Gigantic End of Reason and St. Bernardus Prior 8

We're nearly at the end of Gigantic Beer Week, and I have been out of town for all of it so far.  But to commemorate the last few days of it, I want to say a couple words about one of the most brilliant Gigantic seasonals to date:  The End of Reason.

This is a medium-strong dark Belgian, along the lines of Westmalle Dubbel -- in fact End of Reason uses the Westmalle yeast -- or those Watou masterpieces, Westvleteren 8 and St. Bernardus Prior 8.  It's easy to find St. Bernardus Abt 12 around town, but less common to see bottles of Prior 8, so I was excited to notice one in the cooler at the Beermongers a few weeks ago.  I highly recommend it if you see a bottle for sale.

The End of Reason has that same floral Belgian yeast flavor as the native Belgians, on top of a large, sweetish malt body.  A reasonable helping of hops helps to bring it nearly into balance.  The Prior 8 was noticeably drier than the Gigantic offering, but EoR is definitely worth your time if you can still find any bottles or taps of it around town (like my Gigantic Beer Week coverage, I'm a little late in announcing a beer that may not appear more than once, but you can probably still find a few straggling bottles in the usual places).

There wasn't room to mention this in the headline, but Laurelwood also has a Watou-ish dubbel on tap right now, aptly called St. Bernard.  I had one at the airport on the way out of town, and was quite pleased with it.  I think it was toward the Gigantic end of the sweet/dry spectrum, though it would be difficult to distinguish these three beers in a blind tasting, even harder if you through in a Westmalle.  You can't go wrong with any of those beers.

Three cheers to Gigantic for a great first year!  Click the link above to see Mr. Foyston's list of the remaining events, including Gigantic's First Anniversary party at the brewery itself tonight (Thursday, May 9, 2013, 3 PM to 9 PM).

Westvleteren vs. St. Bernardus

One of these things is not like the others...

Disclaimer: this tasting didn't go how I wanted it to.  Not the results, the tasting itself.

A few weeks ago there was a multi-birthday party at the home of our friends Brett and Debbie.  Since lots of our beer-loving crowd was going to be there, I decided it was time to trot out the bottles of Westvleteren 8 and 12 (one of each) that I brought back from Belgium this summer.

To make it more interesting, I decided to make it a blind tasting, comparing the Westy 12 with St. Bernardus Abt 12.  Westvleteren 12 is one of the world's rarest and most sought-after beers: it is only distributed at the Abbey St. Sixtus where it is produced.  St. Bernardus is very easy to find: I bought the bottle for this tasting for $4 at the CVS on East Burnside.  The two beers are often compared to one another, and have some history in common.  I had tried them side-by-side in Amsterdam, but I knew which was which, so I was probably biased in favor of the rarer, more expensive Westvleteren.  This blind tasting -- with a lot of experienced palates -- would be a great experiment.

But the best laid schemes go oft awry, and so it was with this tasting.  See the bottlecaps in the picture?  I popped the blue bottlecap from the bottle of St. Bernardus and poured some samples into small glasses, and then popped the Westvleteren bottle with the blue bottlecap and divided up that beer.  Westvleteren bottles don't have paper labels, so the bottlecap was my indication of which style was in each bottle.  In my excitement about what a fun tasting this would be I let the color fool me instead of reading the numbers, which means that instead of comparing two similar quadrupels, I had pitted  Abt 12 against the dubbel Westy 8 -- also a fine beer, but quite a bit subtler than the 12.  I didn't realize the mistake until all the glasses had been passed around and drained, and I went to open the third bottle as Act Two of my show and tell.  "OK, now try the Westvleteren eigh... uh oh."

Not too surprisingly, the Abt 12 handily defeated the Westy 8 in the blind tasting, 5 votes to 2 -- hey, a couple of people enjoyed the more subtle pleasures of the dubbel, anyway.  Before I knew about the mix-up, I was perplexed by how different the Westvleteren was than my memory of it from a few weeks earlier.  And I was even more disappointed because the Abt 12 seemed a little cloying to me that day, not worthy to knock off such a sought-after beer.

We did share the Westy 12 around after that.  It was as spectacular as I remembered it being, and in my opinion was better than a 3 year-old Westy 12 that Angelo generously shared with a few people back in August.  Cellaring beer is fun, but sometimes your best bet is to drink things fresh.  At the party, I think most of us agreed that the Westvleteren 12 was indeed a notch above the St. Bernardus.  But by then the damage had been done -- it wasn't a blind tasting anymore.

Almost forgot to mention: it was this tweet by Matt at portlandbeer.org that inspired me to finally write this up!

In De Vrede, Westvleteren

One of the most sought-after beers in the world is Westvleteren 12, the quadrupel ale brewed by the Trappist monks of Saint Sixtus Abbey in Westvleteren, Belgium.  Adding to the mystique is the fact that the brothers do not distribute their beers through wholesalers or exporters.  The abbey has a cumbersome system where individuals can call the brewery during certain hours to reserve a maximum of two cases of beer for pickup on a different date.  Phone numbers and license plates are tracked to restrict each buyer to one such purchase per month.

This limited distribution not only makes beer from Saint Sixtus taste better, it practically guarantees that a tourist won't be able to stuff his suitcase with a case of Westy.  A few bottles of Westvleteren -- the aforementioned 12, a dubbel called Westvleteren 8, and a hoppy golden ale called Westvleteren Blond -- make their way via the black market into bottleshops and bars in Belgium and Holland at a premium price. I shelled out about 20 bucks for a 33 cl bottle of the quad at Gollem's Proeflokaal in Amsterdam.  The other way you can sample these beers is to visit the Abbey, where the cafeteria -- In De Vrede -- will serve you the quad, dubbel, or blond for the reasonable tariffs of €4.7, €4.2, and €3.7 respectively (about $6.60, $5.90, and $5.20).  It's bottled beer, not draft, but poured into the official goblet.  An attached gift shop apparently used to sell six-packs -- limit one per customer -- but on the day we visited there were only "tasting kits" for sale:  €23 for two bottles of the Blond, one 8, one 12, and a goblet.  Sheesh.

We visited In De Vrede ("Vrede" means "peace" in Dutch) on the way from Brugge to Brussels.  It was a little bit of a detour, but well worth it for the chance to try all the Westvleterens at a reasonable price.  It's an odd place, nothing like a bar or pub  I called it a cafeteria above, and that's truly what it is.  At 1:30 on a weekday afternoon, the place was packed, and it seemed to me to be largely a local crowd, demographically on the older side.  The food is very simple and inexpensive, basically cheese sandwich, ham and cheese sandwich, or house-made paté sandwich, to which you could add a side green salad.  I loved the paté; the salad was fresh and good.  The girls got ice cream sundaes that were kind of lame, but the ice-cream made with Westvleteren Blond served to neighboring tables looked much more interesting. The servers all seemed to speak English well, and were very polite and helpful.

Westvleteren 12 is a dense, complex quad, with the usual Abbey ale yeast flavors, a nice balance of bitterness, not too sweet, and with no sharp edges to any of the flavors.  The 8 is recognizable as 12's little brother -- much of the same flavor in a less boozy package.  The Blond is a nice surprise -- a fairly light-bodied ale, 6% alcohol, with lots and lots of hop bitterness.  It reminded me of some of Hair of the Dog's Little Dog small beers -- which also combine light brews with tons of hops -- though of course it's about twice as strong as the Little Dogs.

There is a small museum behind the cafeteria called "The Claustrum". As with the beer sales, its hours are idiosyncratic, and all of the information is printed in Flemish, but it's worth a quick gander if you're there when it's open. The picture at the top is from the brewery exhibit at the Claustrum.

Since we were driving through Belgium twice during our trip, I did actually try to call from Paris and order a case of the Westvleteren, even though the abbey's website showed that they were only only accepting orders at that time for the not-as-collectible Blond. But I gave it up when the abbey's beer line rejected my phone call placed through Skype. We didn't have a phone in our Paris flat and our rental car was already completely full with no room for a crate of beer, so I decided not to flagellate myself any further with Saint Sixtus' convoluted procedures.  The owner of the hotel we stayed at in Brugge confided to me that later this year the monks will begin limited distribution in Belgian grocery stores, but BeerNews.org reported the same rumor last year, so readers in Belgium should not break their piggybanks just yet.

I don't know if Westvleteren 12 is really the best beer in the world. But it certainly is a fine abbey ale, and if you have the chance, you should try it. In Amsterdam we tasted it alongside the fairly similar St. Bernardus Abt, and the Westvleteren was indeed the more complex and refined beer. Get it if you can, and certainly pay a visit to In De Vrede next time you're in Flanders.

Further reading:  Check out this excellent tale of walking around the Westvleteren area on Jeff's blog The Beer Cave!

Gollem's Proeflokaal, Amsterdam

Our family vacation to Europe has not been, by and large, a beer vacation.  That's OK, I didn't expect it to be, and in fact family vacations always give short shrift to beer.  But the last few days in Amsterdam have been something of a beery reprieve for the man of the house, with several good beer bars, a couple of top-notch bottle shops, and even a surprisingly good cheap supermarket brand.

That gives me material for several blog posts, but let me start off by tipping you off to the -- as of this writing -- last surviving member of the Gollem family of Amsterdam beer bars.  Gollem's Proeflokaal, which wasn't on beermapping.com or Beer Advocate's BeerFly before my visit, is a charming and well-stocked pub, well off the beaten path at 160 Overtoom, but just a short walk from the Van Gogh Museum.  We ended up there for lunch Saturday by accident -- no, really, the South Indian dosa place at the corner was closed -- and were very pleased with our burgers, vegetarian croquettes, and salads.  Oh yeah, and by the bottle of Westvleteren 12 ($20).

I was glad to get to a Gollem location, since the famed original Café Gollem in central Amsterdam has been closed for nearly a year because of some hangup with its license, and so has the Biercafé Gollem in the De Pijp neighborhood.  The Netherlands has a lot going for it, government-wise, but it sounds like it is still possible to get crosswise with officious bureaucrats.  Rumor has it that some kind of deal might allow the reopening of the other Gollem locations this fall, but meanwhile your only option is the Proeflokaal.

It may not have the dark, cozy atmosphere of the original Café Gollem, but the Proeflokaal has a spacious, relaxed vibe, good food, and an excellent beer selection.  Definitely check it out if you're in Amsterdam.