Categories
Belgium pubs

Night falls on St Mystere

We were twitching to get back to continental Europe a couple of weeks ago and so arranged a relatively spontaneous long weekend in Antwerp.  It’s a very Flemish Belgian city, which you can reach in less than three hours from London, if your connections work out.

We spent our first evening at Groote Witte Arend near the Grote Markt, in a lovely, tranquil courtyard full of twinkling lights and distant classical music.  It boasts of 80 beers, although we spent a while dealing with sheepish waiters until we found anything they actually had in stock.

On tap, there were a couple of interesting beers we hadn’t had before. Moeder Overste has a pronounced bitter-orange flavour and reminded us a little of Young’s Special London.  We don’t have much more specific to say other than that we really enjoyed it.  Arend Blonde (the house brand) is much as you’d expect from the name, except perhaps crisper and lighter than you’d normally expect from a 6% Leffe-alike.

As night fell and the time came to leave, we asked ourselves, somewhat wistfully, where in Britain could we hope to drink in such peaceful surroundings?

Categories
American beers beer reviews Belgium

Would they be flattered?

Train journeys have certainly improved since the arrival of the Sheffield Tap and other takeaway beer places at some of Britain’s train stations.

A recent trip was enlivened by bottles of Sierra Nevada Torpedo, a delicious American IPA which is a favourite of Rake manager Glyn’s, and Goose Island Matilda.

The latter is the Chicago brewery’s attempt at a Belgian-style ale. They’d apparently like us to drink it from a “wide mouthed goblet” but, on a train, you have to make do with a little plastic glass.

On this showing, we’d say that it tastes really, really similar to Leffe Blonde, if perhaps a touch more bitter. Would Goose Island be flattered by that comparison? Probably not, though we don’t mean it as a criticism. (We’re quite partial to the odd glass of Leffe, despite its ubiquity and Big Industrial Brewing pedigree.)

Categories
Belgium

Great pub names #1: The Optimist

Den Optimist, Langestraat, Bruges, Belgium.
Den Optimist, Langestraat, Bruges, Belgium
Categories
beer reviews Belgium

Pre-emptive stash raid

Because we want to be in gear when Stash Day is formally announced, we’ve started picking off some of the bottles we’ve acquired but deemed too special to actually drink.

First up, Cantillon Lou Pepe Framboise 2006, which we bought at the brewery early last year.

The Lou Pepe beers are a sub-range which, as Cantillon put it:

…deviate from [the usual Cantillon] principles. The Gueuze Lou Pepe is made with two years old lambic beers with a mellow taste, often coming from barrels in which only wine has been kept before. In July, the same kind of beer is used to make the Lou Pepe Kriek and Framboise. With these beers too, the fruits are soaked in barrels coming directly from Bordeaux… The second fermentation of these particular beers is not caused by the addition of young lambic but of a sweet liquor… The Kriek and the Rosé de Gambrinus contain 200 g of fruits per liter on an average, while the Lou Pepe beers contain about 300 g.

It fizzes violently at first, creating a huge mousse-like head which disappears almost immediately, leaving in the glass something that looks like red wine. It smells of… Now, the euphemisms are usually barnyard or animal related, but let’s be frank here: it smells a bit like poo. Once we’d got over that, however, we found a fairly gentle tasting, sweetish beer.

We enjoyed it but, frankly, not as much as the super-sour, popping candy of a beer that is the standard Cantillon Kriek.

Categories
Belgium

The receipt says it all

A receipt from l'Estaminet, Bruges, listing all the beers we enjoyed on a night out.