My Beer Year

  Hair of the Dog’s owner-brewer Alan Sprints says the after-market for his beers doesn’t bother him. But he does try to quash some of the black market. At the Hair of the Dog tasting room, you can buy some of the brewery’s vintage beers, but only if you’re willing to drink them on-site. “If I allowed them to be sold to go,” he says, “I wouldn’t have any more beer.”

  Nothing about what we did at What Would Jesus Bring was illegal, though I can’t vouch for how each beer was acquired. Twenty-five of us—friends and beer industry professionals—wore nametags with preassigned numbers. Every so often, two bartenders would fill rows of little plastic cups with one-or two-ounce pours of beer, which created a grid of dark circles. Our nametag numbers indicated which row we could drink. Whether or not the beer looked more like doses of medicine or some type of sacrament was a hot topic during the hours we spent sipping seven vintages of Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout, four years of Roots Organic Epic Ale—beer that is coveted in part because the brewery no longer exists—and seven years of He’Brew Jewbelation by Shmaltz Brewing. Bottles of these were beers were like individual pearls; in verticals, they became stunning strands. WWJB was Portland’s version of a Davos penthouse party, with thousands of dollars of rare beer instead of champagne, and locally made cheese and charcuterie in lieu of a caviar bar. At the other end of the spectrum, some bottle shares are announced on Twitter and held in bars. BYOB: bring your own burrito.

  After I’d rearranged some of the beer in my cellar, an excuse to ogle my collection, I finally decided on what to take to Brian’s house: a 2011 Samuel Adams Utopias. Packaged in a ceramic container shaped like an old mash tun and with 29 percent ABV, the Boston Beer Company, owners of Samuel Adams, marketed it as the “strongest beer ever made.” It was also one of the most expensive beers ever made: a twenty-four-ounce bottle cost $150 retail. (On the black market, Utopias can cost upwards of $300.) Utopias is a blend of beers that were aged in different kinds of barrels, some of which were brewed as early as 1994, which creates a drink less like beer and more like port or sherry. The Samuel Adams PR department had sent me, and other beer media, bottles of Utopias for free. I’d held on to mine, not only because I was waiting for the right occasion to drink the strongest beer in the world, but also because I wondered if the fact that the beer was free would alter its taste. My friends could help me find out. I tucked the beer into my bicycle pannier, hoping the ride across town wouldn’t do any damage. Since the beer wasn’t carbonated, I knew even a jarring, bumpy ride wouldn’t cause the beer to spew.

  At Brian’s house, Tony and I settled into chairs in the basement while Brian’s two-year-old son, Izzy, rolled around with a cooler on the floor. People started arriving, and so did the beer. A homebrewer named Rodney Kibzey produced a ten-year vertical of North Coast Brewing Old Stock Ale, which spanned from 2002 to 2014 but didn’t include 2003 and 2005. He’d bought the beers one at a time at bottle shops over the years, and he would later lament that the 2015 was released just a few days after the party. Because I was trying to act like someone who hadn’t been spending an inordinate amount of time analyzing beer, I purposely tried not to pay too much attention to what I was drinking. Instead, I let sips of Old Stock slide across my palate, oldest to newest, as I asked myself a simple question I’d started to forget to ask: Do I like this beer? Somewhere around 2008, I became distracted and started trying other beers on the table, including a sour from Upright Brewing and the ridiculously rich, barrel-aged Speedway Stout by AleSmith Brewing.

  Tony, on the other hand, was deeply enmeshed in the Old Stock vertical.

  “Oh wow,” he said. “They’re all so different.” He looked entranced, and I remembered that tasting and talking about beer was something we used to enjoy doing together.

  “This one doesn’t seem right,” he said, and passed his glass to me so I could try it. The beer tasted dusty and made me feel like I was cleaning out a closet, a sure sign of oxidation.

  Then he found Goldilocks, possibly the 2008, 2009, or 2012. While the newer vintages seemed disjointed and jangly, the “just right” one was like the perfect dinner-party guest, a witty conversationalist who expressed both lightness and gravity.

  At one point, I discovered I was sitting next to a Certified Cicerone, a guy who worked as a blender—someone who blends beers from different barrels—for a local brewery. I peppered him with questions about how he had prepared for the test, but to my frustration, he answered most of my queries with shrugs. I felt like he was withholding advice, but maybe he was just trying to relax. I tried to follow suit.

  When I opened the Utopias and passed around the bottle, Brian suggested adding an oversized cube of smoked ice he’d brought home in a to-go bag from a restaurant famous for its cocktail program. I tried the beer straight up, then, even though I feared watering down the beer with the smoked ice, I tried it. The smoky dilution didn’t even make a dent in the intense, sherry smoothness.

  During the slow ride home, I took in gulps of cold air and felt the gentle slip of the pedals under my feet.

  “They were so different!” Tony yelled from in front of me in the bike lane.

  “The people?” I asked.

  “No, the beer!”

  GOING WILD

  You can’t just let nature run wild.

  —WALT DISNEY

  ON ONE OF THE LAST DAYS of February, during a rosy, gauzy sunrise in Brussels, my plane landed on a runway surrounded by soft hills punctuated with sharp steeples. With heavy eyelids, I rolled my bag from the airport to a hotel across the street, where I’d arranged to meet Sarah Jane Curran, my travel companion for the first half of my trip. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her again. We’d only met that one time at the Feast Portland festival, when I’d asked her if she wanted to go with me to Belgium. If I acted on every plan I made under the influence of a beer buzz, I would have climbed K2, written a dissertation on the wild desert truffles of Saudi Arabia, and spent a year working as a long-haul trucker. Yet there I was, on a frosty winter morning in Belgium, about to meet up with Sarah.

  Because I’d been worried about giving up my solo travel time, I proposed a plan: Sarah and I would travel together for the first half of the trip, then I’d do the second half alone. Even though I worried I’d come off as ungrateful for her willingness to travel with me—a beer novice and a total stranger—she seemed excited about the idea, which wouldn’t take her away from work and home for too long. I also started to realize that, if we traveled well together, I would’ve hit the Cicerone-study jackpot: Sarah was the real deal, an experienced beer industry insider who could teach me so much. Besides, as Megan Flynn had said, “It might be fun to have a buddy.” She had a point: At most beer events, minus the rare night Tony and I got a babysitter for Oscar, I flew solo. Having a copilot might make Belgium more fun.

  Arranging the trip had taken some work, starting with simply finding a time for Sarah and me to talk to make plans. She’d recently moved to Washington, D.C., and had landed a job at Birch and Barley, an upscale, beer-centric restaurant. Between her late-night hours and my copywriting job, our phone conversation took weeks to execute, which didn’t seem like a good sign. When we finally talked, I was glad I’d trusted my intuition about her. She’d already made a Google map of all the breweries she wanted to see.

  “I’m assuming we’re both on a tight budget?” she said over the phone, before explaining that she wasn’t picky about hotels, as long as they were moderately clean. I felt a surge of relief. Sarah was a budget traveler, just like me.

  “So, this is kind of random,” Sarah said, “but my co-worker told me about a great restaurant in a town called Ypres. The chef used to work at a Michelin-starred restaurant, so it’s definitely a splurge. Want to go there for lunch one day?” My mind flashed to a vision of us eating juniper foam and uni.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  With just a few weeks until we would meet in Brussels, Sarah and I decided to each contact people who could help us
arrange meetings with brewers at breweries, which fit with my vision of gaining firsthand knowledge of Belgium’s beer culture and traditions among fermentation tanks and in brewery tasting rooms. There was no one brewery or town I needed to visit to accomplish this goal. I welcomed serendipity; whatever I encountered would teach me something. Sarah talked to the distributors she knew from working at Eleven Madison Park. I asked for contacts and introductions from fellow beer writers, from a sales rep for a distributor who’d recently let me sit in on a tasting of imported ales, and from two Portland friends who run bicycle beer tours in Belgium. I told the Belgian brewers I was a journalist who was studying for a beer test by visiting Belgium for the first time. (I didn’t mention the word Cicerone: since it seemed to confuse most people in the United States, I could only imagine how obscure the program was in Europe.) Our approach meant that planning focused less on geography and more on just getting appointments. As our travel dates approached, Sarah and I e-mailed each other in a flurry as we tried to gauge distances and timing.

  As our itinerary filled, I faced a few heartbreaks. I wouldn’t have time to see Bruges, a city known for its reflective canals and medieval architecture. And I hadn’t been able to gain access into any Trappist breweries, which wasn’t a surprise; Trappist monk brewers were notoriously unreceptive to visitors of any kind. While beer geeks still flock to the cafés and nearby spots that serve Trappist ales, I was less interested in being a tourist and more interested in being on the inside, even if it meant missing the chance to drink some of Belgium’s most famous beers. Lastly, I had scheduled only one day during my eleven days on the ground that didn’t include a beer appointment, which meant I probably wouldn’t be visiting art museums or chocolate factories. This trip was all about work, but it would be the best kind of work.

  I was worried about being away home for thirteen days, including the two full days of air travel (but who was counting)—it would be the longest I’d ever been away from Oscar. Nearly a year earlier, when I first brought up the idea of going to Europe, Tony seemed skeptical. “Oh sure,” he said. “You have to go to Europe to learn about beer.” But once I’d committed to taking the exam, he’d fully endorsed the idea.

  “Go,” he’d said over and over again. “We’ll be fine!”

  I showed Oscar maps of Europe, and I told him about my new friend Sarah and what made Belgian beers so special. I told him I’d miss him. We agreed I’d take one of his beloved Matchbox cars, a black one, which would make it like he was with me all the time, I said. I’d heard of parents photographing their kids’ objects on the road then sending the pictures home, so I thought I’d give it a try. After I tucked my toothbrush into its travel case and zipped up my suitcase, I decided to sneak into Oscar’s room for one last chance to feel the warmth of his forehead and take in his sleep smell, an even mixture of milky baby and goaty boy. The sun wouldn’t rise for at least a few hours. As soon as I opened the door, he rolled over and struggled to open his puffy eyes.

  “Sunshine,” I started, taking a deep breath. “I wanted to say goodbye one last time. My taxi is here.”

  “Mama!” he wailed. He threw his arms around my torso, as though we were lovers being torn apart by unjust forces. “I can’t bear it!”

  I cried during the taxi ride to the airport. I’d justified this trip as career development, but who was I kidding? I was going to Belgium to drink beer, which sounded less like a job and more like a vacation. I was selfish, and my sweet, innocent child couldn’t bear it. But once I buckled my seatbelt on the plane, I felt an odd sense of liberation. I was by myself, about to explore the new and unknown, like I used to do before I had a child. I’d packed my dog-eared copy of Tasting Beer—a book I kept reading in nonsequential chunks—stacks of beer style sheets from my classes, and some blank flashcards. Let the learning begin, I thought, as the plane’s engines roared.

  In the lobby of a hotel across the street from the airport, I immediately recognized Sarah’s long stride. Her straight hair was swept back, which made her look professional, as though she was headed to a meeting at the European Union. She’d flown in the night before and spent the night in the hotel. I tried not to resent her recent full night of sleep and hot shower.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling. “How’s it going? I didn’t check out yet because I thought you might want to freshen up. You know, brush your teeth and stuff.”

  “Ah,” I sighed. “Thank you.”

  After I collected myself in the hotel room, we were off. I’d already warned Sarah that I hated driving. In foreign countries, I usually took buses, trains, boats, airplanes, taxis, and canoes, anything that would prevent me from having to navigate strange road signs, and do metric conversions, at seventy miles per hour. Unfortunately, as a New Yorker for the past five years, she also hated driving. But since our trip was centered on traversing a country the size of Rhode Island, many times, we rented a black Jetta. As we left the airport, Sarah gripped the steering wheel at ten-and-two and peered at the small GPS unit mounted to the dash. The console said “Klara,” which we assumed was the name of the car. Later we would discover that Klara was the name of the classical music radio station playing at the time, but it was too late. We would address Klara by name from then on, as though she were the European goddess of safe passage.

  Sarah cautiously drove us to Erpe-Mere, a sparsely populated area in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking area of northern Belgium that includes the capital city of Brussels and five provinces. Flanders is known for many styles of beer, most famously the fruity and acidic Flanders red ales, which writer Michael Jackson called the “Burgundies of Belgium.” But that beer style wasn’t why we were here.

  In a well-manicured suburb with pointy iron gates and streets too narrow for most American cars, we’d found a modern, two-story garage with a sloped roof next to a well-kept vegetable garden. The air smelled richly fertile, making the frenetic aromas of cars, fried foods, and the perfumed people on the streets of Brussels seem like a dream. We’d arrived at De Glazen Toren brewery, named after the street it’s on—Glazentoren, which translates to “glass tower” and was the name of a pub that existed on the street a century ago.

  Inside, we were greeted by Mark De Neef, one of the brewery’s three business partners, who was retired from his job as a librarian in the nearby city of Aalst. Our balding guide, who wore a diamond-print sweater, circa 1994, hunched over a bit. I guessed he was close to seventy years old. He told us the brewery made 1,500 hectaliters of beer a year, my first introduction to two weeks of nonstop conversions. (I later figured out that equals about 1,280 barrels, which made De Glazen Toren a small, if not tiny, brewery.) The two brewers were the other business partners: Dirk De Pauw, a lawyer and the financial director of a hospital in Aalst, and Jef Van den Steen, a mathematician and one of Belgium’s most famous beer writers. They’d both earned degrees from the Ghent Brewery School CTL (Chemie Textiel Landbouw), a three-year program they pursued during weekends so they could continue working their day jobs.

  “Anyone can call themselves a brewer, but Jef and Dirk are masters,” Mark said forcefully, as spittle flew from the corner of his mouth. This, I believed. Since the brewery’s opening in 2004, it had developed a reputation for outstanding beer made from iron-rich well water from Jef’s house, next door. Even though the demand for De Glazen Toren beer outpaces supply, the three men don’t have plans for expansion, what seemed to me like a distinctly non-American approach. While I knew a few brewers in Portland who weren’t interested in growing their breweries, they were outliers.

  “We don’t want to become rich,” said Mark, “but it all needs to be paid for.” He swept his arm around the brewery, which was originally built to be the garage for Jef’s “camping car,” which is now parked elsewhere. All the brewing equipment was designed by Jef, the perfect job for a mathematician. But he didn’t do his own welds; he’d had the equipment constructed in Germany. After the beer ferments in stainless steel, it is bottled and moved to a small room
heated to 25 or 26 degrees Celsius (78.8 degrees Fahrenheit). I’d heard about these “warm rooms,” which are used to develop flavor profiles from certain esters during secondary fermentation, otherwise known as bottle conditioning. The rooms were standard in Belgium breweries. Inside the warm room, faced with case after case of bottled beer sitting upright, the balmy air kissed me once on each cheek, a greeting the people of Belgium would bestow on me many times in the coming days. Despite the warmth, I shivered from the thrill of finally standing in one of these famous rooms.

  Mark told us he was in charge of wrapping each 75-centiliter bottle (25.37 ounces) with paper, which protects the beer inside from light and makes the beverage look like an elegant present.

  “I’ll do it blindfolded!” he cried out proudly.

  I imagined him wrapping the bottles with the same swift care he took when shelving books at the library. Sometimes “students,” or interns, helped with the wrapping on Saturdays, when they weren’t in school. The good ones can wrap fifteen cases of twelve bottles an hour.

  A man with a long white beard, a red fisherman’s cap, a blue jumpsuit, and a carefully arranged scarf, looking like he could play a role in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, opened the door. He gave us a nod and a dismissive wave, as he pressed a cell phone against his ear and spoke in a language I couldn’t understand. It was Jef Van den Steen.