The Books

Currently, I am reading loads of travel guides. One of the piles of books on my coffee-table, for example, looks like this: 

I booked tickets to go back to Belgium and France at the beginning of May, this time with a focus on beer.

I land in Frankfurt (flights from Pittsburgh are only $607 on British Airways - what?!), so before I head east to Brussels, I'll buzz up to Cologne, Germany for a couple nights to fight jet-lag. And to drink beer, however contraindicated that may be for fighting jet-lag. I can't not drink some kölsch in its hometown of Cologne. Technically, "real" kölsch may come from only Köln (aka Cologne), just as "real" champagne must originate in the Champagne region of France (Oxford Companion to Beer 519, "kölsch"). While I'm in Cologne, I'll take a day-trip up to Dusseldorf to drink its local specialty, altbier. Like kölsch, altbier is one of the few "indigenous German ale styles," along with hefeweizens (OCB 36, "altbier"). Creating visceral memories of drinking these classic styles in their hometowns should burn them into my brain for the Cicerone exam.

But most of the trip I'll spend in Belgium and France. Good lord, I love Belgian beer. Orval was my first "aha" international beer. ("Beer can taste like that?!") The line-up of the only empty bottles that I keep in my kitchen looks like this:

To plan the Belgium part of my trip, I'm relying on Lonely Planet's Global Beer Tour, CAMRA's Good Beer Guide: Belgium, and Trappist Beer Travels: Inside the Breweries of the Monasteries. If you have recommendations for other guides or websites, I'd love them.

Ambitiously, the Lonely Planet Global Beer Tour takes on the whole world, as its title implies; thus, even those countries that are richest in beer history get only 20 pages or so. Truthfully, that helps narrow things down. Today, I spent the whole afternoon in one of those awful cyber-spirals of researching hotels and Airbnbs, endlessly comparing listings and reviews. In such a sea of information, the relatively narrow suggestions of Global Beer Tour are refreshing. The book is pretty, too. A spread on Brussels, where I'll spend 2-3 days, looks like this: 

From Brussels, I'll rent a car to visit Chimay and Rochefort, two abbeys in the southeast of Belgium, in the same corner of the country as Orval. My primary resource for that part of my trip is Trappist Beer Travels, which I first read about in Beer Advocate last Fall. The book, by Schiffer Publishing, has a gorgeous layout, replete with with original line drawings of each abbey by one of its authors, Jessica Deahl, who wrote the book with fellow beer journalists Caroline Wallace and Sarah Wood. It is as informative as it is beautiful.

The last week of my trip, I'll spend in France, using Strasbourg as home base. When I was last in Europe, in November, I spent only a couple days in Strasbourg, but I fell hard for this Alsatian town. You know that special kind of deja-vu that happens when you immediately feel at home in a place that you've never been before? Strasbourg clicked like that for me. Even after just a couple days, I knew that I'd return to Strasbourg soon, and for longer.

This time, I'll take a few French classes at École Haudecouer, with day-trips to quelques brasseries françaises and to the hometown of my great-great-great-great grandmother, which is about 30 minutes north of Strasbourg. The French are notably proud of their wine, but I was well impressed by the local beer that I drank in Strasbourg last Fall. I had another "aha" moment eating lunch at the Banquet de Sophistes. I started my meal with a glass of rich red wine but followed it with a bubbly, hoppy French saision. I took that first sip of the saison, and it cut through the grease of the red meat I ate for my main course: and boom - it fully hit home that beer can pair with food better than wine can. 

If you have any recommendations or tips for not-to-be-missed beer-related places in Brussels, southeast Belgium, northeast France, or Strasbourg, please be in touch. So much beer, so little time...

The Beer

As I'm opening the Chimay Cinq Cents, I look up at that line of bottles in my kitchen. The Westmalle dubbel and tripel, all the way to the right, stand out. It wasn't until I came back from Belgium last time (in November) that I learned the difference between the two styles; these two bottles taught me that. That memory makes me feel like the studying for the Cicerone exam is paying off: those two styles are so different to me now. 

Originally, I thought a tripel was just a stronger dubbel. While that's true, the two also taste very different and have very different coloring: the dubbel is brown; the tripel is golden. The dubbel isn't brown because of roasted malts but instead because of the "candi sugar" that the monks feed it to bottle condition. As the Oxford Companion to Beer puts it, "Whereas roasted malts tend to give flavors that recall coffee and chocolate, candi sugar gives an aromatic reminiscent of burnt sugar and raisins" (310, "dubbel"). I like the bitterness of coffee and chocolate but am not such a fan of sweets, hence my aversion to dubbels.

Tripels, though: yum. Which is why I picked up the Cinq Cents at Bierport instead of the Chimay Blue (Grande Réserve) or Red (Première). It's super bubbly on the palate, and dry. Tripels use the same Belgian yeast as dubbels do, so there's still spicy, fruity phenols. Derek Walsh says I'm supposed to taste "hints of Muscat grapes" in this Chimay, so I'll have to learn what Muscat grapes taste like (OCB 798, "tripel"). For now, I appreciate how very dry it is, and the spicy bite of the hops that balances the Cinq Cent's ever-so-slight raisin-y sweetness. 

The Cinq Cents is the perfect end to a day of travel planning. It's got me all excited to be in the land of my favorite international beers. If you're headed to Belgium - or want to daydream while drinking a Chimay - definitely pick up the CAMRA Good Beer Guide: Belgium and Trappist Beer Travels. 

P.S. Unrelatedly (or related in the sense of the spectrum of delicious beer that Belgium has to offer?), here's a shot from last weekend at Hop Farm, when a party ordered a taster of every single thing on the menu. My kind of people.