Posted on 12/21/2013 1:47:14 PM PST by NYer
Nice! I’ve had the opportunity to try 3 of those. The Belgians are the Kings of beer. If you lived there 20 years I’m not sure you could sample every beer made in Belgium.
I’ve tried all of them and visited mot of the Trappist Breweries.......
My favorite is the Westmalle Triple.......
Best beer fest in the world is in Grande Place Brussels every year, the first weekend in Sept. The following weekend is the better festival of mostly Belgian Sours.....
Have done this 5 times... 3 days of 300+ Belgian beers!!!!
And spend the night drinking at Joe’s Delerium Tremens Bar or across the street at his Flores Cafe’... 150 different brands of Absinthe!!!! Killed a lot of brain cells in those places.....
Went to an EU brewing symposium with the brew-masters from the Trappist breweries. Drank till the sun came up.... really great guys
4 out of 10 and Chimay is my favorite.
I developed a taste for Absinthe, may God help me. LOL!
If you visit the breweries, pass on the monk’s beer.... It smells like crap, has no alcohol and it absolutely tastes terrible!!! (They don’t want the monks to become alcoholics!!!)
Most of the Trappist breweries add brettanomyces yeast culture at bottling. In Europe they drink it too green for the brettanomyces culture to really impact the taste. However in the USA, due to the shipping time, it has a chance to mature and tastes quite different.
You're my new hero.
Come to the Dark Side. We have beer.
bump
My favorite lambic is from Cantillon. The brewery looks like a row home in a residential neighborhood from the front. They still pump their beer to the attic in a copper pan to cool, then put it in barrels for aging.
One of my former co-workers is a beer aficionado. Several years ago, never having traveled to Europe, he purchased tickets for a beer tour of Belgium. He purchased two large suitcases, one carry on, and several rolls of bubble wrap. He packed his skivvies in the carry on and departed. As he toured the Belgian breweries, he purchased and packed both bags with their best beers, carefully wrapped in the bubble wrap. Upon his return to the US, he held a beer party at home with his best friends. He never stopped raving about his trip.
Those monks sure know how to trap a person into becoming Catholic.
I never got there during my Army tours in Germany, although I took many trips to Belgium. But spent those walking WWII battlegrounds & Waterloo. Got my Belgian beer at the places I stayed or had meals.
It's not too late!! St. Joseph's Abbey is nearby in Massachusetts.
My son’s brewed a Tripel that had had a bell curve flavor.
The first couple of weeks after carbonating the flavor was OK. By the 2nd couple of weeks the flavor was outstanding.
By the next couple of weeks the flavor declined.
Just and 2nd hand brewing observation.
Ping a roo
“He never stopped raving about his trip.”
The people are wonderful. The landscape is beautiful... And the beer is GREAT!!!! Absolutely love Belgium.
Nowhere in the world is there such a great variety of wonderful beer... As an amateur brewer and by bizarre chance, I ended up getting invited to a EU brewing symposium as a personal guest of the Chairman of the Board of INBEV. Spent several days with 80 of the top brew-masters from around the world. What a great bunch of people.
If this country tanks like I expect it will, just might move to Belgium and enjoy life.....
Orval Trappist Brewery is in the southeast corner of Belgium, not too far from Luxembourg. It’s in the Battle of the Bulge area. Americans sure are welcome there.
“My son’s brewed a Tripel that had had a bell curve flavor.”
The trick to making a good tripel is to mash two batches and blend them. The first batch keep the temp low enough to get the beta-amylase enzyme producing monosaccharides or short chain fermentable sugars. That will give the high alcohol content of a tripel.
The second batch you need to keep the temp around 158 degrees so the alpha-amalase enzymes produce long chain unfermentable polysaccharides which leave the sweet balanced flavor in the high alcohol beer. That will stabilize the beer and minimize the drastic changes from bottle fermentation.
Step mashing won’t give the same results as the enzyme level in most grains converts starches so fast that the window to step the temp up is too small.
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