Grim news

The monks at Grimbergen Abbey just north of Brussels apparently want to start brewing again, in part because visitors to the site are always asking them if they can take a look round the brewery.

There are two types of monastic beer in Belgium, those with the Authentic Trappist Product logo which have to be brewed within the walls of a monastery, albeit often by secular workers under the supervision of monks, and Abbey beers which are normally contract-brewed by outside companies on their behalf.

Trappist beers have a deservedly high reputation internationally, but some of the Abbey beers are up there with them in quality, notably the Sint Bernardus ones brewed in Watou. One of the Trappist breweries, Chimay, went through a spell of producing poor-quality beer with cheap ingredients a decade or so ago, although they have supposedly improved since I tried them then. I've also tried a couple of Grimbergen beers and found them, well, grim.

Grimbergen was first contract-brewed by the Maes Brewery in 1958 (when I went to Belgium in 2015, Maes Pils seemed to be the beer old blokes drank in cafes first thing in the morning, the equivalent of John Smith's Smooth in Wetherspoons here) before it was taken over Scottish & Newcastle in 2000, who were then taken over themselves by Heineken and Carlsberg in 2007.

The only snag the monks at Grimbergen have hit is that they can't find the mediaeval recipe for their beer and a team of researchers is now going through the documents in their library in an attempt to find it for them. I'm not sure it's that big a deal: they know from invoices what types of hops and malt were used in it, if not the exact proportions or how it was brewed, and they can just say, as other breweries have, that it's "inspired by" rather than a replica of the original. Whatever they come up with must be better than what's produced in their name now, and it's not as though anyone who drank the original beer is still alive to dispute its authenticity.

A few thoughts about Brussels

This time last year, I was in Brussels, flying back at the end of my first trip to the Belgian capital from the airport at Zaventem which on Tuesday morning was the scene of two of the three bomb attacks which struck the city.

As I suppose is natural, it's more shocking when a bomb blows up somewhere you've been to or know well, with the inevitable thought of "there but for the grace of God go I". I must admit that, even after I'd been to Brussels, I wasn't really aware that it had a sizeable population of North African Muslim immigrants or that its Molenbeek district was home to large numbers of jihadis who had returned from fighting in Syria: like most people who go to Brussels, I stuck to the the tourist quarter around the Grand Place with its bars and cafes.

After a massacre such as this week's, the inevitable question is asked: what we can do to stop it happening again? Last night, in a special edition of the BBC's Panorama programme, the investigative journalist Peter Taylor sought some of the answers.

For the the last decade or so, Taylor has been investigating the role of the intelligence agencies in the fight against Islamist terrorism (before that, he spent much of his career looking into their covert operations in the thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland). A few things soon become apparent about those suspected of carrying out the Brussels attacks and the ones in Paris last November: they tend to have friendship or family links with others in their terrorist cell, to be from not particularly religious backgrounds, to be involved in petty crime and are often recruited whilst in prison.

If the alienation felt by many young Muslim men in Europe, which leads some of them to become jihadis, has socioeconomic rather than religious roots (albeit that it often take a religious form), the answer to the violence perpetrated on the streets of its cities becomes clear: tackling the lack of integration in housing and schools and providing decent jobs as an alternative to the low-level gangsterism which sees some of them eventually enter the ranks of Islamist terrorist networks like ISIS. The real question is whether European governments have the desire to do it.

Reassuringly inaccurate

I saw the new Stella Artois advert for the first time yesterday and it got me thinking.

Did you, like me, think that the first pale lager was brewed in Pilsen in 1842?  Did you also think that Stella Artois was launched as a Christmas beer in 1926? Well, it seems that we were all wrong and the boys from AB-InBev are here to set us straight: Sébastian Artois started knocking out the stuff shortly after he took over the Leuven brewery in 1717. The beer history books are clearly all going to have to be rewritten.

King of the Belgians

I've just got back from Belgium, the first time I've been to the smallest of the world's great beer countries.

The main reason for the trip was to see the grave of my great uncle, who was killed fighting with the British Expeditionary Force just south of Brussels in 1940, but I also managed to get round a few bars and cafes.

One thing that struck me was the availability and choice of decent beer, in cafes in small towns and railway station bars. I also began to understand why the Belgians attach such importance to serving each beer in its own glass and pouring it in the correct manner.

Brussels has one of the most walkable city centres I've been to: all the bars and cafes I went to were no more than five minutes from the Grand Place.

Delirium

I'd heard lots of negative things about Delirium before I went – touristy, expensive, slow, rude and uninformed staff, full of students drinking industrial lager – and intended to just pop in for one beer and move on; in the end, I spent several hours there enjoying beers from its massive range of Belgian bottles.

At between three and four euros a bottle, the beer is actually pretty cheap. The staff were friendly and happy to help those unsure what they wanted to drink. Most of the customers were in their twenties, many fellow travellers chatting to each. It made for a lively, fun atmosphere I thought.

Poechenellekelder

In contrast to Delirium, I'd heard lots of positive things about Poechenellekelder. The Tripel Karmaliet I had was fine, expertly poured in the right glass, but I found the atmosphere just a bit too touristy: the Mannekin Pis is just across the street, giving them a ready made clientele of international snappers which is reflected in the slightly higher prices. I can't say the kitschy interior bedecked with puppets did it for me either,

A La Bécasse

In the CAMRA guide to Belgian beer, the authors claim that only a few people take to lambic beer straight away, some never do and for most it's very much an acquired taste. I thought about that as I sipped glasses of Timmermans Doux Lambic poured from a stone jug in A La Bécasse: appley and sharp, it's a refeshing drink which you probably wouldn't identify as beer if you didn't know what it was.

I liked the interior of this place: cosy and decorated with historic beer adverts, its bare wooden tables and panelled walls reminded me of a German pub somehow. Luckily I left just as a busload of tourists arrived with an energetic guide giving them a rather loud lecture on Belgian beer.

A La Mort Subite

This is the classic Bruxellois cafe, pretty much unchanged since it opened in the late twenties. I had the house beer, Mort Subite Kriek, and was impressed by the contrast between the sharp sourness of this spontaneously-fermented lambic and the tartness of the kriek cherries used to flavour it.

On the plane back from Brussels, I was amused to read in a Belgian newspaper a quote from fellow Mancunian Noel Gallagher that he hates days off in the city as it's always raining and there's nothing to do!

Sticking up for Stella

There's a video doing the rounds on social media and blogs of a Swedish journalist who travels to Leuven in Belgium to interview the drinkers and brewers of Stella Artois.

It's easy to poke fun at the AB InBev PR guy who talks about his "passion" for the company's "brands" but can't describe what the beer tastes like. I'm not sure what the point is though. Stella is a long way from being the world's most exciting beer but it isn't positively unpleasant. It's better I'd say than many mass-produced lagers.

I like beer. I'd rather drink cask conditioned beer in top condition but I still prefer beer to wine or cider. Given the choice between a can of Stella and a world famous claret, I'd choose the former.

A Special Guinness

I rounded off my festive drinking with another beer I hadn't tried before, Guinness Special Export Stout.

I've drunk Guinness Foreign Extra Stout before. Special Extra Stout is the 8% version brewed by Guinness for the Belgian market (David Hughes in A Bottle of Guinness Please explains how that anomaly came about).

Special Export Stout is quite like Foreign Extra Stout in having a smooth, velvety mouthfeel which reminded me of Graham Greene in Brighton Rock describing a woman singing in a pub as having a "rich Guinness voice".

Auf Wiedersehen Deutschland

This time last week, I was on my way back from Germany.

My flight from Düsseldorf to Manchester took off at half past three so as usual I arrived at the airport just after midday. Düsseldorf Airport is actually quite a pleasant place to spend a couple of hours buying presents and having one last beer (the bar has bottles of Frankenheim Alt and Radeberger Pils on draught: I chose the latter).

In the last three years, I've been to Germany quite a bit: Düsseldorf and Cologne, Munich and Bamberg. I've  been following in the footsteps of other beer enthusiasts who showed me the way to some wonderful drinking expereiences, notably Michael Jackson and his World Guide to Beer and Ron Pattinson with his invaluable pub guides. I've now got the unexplored beer lands of Belgium and the Czech Republic in my sights. And I really must get to Salzburg one day.

Franco-Belgian beer war

I've written before about the French's government tax hike on beer (although apparently duty on beer will still be lower than in the UK). The 160 per cent rise now seems to have sparked a diplomatic stand-off between France and Belgium.

According to today's Guardian, the Belgian prime minister was rebuffed when he raised the matter with the French president and Belgium is now planning to increase duty on French wine.

Michael Jackson in his 1977 World Guide to Beer talks about the line running through Europe between beer and wine countries. The Franco-Belgian border now seems to be the main confrontation point on that line.

Surely the main effect of tit-for-tat tax increases on Belgian beer and French wine will be consumers on either side of the border crossing it on shopping and drinking trips.

Biking Belgians

When it's not whipping up middle-class prejudices about immigration or benefits, the Daily Mail can sometimes be (unintentionally) funny.

The Mail reports in shocked tones that a few years back British cycling hero Bradley Wiggins started "collecting all 365 varieties of Belgian beer" and "regularly set off for Brussels and returned home with a van-load of local brews. He would sit at home, admiring his collection, and then start drinking it. Before long he would be standing outside the pub, waiting for the doors to open, and by the end of the day he would often have consumed a dozen pints."

I'm not sure why the Mail describes Wiggins' collection as a "unlikely obsession with Belgian beer" - beer, and cycling, are pretty much the only things Belgium is famous for. And I don't believe the claim about "365 varieties of Belgian beer". Not only does it sound on the low side, it's a bit too much of a coincidence that there's one for each day of the year.