vandewalle is. Which is a story for another day. For now I'll just say that I wish more longtime beer historians would up and start their own breweries just to make old recipes.

In Brussels: Remember how the Kafka closed? Then it re-opened. But, er, then the Monk closed. Well, there is a sign on Monk's door that says, essentially, "Be back soon." We shall see.

Moeder Lambic these days has been selling most of their draft beers in half-liters as well as 25 or 33cl glasses. I've always thought a half-liter ideal for those hoppy, lower-alcohol beers from Senne and others. But then I am a thirsty person. I might have mentioned that before. Band of Brothers, something like a lean-and-mean Zinnebir at 4%, but in a larger portion... yes, please.

If you want to do the Sainte-Catherine seafood splurge but don't want white wine or Champagne with your shellfish, consider the Vistro, which is the tavern side of L'Huitrière. It is not the best restaurant in Brussels. Neither is it the worst. What makes it above-average: its location, laid-back ambiance, cartoons on the walls, and a drink card that includes Saison Dupont, Boon Oude Geuze and Taras Boulba.

Finally, food for thought: Spaghetti bolognaise is as Belgian in Belgium as pizza is American in America.

Discuss.

Hunting for Finesse: The Exceptions Are Still the Exceptions.

So I've been in America for some weeks and, to be honest, not much has changed here lately -- not on the beer front, anyway. Oh, there are more and more breweries and more and more beer specialist bars with more and more taps, and there are more and more regular bars and restaurants with growing lists populated by small and regional brewers. But the products are basically the same: resinously bitter and/or highly alcoholic. When not overly bitter they tend to be overly spiced, as with the caricatures of Belgian ale that seem to be flourishing.

So much for the sweeping generalizations. There are some highly drinkable options out there, beers full of flavor and finesse. But it takes some hunting. It falls to us to share tips on what and where to hunt. Anyway, there ought to be more.


A few we've found along the road:

A true "session" took place last night at Meridian Pint in D.C., where five of its taps have been pouring beers of 4.5% or 4.6% strength. It wasn't a special event or anything like that; it just appears to be a priority for the landlord. A highlight for me was the Caledonia from Williamsburg Alewerks, a orange-amber "session IPA" full of herbal, floral hop flavor. Afterward I walked home in a straight line, more or less.


Back in St. Louis, the Civil Life (pictured) is filling dimpled mugs full of stuff that most geeks would find boring. Good. Let the regular drinkers and seasoned pros mingle without the whale-hunters. The Rye Pale and Brown were the popular girls, but I fell for the wallflower Bitter, dry and golden, full of floral Goldings with just a touch of fruity Centennial.


Also in St. Louis, Perennial is making some oddities but seduced me with its simpler saisons. The Hommel Bier has compelling character, matching American hops with what I think is the Dupont yeast strain. In my hometown of Springfield, Missouri, I found the Saison de Lis on draft in Patton Alley and couldn't seem to stop asking them to refill the glass. Its chamomile is understated and adds depth. If you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there.


Now for breweries with numbers in their names. On the acidic end: 4 Hands put out a Berliner Weisse named Prussia that wields a refreshing lactic tartness. It's difficult to put down and weighs in at a whopping 3.5% abv. And at 2nd Shift in New Haven I tasted a barrel-aged half-wild ale named Katy, a "Brett beer" for lack of better title. Pale, lightly tart, lightly tannic, heavily addictive at 5% strength. A future star, I think.

The hunt continues. I look forward to a day when the exceptions can no longer be called that.

Monk Closed, Kafka to Re-open, and Get Your Pants Patched.

A few quick hits on the Brussels café scene for you today. If you're headed there soon with fresh or dog-eared copy of 80 Beers in hand, mix-and-match with this post from April. As usual, all reports welcome. Really helpful folks are sure to get free copies of the hypothetical second edition, vandalized by jokes from my ink pen if that's what turns you on.

Monk has closed. That would be the hip-yet-old-school wood-paneled café across from the Nordzee fish counter, near the Ste-Catherine cathedral. Handy location and swell place for a De Ranke or Senne beer at friendly prices. Similar to Kafka in April, the place has shut for the owner's financial troubles. Both spots are on the neighborhood's extensive Flemish hideaway circuit.

But perhaps there is hope. Some of the local news reports have staff from Monk heading over to help re-open Kafka by late July. With luck the café will still have fresh Zinnebir on draft.

A couple of bits from Ixelles: The Belladone indeed remains open, with its interesting beers and vodkas in a high-ceilinged mansion. (There was some doubt after a brief closing last year and stale website.) And on Place Flagey, a new dive called Flip will appeal to poor but thirsty students with holes in their pants. The lovely Dame Cath might be there with her sewing machine to patch them up. Dupont and Ellezeloois beers, at least.

Up in Jette, check out the Excelsior Stam Cool café and the 77 bar. And then let me know what you think.

Major hip-hop head nod to the great Podge for waking me from a Missouri barbecue-induced stupor by noting the Monk and Kafka news. And one more to the intrepid Simon Croome, who is just a few cafés short of hitting every spot in Brussels 80.

More to come.

Zooming In to a Familiar Spot On The Global Beer Influence Map.

There is an international marketplace of beer ideas, and we usually oversimplify it. For example: One arrow of influence might point from the U.K. to the U.S., and then another arrow would point right back. Taking a step backward and looking at the global picture, everybody is influencing everybody these days. A more accurate way to think about the aforementioned marketplace would be one of those airline route maps, with the number of curvy lines multiplied many times over.

Back to the simple view: British ales have had massive influence on Belgian ones over the years. It is nearly impossible to overstate that fact, which goes well beyond the Belgian pale ales, stouts, Scotch ales and other familiar categories. Eugene Rodenbach, or so the story goes, learned about barrel maturation and blending of young and old ales when he visited England. He then had a taste for that sort of thing when he took over his father's brewery, creating a distinctively tart beer that has inspired many others.

Why do I mention all this? Sometimes it helps to go back and dip into the old well. Recently I asked Belgoo brewer Jo Van Aert where he got the idea for his new Saisonneke, which weighs in at a light and hoppy 4.4% strength. I expected him to mention something about how Wallonian saison was traditionally lower in alcohol. But that's not what he said.

Instead, he said got the idea for Saisonneke from a recent trip to the U.K...

... where I tasted different great beers from relatively young breweries, with extremely low alcohol percentages. I personally prefer drinking low alcohol beers, but there are not much options on the market. Brewing low alcohol beers is also the most challenging from a technical point of view.

I talked to several U.K. brewmasters to find out about their “secrets” on getting so much body with such a little alcohol percentage and used some aspects for my Belgoo Saisonneke. Their main thing is, as you know, their cask ales method, where fermentation has been stopped by cooling after three to four days down under 10°C, with as a result lots of unfermented sugars and thus body, which would be impossible to do in Belgium. 

I tried to get the body by using different malts with more proteins and taste, an above-average European bitter hopping [33 IBUs] and an exuberant late- and dry-hopping (250g/HL) with European aroma hops with a discrete citrus touch.

Van Aert suggests that cask ales are "impossible" in Belgium, but I think he means "very difficult." After all, there have been cask ale sightings at Moeder Lambic Fontainas and a handful of festivals over the past several years. That global influence map is getting more complex, but those tried-and-true routes remain as well-trafficked as ever.


The photo comes from the Brussels chansons bar Goupil le Fol, where I tasted Belgoo for the first time nearly four years ago.

Malting Pot, The Festival, and Wise Counsel.

Many thanks to local agents Darin and Anne for snapping this shot of the new Malting Pot bottle shop on Saturday, its grand opening. Here is last week's post, in which we all learned about the shop together.

The owner's name is Sam Sarmad, and he knows how to open in style: free beer on tap. And just look at those happy families, drinking Senne's Jambe de Bois and two from Binchoise, including the Belgoo Saisonneke.

Now, let's stop and notice that last beer together: a new Wallonian saison at 4.4% alcohol by volume. Haven't tasted it yet, but it does speak my language. If you're keeping score, yes, Belgoo's Jo Van Aert is still brewing at Binchoise in Binche, home to that crazy carnival in Binche where the guys put on those creepy masks. A nice label too, which someone at ZBF was nice to snap here. That's a beer I'll be hunting this summer.

Back to the shop. The prices are a bit higher than what one would pay from a drinks market like SBS or BVS, but that is to be expected from a bottle shop. We will see if the locals take to the idea. Certainly that is Sarmad's hope.

"The purpose of the store is to offer Belgian and foreign craft beers not available in supermarkets and other shops in Brussels," Sarmad told me in an email. "Even though tourists are welcome, I wanted a beer shop for people living in Brussels and offer them an assortment of beers they don't know, while trying to keep affordable prices. After the recent hoppy/IPA revolution in Belgium, I also wanted to offer to the 'beer geeks' some Belgian and foreign craft beers, very difficult to find in Brussels."

Incidentally, the Malting Pot will be closed from July 22 to August 6. Plan accordingly.

Other news: Last week I updated an earlier post about The Festival, the one organized by the Shelton Brothers in Worcester, Massachusetts. In case you missed it: The ticket prices have dropped to $60 per session. A weekend pass for all three sessions is $160. It's not cheap but it's also not out of whack with a lot of U.S. beer festivals these days (a topic for another day, I think). And if you're into some of the world's most interesting beers and meeting the people who make them, then it will likely be worth every penny.

If you are one of those folks getting irked by expensive craft beers and festivals in the States these days -- and who isn't? -- then I have some simple advice for you. Stop buying whales and instead subsist on that local pale ale you've always liked but always ignore. Save those duckets, buy a plane ticket, and go to where the beer is cheap. Make a trip your whale instead.

Brussels Gets New (Serious) Bottle Shop.

The Malting Pot, not to be confused with Malt In Pot, is well off the tourist track, a block's walk from Place Flagey. That wide open square and its cafés are popular with locals of all stripes, but tourists rarely venture down there. That tells us something about the shopkeeper's hopes straightaway.

The shop's official opening is tomorrow, although it appears to have been open in practice at least since April 18. The posted hours are noon to 7 p.m., Tuesday through Friday. Address is Rue Scarron 50.

I note the shop's proximity to a few other places worth drinking (last I checked): quiet and divey student bar the Pantin (Chaussée d'Ixelles 355), the popular Café Belga and its (occasionally) sunny terrace on Place Flagey, and the artsy Murmure (18 Rue du Belvédère). A certain guidebook could help you with further details and help me avoid further parentheses.

The Malting Pot's inventory should more than please aficionados, with very little, if any, nonsense there. To thicken the plot, there are beers from Schneider, Schlenkerla, Thornbridge, Mikkeller and Brewdog, among others. No doubt more will come. It's yet another sign that Belgian beer lovers are waking up to the international scene.

Watch this space for more details.


*Hat-tips to Toine and Darin.

Beer Moments, Plural.

It eviscerates the meaning of epiphany to talk about it as a gradual thing, experienced through a series of moments throughout life. Anyway, the word is too dramatic. Sudden learning is for neat storytelling and problem-solving cartoon protagonists, not for meatbags like us who struggle with the awkwardness and complexities of life. Our learning takes time; that includes learning what we like. The fun of it is that we get to have lots and lots of moments.

Like that sip of what you've chosen for the evening, just after sitting in your favorite sitting place but before you've cracked the book. When you dig into the book it will distract you, a joy of its own, so that first sip is the one.

There is the first one after a long day's work, easily surpassed by the one after a long week's work.

There are also lasts. Here in Costa Rica, for example, there is the zarpe. Literally it means means something like bon voyage. It's what the locals call the final drink of the night. In practice it always seems to be penultimate rather than ultimate, but that is educational too.

There is the thousandth-odd time you have drunk a favorite, which you know intimately. Yet you seem to learn a little something new each time.

There is the one just after the kids go to bed.

The first one and all the ones with the friend you haven't seen in years, but especially the heartfelt toast.

You know, we have these receptors on our tongues and in our noses to analyze taste and perfume, and these connectors throughout our bodies to feel (and occasionally not to feel) the effects of the contents. Somehow this connects with all the memories and impressions we've gathered over time. Amid all the awkwardness and complexities, there are indeed a few certainties.

It's all right, you know. Being a meatbag, I mean.

*This is my part of Session #63. More info here.

Brussels as Culinary Amusement Park.

Don't you like articles that make you hungry and thirsty? It would be masochistic, but I reckon we are mostly gastronomes and people of plenty. We like hunger and thirst because we're pretty sure the next plate and glass are just around the corner. The anticipation increases the joy when we arrive.

But I digress.

Just wanted to point out today's Birmingham Post (that's England, not Alabama) piece on Brussels foodie fun, connected to this year's Brusselicious -- a city-wide, yearlong food festival. It's got Michelin-starred meals aboard moving tram cars, praline tastings, veal cheeks, bintje potatoes and Moeder Lambic. It's got Cantillon Kriek, Taras Boulba and Géants Gouyasse. I read it twice.

(An aside: When are Brussels world-class top-shelf eateries going to start taking the beer more seriously as an accompaniment to their food -- more fitting and usually more compatible than French wine -- and not just a rustic ingredient? There are some who do but they're not usually the ones with Michelin stars. On the plate many are bruxellois but in the glass they are still trying to be Paris.)

While we lived there we treated the place as a round-the-clock food festival. But that was not quite correct. There is something to be said for those moments when the collective minds of Brussels get together and demonstrate their ability to go over the top... all at once.