Brussels, Belgium: Moeder Lambic - Fontainas
By the time I arrived in Brussels, after a few days of kölsch, I was ready to drink some more aggressively flavorful beer. I was in the right place. Belgium has SO MUCH GOOD BEER. I knew this before I went there - but, really, I also didn't know just HOW MUCH GOOD BEER Belgium has. I planned four days in Brussels, thinking that I'd also take a day-trip to Antwerp, or down to Drie Fonteinen, or over to In De Verzekering Tegen De Grote Dorst (a bar an hour west of Brussels that carries Bokkereyder guezes).
Ha, no.
I stayed in Brussels all four days - and still needed more time to do justice to its beer scene. I did manage to get to both Moeder Lambic bars, the Cantillon brewery, the Brussels Beer Project, BrewDog Brussels, Brasserie l'Érmitage, and a couple restaurants with great beer lists: Nuet Nigenough and Le Poechenellekelder.
Moeder Lambic Fontainas (there are two locations - one is on Rue Fontainas) was my first stop after dropping my bags at my Airbnb in the Ixelles neighborhood of Brussels.
I was super happy to be there. Can you tell?
And why wouldn't I be? Check out this beer list:
Jandran-Jandrenouille's IV Saison.
I started with the Jandran-Jandrenouille Saison. The saison was the first beer that this brewery made, and you can tell they've had time to hone its recipe. It's just brilliant. It pours with a big white head that dissipates pretty quickly. It's tart on the nose and has some funky hay on the tongue. The carbonation was a perfect match for the smoked goat cheese that I was snacking on as I drank it; all those bubbles cut through the fat of the cheese. Yum.
Next, I tried a tripel from En Stoemelings called Curieuse Nues. En Stoemelings is apparently Bruxellois for "in secret," and it's a fitting name because although I'm sure I've heard of this brewery somewhere, I can't find much information about them online. I loved this one, too. It smelled bready, slightly tart, and a little spicy (à la Noble hops?). It tasted lightly fruity (navel orange) and floral. (Is "daffodil" a thing when it comes to beer tasting? That's what the floral part reminded me of. Weird).
De Ranke's Guldenberg, a tripel.
I wasn't crazy about the Guldenberg from De Ranke, but here's a picture of it because it sure looked pretty. Check out that mousse-y head! My favorite part was its aroma: it smelled a little of lemon, pineapple, and grass, with a notable whiff of Belgian yeast.
A beer that I was crazy about, though? And I mean absolutely gaga for? The Brother Soignée from Hill Farmstead. Hill Farmstead is a legendary brewery in northern Vermont, and their beers were all over Brussels during my visit. Turns out, they'd just been in town to collaborate with Cantillon. It sounds odd that I drank three beers from Hill Farmstead during my limited time in Belgium, but Hill Farmstead is so hard to find in the States that I'd never even seen one, so I took advantage. This is exactly what I said to each of my servers (somewhat guiltily) when I explained why an American was ordering American beer in Belgium. One of these servers, the wonderful Boritz at Moeder Lambic Fontainas, said that he'd been explaining Hill Farmstead to Belgians as "the Westvleteren of America." Westvleteren is the smallest Trappist abbey, whose beer is notoriously difficult to get - in America, for example, you can find 6-packs of it going for $150. When I first heard Boritz draw the comparison, I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration - but on second thought, it actually sounds about right. So Hill Farmstead will get its own entry as part of my Belgium beer trip. Odd as that may sound, it was a significant and memorable part of all that I tasted while in Brussels.
The next day I visited the Brussels Beer Project, a brewery known for the ways that it departs from centuries of Belgian brewing tradition (its motto: "Leave the Abbey, join the playground!"), then had dinner at Nuet Nigenough, where I got to sample some Drie Fonteinen gueze (as well as another Hill Farmstead sour). After a visit to the Old Masters Museum the following afternoon, I stopped by BrewDog's impressive new bar in Brussels. On my final day in Brussels, I visited Cantillon and its neighbor, the nanobrasserie l'Érmitage. Blog notes to come on all those amazing beers, as well as one about my visit with Christian and Ana at Perle Bières Artisinales, an old (founded in 1882) but new (re-founded in 2008) brewery in Strasbourg, France.
Like I said: there is just so, so, so much good beer to account for here. What a treat.
