100 Belgium Beers: One more, and the 2010 round-up
So, started the day in Antwerp at the end of the short break with pingoparkand fringefaan. Train to Brussels, where we got a bit of beer shopping done, then on to the Eurostar back to London. Arrived at St Pancras, which was handy as the next bit of the trip was up to Nottingham for Novacon. So just time for a quick visit to Sourced to pick up a few Kernel beers to give Randy a taste of the best new British brewery.
Now Novacon seems to run a beer-tasting evening on the Sunday night. The idea is everyone brings along three beers and sticks them on a table, then you can just go and get yourself a taste of any of them. So as we were beer buying in Belgium it made sense to bring along something from there. Study of what was in the shops, and what I was still wanting to drink from "the list" led us to an idea...
Now most Belgian beers come in 33cl bottles; also the size preferred by many of the newer British breweries and similar to a standard US bottle. Some (also) come in 75cl champagne bottles, which are a bit classy, and if you wave your hands around and mutter "yeast dynamics" you may be able to persuade people they taste marginally better. A few are also found in magnums (150cl) or even larger, with plenty of these larger bottles finding their way to be bar-room decorations.
77 - St Feuillien Triple
One of the beers available in unfeasibly large bottles is St Feuillien Triple. In this case though, differences in taste between the various sizes is more readily explained. The beer is actually brewed at more than one brewery, and the stuff that goes in to the larger bottles is supposed to be much better than that in the smaller ones. It's possible this situation has now changed and it's all now made at the "home" brewery and not contracted out, but it's hard to verify this. So I thought it best to stick to the advice of "the book": go for a bottle of at least 150cl.
So that's why, on the trip back from Belgium, pingoparkwas lugging a 300cl bottle of beer. That's three litres. Four champagne bottles. A veritable Jereboam of Gay Beer.
And if you think we were bringing three bottles of that each for the tasting you're sadly deluded. And rather mistaking my physique for Flex Mentallo's.
After all that you're probably expecting me to go on about the actual beer. But what with the sheer ludicrousness of turning up with "such a big one", the struggle to get the bloody cork out, handing it around lots of people, chatting and so on I seem to have completely neglected to write anything down about it. Well, not anywhere I can now think of, getting worryingly near to a year later. I seem to remember it was a fine example of a tripel, so if that's as style you can go for then you'll probably like this. You just have to be careful getting your shopping home. Still, it makes you fairly popular at conventions, but if you really want to push your luck go for the nine litre bottle.
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I started this "project" in 2009 and got through fifty of the hundred beers that year. So that looked like a nice two year thing. Except last year I only got the total up to 77. I could easily have had more, there were still some reasonably common beers to drink, but I was stuck with this idea that I was going to write about all of them, and I'm incredibly lazy. OK, I thought, make it a three year challenge, leaving just the last twenty odd, or as many as I could find, to drink this year. However I didn't want to get too far behind on writing things up so I've not really drunk many so far. Well there was a visit to Belgium back in July when I ticked off a few more, but that's been about it.
Still, I'll now at least be writing about beer I've drunk this year, so I reckon it's time to start getting some down my neck and see if I can have a bit of a late surge. Chin chin!
