Saltaire Triple Chocoholic might be my favourite chocolate beer. It’s not sweet like some, but definitely smells of chocolate. It’s dark, creamy and extremely full bodied, almost like a Spanish hot chocolate fit for dipping your churros.
It’s like (but better than) the Meantime effort at its best.
And, for all its intense flavour and gooeyness, is a mere 4.8%.
Once again, evidence that Saltaire are masters of flavouring beer.
Boak
The Kulminator Beer Cafe in Antwerp is a great little place, full of tat, and with a cellar full of interesting aged beers. We turned up the night before they closed for their two week summer break and the owners were in a very relaxed mood as they began to wind down.
Boak had been jonesing for a proper sour Kriek, and so went for Boon Oude Kriek — a mere youth of a beer compared to some on the menu, from 2004. This tasted like cherry drops in lemon juice. Interesting, but not necessarily all that pleasurable, and a bit of struggle to get through.
Bailey went for a Hoegaarden Grand Cru from 1987, which came in a dusty, rusty bottle, with a vintage glass. This smelt incredibly malty and tasted like barley sugar. There was no hop character, and none of the characteristic spiciness, although a hint of acrid bitterness remained. Oddly, it reminded us of Fuller’s 1845, but with a thinner body. Probably not a beer, then, that stands up to 23 years maturation.
We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to drink some extinct British ales, although it seemed weird to go to Belgium to do so. Gales’ Prize Old Ale (1982) had no head at all. It smelled like an amontillado sherry, which was also the main flavour at first gulp. There was also a little saltiness. It had an extremely long aftertaste, with notes of cocoa, liquorice, marmite, orange peel… we could go on. There weren’t many flavours that weren’t in there somewhere. Again, an experience rather than an absolute pleasure. And you can get a whole bottle of sherry for €9.
Courage Imperial Stout, actually brewed at the Anchor brewery long before it became yuppie flats, was beautifully served in a nip glass of an appropriate vintage. Even after all those years, a nice off-white head was present. The aroma was, again, like sherry — this time, something raisiny and sweet. The first taste was of raisins and chocolate, giving way to oak, smoke, burnt cream and coffee. Unlike the Gales, it still had some hop flavour and bitterness. In fact, it tasted amazingly fresh and alive — there was a real prickle on the tongue — plenty of zing.
The cellar, which is behind glass and gently lit, offers tantalising glimpses into the future: some special De Molens, not on the menu, “will mature for 25 years”.
This place is absolutely unmissable for the beer geek. Just remember to bring plenty of cash. The above set us back €38, and they don’t take credit cards. Probably just as well for our sakes.
See also:
T’Pakhuis is a huge, 370-seater brewpub in an old warehouse in the arty part of Antwerp to the south of the Grote Markt. At 2pm on a Friday afternoon morning, we had the place to ourselves.
They make three beers. The 5.1% beer was very light and refreshing, but with very upfront spicing. It was cloudy but had enough character to avoid being mistaken for a Boring German Brewpub Zwickl™.
The 5.5% bruin would probably be pretty dull out of a bottle, and certainly isn’t the most exciting beer in Belgium, but its freshness did it a lot of favours.
Finally, the main event: Nen Bangelijkes. It was a 9.5% triple and is dangerously drinkable, as the barman explained. “Guys come in and they think they’re pretty tough, they can handle their beer, but after a few… wow… I’m having to, like, throw them out in the street.” The name is Antwerp dialect and (so we were told) means both scary and fantastic. With this beer, Pakhuis have successfully pulled of the Duvel trick — it was strong and powerfully flavoured, but with a champagne-like fizz and body which meant it seeemed to slip over the tongue rather than coating it.
If we weren’t ready for our afternoon nap, and hadn’t needed to recover for an evening session, we’d have happily had another.
Getting fruit flavour into beer is harder than you might imagine.
Some fruit beers are too sweet, others are too sour. The fruit flavour can be overpowering, or barely perceptible. Worst of all, it can sometimes be just too pink.
Saltaire’s Blackberry Cascade and Raspberry Blonde get it exactly right. They both taste enough of fruit that you can tell it’s there without being told (we tested this theory on unsuspecting friends). They’re a little sweet, hardly at all sour, and un-dyed.
We’re not 100 per cent sure but we suspect the trick might be to get over the purism which says fresh fruit is best: these beers are ‘infused’ with ‘flavours’, which to us suggests extracts or syrups. Who cares, though? It works.
Blackberries are Boak’s favourite fruit, which is why Blackberry Cascade has edged it as our beer of the week.
The latest in Acorn’s fascinating series of beers showcasing New Zealand hops uses Green Bullet, a variety I’ve never heard of before. Green by name and green by nature — this tasted raw, grassy and herbal. I thought it was just the right side of astringent, but still probably a bit more bitter than I’d like. It slipped down very nicely, nonetheless.
Boak
We’ve mentioned Alte Mainmuehle before. We love it so much that, when we’re on our hols, we now always try to stop off for lunch in Wuerzburg if it’s on the way. It has great food, beautiful views and fabulous beer — the full range from local brewery Distelhäuser.
Breaking the journey back from Passau, we remarked to ourselves as we pulled into the station that only one thing could make it better — a new beer. We laughed. German breweries don’t introduce new beers, except to make them ‘Gold’ or add cola. But, what do you know, the beer gods seemed to have delivered, with Mozartbier being proudly advertised across town.
We didn’t realise how lucky we were, though, until we got home and researched it a little: it’s not a new beer, but is only available on or around the 5 June each year. How jammy are we?
It’s a cracker, too. Golden rather than yellow, conditioned rather than fizzy, it has an incredible depth of malt flavour — rye bread with added cereal — without being at all cloying. We wondered, with its name and slightly darker colour, if it was a nod to a Vienna-style lager, but it also struck as what we’d been looking for in a festbier all these years.
We put off visiting Innstadt‘s biergarten because, from the outside, it looked a bit fake, like something from Disneyland. Nor were we expecting much from the beer. A big company, slick but boring branding… surely it would be another Hacklberg or Lowenbrau?
What a surprise. For starters, the helles was subtle rather than bland, as hoppy as the beers some other breweries in town were labelling as pilsners. Lovely.
The range was more varied, too. As well as the holy trinity (pils, helles, weizen) there was a zwickl with a very pleasing hint of sherbet and its own elaborate porcelain krug and several interesting looking bottles.
From the bottled range, we tried Edelsud, which (as they announced on the menu, and reiterated proudly when we ordered it) came in a swingtop bottle (“bugelflasche!!!”). It is described as an Export but, at 5.3%, and with a satisfying, heavy, toffee-ish body, it could have passed for a 6% festbier. It was really excellent — liquid bread. The hop aroma made us think briefly of Brooklyn Lager, too, which was a nice surprise in a German beer.
We didn’t get round to trying the last brewery in town, Andorfer, because we decided to spend our last day across the border in Austria. We’ve since heard that the locals consider it the best of the bunch. Bloody typical. Then again, Austria was not a wasted trip…
Thank you, Peschl or Passau. We hadn’t dared let ourselves hope that all that folksy branding and ‘family brewery’ rhetoric might actually mean interesting beer but were over the moon to be proved wrong.
The benefit to all the local breweries offering similar ranges is the ease with which they can be compared. Straight off, we could tell that Peschl’s helles and pils had more zing than the respective offerings from Hacklberg and Lowenbrau. They weren’t transcendent, but we certainly found them interesting and agreed that, if we could never drink anything but these again, we’d probably be happy.
Even the hefe-weizens were interesting, being perhaps a little more grainy-tasting (more wheat in the mix?) and a touch sour.
So, we thought we’d found the best beer in Passau, and began to feel a little more cheerful.
Nächste halt: Innstadt.
It seems every German city has a Löwenbrauerei or two. Your Germans are nuts about lions, especially medieval stone ones that look like dogs with perms.
Passau’s Löwenbrau is another big local brand. We saw their trucks, adverts and parasols all over town and the surrounding countryside — and, as we’ve come to expect from big regional Bavarian breweries, they’re not exactly risk-takers.
In fact, we could more-or-less repeat our review of Hacklberg. A cold helles on a terrace on the river Inn at sunset, after a hike in the sun, is always going to taste good but, really, we were beginning to think that we might have to give up on the beer in Passau…
Nächste halt: Brauerei Peschl.
Here’s why you should never take our tasting notes seriously (we certainly don’t).
We were sitting in the garden having a drink in the sun. We started with our own Centennial-hopped pale ale and followed it with Brewdog’s 77 lager, described as a pilsener. We thought 77 tasted like a good Franconian pils — noticeable malt flavour with bitter bite at the end, but with quite restrained, herbal hops.
Reading Barry and Velky Al, however, we realise that this cannot be. Surely we should have spotted the Amarillo hops a mile off? But they were drinking this alongside German and Czech versions, and we were drinking it after having had our tastebuds bludgeoned with c-hops.
Tasting is absolutely relative.
We really enjoyed it at any rate, and will be getting a bit more in for the summer.
Question: have Brewdog stopped making Hoprocker?
We're a pair of beer geeks who live in London in the UK. Bailey is a man, Boak is a lady. We've been writing this beer blog since April 2007 and it's taken us all over Britain and Europe in pursuit of the perfect pint.
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