Brussels: Brussels Beer Project, Drie Fonteinen, and BrewDog Brussels
Brussels Beer Project
I first read about the Brussels Beer Project in a fantastic Beer Advocate article on the experimental beer scene in Brussels. Rather than follow centuries of tradition, BBP tends to eschew the sours and wild beers for which Belgium is famous. (If you're unfamiliar with the Brussels Beer Project, an apt analogy is BrewDog, whom the BBP cites as a major influence in their approach to experimentation and marketing.)
There are a few mainstays on their beer list, but they try to have 1-2 new beers on per month. They also host some pretty great guest beers.
I got a sampler of the Beer Project’s New England IPA, Belgian IPA, and double IPA, as well as a quince saison by Nevel Artisinal. I went heavy on the IPAs in my sampler, because that kind of breaking from Belgian tradition is what the Beer Project is going for, so I wanted to see how they did with it.
Their IPA game was solid, especially their New England IPA. It had just the aroma you’d expect: grapefruit and mineola, a smell that I'd started to miss after days of kolsch and sours. Appropriately, they call this beer “Juice Junkie.” It’s also super hazy, to round out the traits that define the style. I loved it. As a former west-coaster, BBP's double IPA was a little light on hops for me. I didn’t smell a lot (though apparently they’re there, as the beer is dry hopped), and I tasted more malt sweetness than I did bitterness. They use Galaxy hops towards the end of the boil, so I should have been tasting pineapple, I suppose, but all I got was wheat bread and green banana. Go figure. The Delta IPA was interesting: it put the hops of an IPA right up against the phenols of Belgian yeast. By the end of the sampler, I was tasting the Belgian more than the IPA, which is cool. Love this concept of marrying their country to different styles.
Maybe I didn’t taste everything I “should” have in these beers because I was drinking them right next to an active brewery. (Though according to the Beer Advocate article, the BBP does much of its brewing off-site, by contract.) Though I find that the smell of barley and hops broiling throws off what I taste, I loved the open concept that allows you to watch and eavesdrop on the brewers as they work. It was an interesting taproom: there was lots of English being spoken around me, a little Dutch, smatterings of Russian, Portugese, and Japanese. I heard no French while I was there, even though French is the language that I heard most often in Brussels. One table was filming a podcast. On the day that I visited, the BBP was more a destination brewery than a local haunt.
But I saw the Brussels Beer Project on tap at a couple other places while in town, so there’s definitely local support for this kind of experimentation. Brasserie l’Érmitage, for example, is doing something similar (more on them when I write about their neighbor, Cantillon) and had BBP's Delta IPA on as a guest tap.
Drie Fonteinen
After the BBP, I went to a very early dinner at Nuet Nigenough. I went on a tip from a regular at Hop Farm (thanks, Colleen!), and she was so right. The food was the best of my whole trip – I had perfectly fried frites and rabbit in a buttery brown sauce. I sat at a table right by the front door, so a cool breeze blew in while I waited for dinner. Because I was the first one there (when traveling solo, I feel less guilty about taking up a whole table during off-hours), I got to smell my dinner hit the pan in the kitchen: garlic and butter took over the dining room as the chefs chatted away in French.
And Nuet Nigenough may just do beer better than it does food. Its motto is “The Greedy Glutton” in English – but in French, underneath the English motto, it tells us that the restaurant is also a coureur of guezes - a gueze trader or tradesman, I think? And they did that job so well that they saved me a daytrip to Beersels, south of Brussels.
What’s in Beersels? Drie Fonteinen, a gueze blender or geuzestekerijen in Dutch (from steker in Flemish, I think?). Gueze is a blend of a young (1 year or so) and older (3 years or so) lambic, and finding the perfect blend - knowing which flavors to enhance and which to mellow, which will referment and condition well - is an art. And it's nearly a lost one. As this Beer Advocate article on a new nanoblendery called Bokkereyder puts it, "[A]s demand for the style began to plummet a century ago, most Lambic breweries vanished, along with the bulk of the ecosystem of independent blenders. Much of the sensory knowledge traditionally passed from person to person has also been lost." When writing about her visit to Drie Fonteinen in My Beer Year, Lucy Birmingham notes that even the tiny town of Beersel was home to 14 lambic blenders as recently as 1953; by 1990 there were only six blenders in the whole country (184). And Drie Fonteinen barely survived a catastrophic heating malfunction in 2009, thanks to help from the beer community, both in Belgium and abroad. (Dogfish Head, in Delaware, for example made a Belgian white and donated some proceeds to Drie Fonteinen (My Beer Year, 193).
I had Drie Fonteinen’s Oude Gueze 6°. It pours an amber that sparkles through the slight haze, without any head at all. (As I saw at Cantillon, the yeastie beasties do all of their eating of sugars and emitting of alcohol and CO2 in the barrels. After that, there's no bottle conditioning: without any new sugar to eat in the bottle, the yeast produce no more carbonation.) On the tongue, as you might expect: Bam- sour! Pow- tart! But what distinguishes this gueze for me is its roundness: somehow, it resolves the shocking pucker of the sour for you by the time you’re ready to swallow. I'd never tasted one quite so dynamic before.
BrewDog Brussels
After my tasting notes on the Drie Fonteinin, my notebook pleads: “At this point, I just want to enjoy a beer! No notes. No analyzing. No thinking.” So that’s what I did, through dinner (one more Hill Farmstead sour, their Arthur) and the next day, when I visited BrewDog Brussels. There, I basked in the sun on their awesome patio. When I got too hot, I came inside to read a book in their lofty, bright dining room. First, I tried a t' Verzet Rebel Local (Belgian brewery, Belgian IPA). But then, thirsty for home and for a familiar favorite -I ordered an Elvis Juice. Ok, so technically Elvis Juice is Scottish (not my home) - but it's BrewDog's American IPA, and I first drank it while watching an OSU football game, with a bunch of people dressed in scarlet-and-gray, in Columbus, the home of BrewDog's new American headquarters. So to me, Elvis Juice tastes like home.
That Elvis Juice was so delicious. Beer trips are fantastically fun, and learning about beer has been the outlet for my geekiness since I finished grad school. But sometimes, it's nice to just sit in the sun, eavesdrop on people speaking French, and drink a beer that you know and love.
