Until then, I hadn’t thought much about the demise of beer styles. But listening to Armand made me think about dying languages, which illustrate the grind toward a more homogenous world. How are beer styles any different? Beer drinkers’ palates are sure to change, as will brewing technologies and beer ingredients, but the permanent loss of any beer style, and the knowledge it took to make it, marks a moment of no return.
A woman with short gray hair and a dusky-blue velvet blazer burst into the room: Lydie Hulpiau, Armand’s wife. Before she arrived, Armand had told me he fell in love with her the first time they met. Then, while he was talking to Sarah and Dimi, Lydie told me she fell in love with Armand the first time they met. Before she came into his life, he said, he lived “like an artist,” with total freedom and an ignorance about the business side of Drie Fonteinen. “Lydie changed my life,” he said matter-of-factly, before he caught her eye and smiled radiantly. I imagined a fluttering inside his chest was rippling through the gift shop and into all the beer in the brewery.
Before they met, Lydie said, she was a beer drinker. “I would drink a lot of beers with crazy names, and I would think I was drinking the best,” she said. “Lambics, I got acquainted with very quickly, but gueuze took me a bit longer. But once you get into gueuze … ”
With a background in marketing, Lydie took charge of the brewery’s marketing, finances, and sales. She began to raise the prices of the beer and started to think about which importers were best suited to sell the beer outside of Belgium. She said that, even though they could easily export all of Drie Fonteinen’s beers—international demand is strong—they were committed to keeping 50 percent of the brewery’s beers in Belgium, reversing an exporting trend. For example, Belgians have a difficult time finding Orval, a famous abbey ale made with Brettanomyces, while I can walk from my house to a bottle shop and find a bottle of Orval on most days. “It’s easier to export than be a good brewer in Belgium,” Lydie said. “We have the reputation of being a good brewer in Belgium. We want to keep that tradition.”
Armand’s phone beeped. When he answered, I wasn’t sure if he was speaking Flemish, Dutch, French, or a hybrid, but his fluid singsong made my mind feel as brittle as a dried stalk of barley. After he ended the call, Armand said, “That’s my next generation. You might call him my protégé.” Five years earlier, on one of the first sunny days of April, Armand had been eating a few slices of bread for lunch, waiting to interview three people for a job at the brewery. The first person was a no-show, and so was the second. But the third, Michael Blancquaert, arrived right on time. When he walked through the door, Lydie said to Armand, “That’s him.” Earlier she’d had a feeling he’d be the one. Ever since he started working for Drie Fonteinen, Michael has given Armand and Lydie hope, like the first grandbaby in an aging family. Armand doesn’t have children, so he’d assumed the brewery would end with him. As a protégé, Michael bought 50 percent of the shares of the brewery in 2012, and he will inherit the title of blender when Armand retires.
“Sometimes I ask if he’s from this planet,” Armand said. “It’s unbelievable what happens to me.”
Lydie looked at the table and made an important observation. “They’re not drinking beer!” she exclaimed. “This is a problem.”
“They are coming for the beer, not for me,” Armand said, with a wry smile.
Armand pulled a bottle of the angel piss we’d tasted with Dimi the night before from a small fridge in the tasting area. I was eager to see if the beer would taste the same as it did last night by the fire. How would being at the brewery with Armand and Lydie alter my sensory experience? I’d never find out, because when Armand dislodged the cork from the 2008 gueuze, the room was silent. There had been no celebratory pop, which meant the beer contained little carbonation. “That happens,” Armand said. He sounded nonplussed. “It doesn’t mean it’s not drinkable. You will not die from it.” Most likely, the bottle had been stored upright, so the cork had dried and failed to adequately protect the beer.
We tried the spoiled gueuze anyway. Dimi put his nose inside the glass and inhaled. “The perfume,” he said, “it’s … ” As his sentence trailed, we were each left with a blank space for inserting the right adjective for our subjective experiences. For an instant, I resisted the call to define the beer with words, the antithesis of what I was training myself to do. In Belgium even more than at home, I’d been feeling the urge to simply experience many beers instead of approaching them like teaching tools in need of dissection. While analyzing any beer increased my appreciation and understating of the beer itself, the action also seemed to pull me out of the moment. With my nose in the glass and my mind racing through the properties of certain beer styles, I could easily miss a sideward glance, the quality of light in a room, or the texture of a wooden plank in a barrel. Since my moments in Belgium were limited, I wanted to be present in every way possible. When Armand loosened the cork on the next bottle of gueuze, a festive pop commanded my attention.
Gueuze is special, in part, because of the blending process, an art that requires a master blender to taste beer from individual barrels (each barrel holds its own microbial flora and, therefore, flavors) and predict how each lambic might taste years later, alone or blended. Armand said, when he’s blending, he relies only on intuition. “You don’t have to think,” he said.
Inside the oak wine barrels, which Drie Fonteinen sources from wineries in Italy and France, a white film, or skin, called a pellicle develops on the surface of the beer as sediment falls to the bottom. During this phase, it’s essential not to knock, move, or otherwise disrupt a barrel of lambic. “The sediment is the mother, and the beer is lying on the mother,” Armand explained. “When you separate the mother and child, the child cannot live anymore.” Part of the art of blending is placing a valve in the barrel to retrieve a taste of the beer without disturbing the beer inside. The first taste from the barrel is never a good representation of the beer, Armand explained. In the second taste, he discovers the true essence of the beer, a moment that brings him great joy.
“Does the beer ever surprise you?” I asked. “Is your intuition ever off?”
“I’m always surprised and sometimes disappointed,” he said. “That’s why I have a nice job. I’ve never made the same beer twice.”
The gueuze with the happy cork pop was a lambic aged for one year in a sherry barrel, a type of barrel Armand was using for the first time. The beer had a name, but since it wouldn’t be released until fall, Armand wouldn’t reveal what it was.
“This is very special,” Sarah said, swirling the beer in her glass. “It’s crazy.” Her eyelids looked heavy, as though the beer had just transported her to someplace peaceful and serene.
“Formidable,” Dimi added, with a heavy sigh. “Some bottles you open for something special, like yesterday when you came.” He nodded at Sarah and me. “But this, it’s different. Magnifique.”
“It’s perfectly balanced,” Sarah continued. Her voice sounded rich and warm. “All the complexities are melding together. It’s not too acidic. The texture’s just right.”
Despite the fact that I sensed greatness in this beer, I couldn’t find the language to contribute to the conversation, which made me feel like a tourist, someone who came to gawk, not participate.
“To find that balance is the thing,” said Armand. “Michael’s tasting to learn.”
Dimi nodded. “He is getting the experience of you.”
Like Cantillon, Drie Fonteinen brews only between October and April, when there is less of what Armand called “rotting bacteria.” By the time summer arrives, “If you have meat or you’re making your own mayonnaise, you will have conservation problems,” he said. “Our grandparents knew that. Les temps de cerise est les temps perdu.” The time of the cherry harvest (that is, June and July) is the time lost. Dimi muttered something about amoureux, and the two men chuckled. Not only is the cherry harvest a time of rotting and decomposition—too much wildness for spontaneousl
y fermented beer—it is the time for lovers.
Eventually Armand led the three of us outside, then into the building that housed the brewery, where the floors and tanks gleamed in stark opposition to the scene at Cantillon. Large laminated labels identified each piece of equipment, which made giving tours easier. Small fans mounted above the coolship helped bring the wort down to temperature while circulating yeast and bacteria, the equivalent of the window louvres at Cantillon. A dingy, plastic saint-like figure stood atop a temperature-control box, the patron saint of precision.
Things looked more like Cantillon when we walked downstairs, into a dark, cave-like space filled with barrels of lambic in various stages of fermentation. Without thinking, I put my hand on one barrel, hoping to feel its life force, real or imagined. Armand shot me a look.
“Be careful not to disturb the beer,” he said tersely.
I’d forgotten about the skin-film and the sediment, the mother and child. I whispered apologies to the beer and slowly backed away, hoping the micro-universe inside the barrel was tougher than my touch.
At the far end of the barrel room, a hidden stairway led to the Drie Fonteinen restaurant, a white-tablecloth bistro that felt like a place my grandparents would have visited somewhere in Europe in the 1950s. Armand, Lydie, Lydie’s French cousin and her twelve-year-old son, an aspiring American brewer named Luke, a videographer from Antwerp, Sarah, and me sat down together at a long table like an extended family forced together at a holiday meal. The menu listed an array of rustic Belgian dishes and French classics, including sole meuniere and chateaubriand. Many of the dishes were made with beer, including a kriek vinaigrette and the vlaamse stoofkarbonaden, aka carbonnades à la flamande, which was braised in oude gueuze and would be my dinner. Frites arrived in silver serving containers with serving spoons, the only vegetable on the table. Armand and Lydie ordered a grainy Beersel Blond with plenty of bubbles—a bright aperitif—and I followed suit.
In the tasting room, Armand had described a pivotal moment in his career. On a weekend morning in 2009, he had walked into the brewery and found bottles of gueuze exploding, creating a dangerous spray of glass chards and beer. The heating system had malfunctioned, and as the room warmed, the bottles couldn’t withstand the pressure building within.
“The glass jumped,” Armand said. “God protected me at that point.”
In a panic, he tried to shut off the temperature control system, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. Then he realized turning off the electricity would stop the heat. By the time the room cooled and the explosions stopped, 126,000 bottles of gueuze had been destroyed or ruined. He called Lydie to tell her the news. Within minutes she was there, jumping out of her car in her pajamas. He told her his life’s work was over. He was bankrupt.
“She took me like this and started shaking me,” he said, placing his hands on imaginary shoulders. “She said, ‘Armand, stop it! Armand, stop it! You don’t have a bad disease. You can work again tomorrow.’ That helped me cool down a bit.”
The bottles exploded on a Saturday. Armand had asked Lydie to marry him that Wednesday.
At the dinner table, Lydie’s eyes filled with tears as she remembered arriving at the brewery that Saturday morning. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but this makes me a little emotional.” As news of the explosion reverberated through the beer community, people started to help. Dogfish Head brewed a Belgian white beer called Namaste, and sent some of its proceeds to Armand. A distiller in Brussels offered to transform the ruined gueuze remaining in 63,000 bottles into a distilled spirit. To transfer the ruined gueuze to the distillery, every bottle needed to be opened. For three Saturdays, local volunteers opened every bottle of ruined beer at Drie Fonteinen. The finished liquor became Armand’s Spirit, a high-end eau de vie. The story of cross-cultural compassion—a Flemish brewery saved by a French Wallonian distillery—became a local media sensation.
When we’d finished dinner, Armand quietly picked up the tab for the entire table and beamed when we thanked him. Then he handed Sarah and me each a bottle of 2004 gueuze. I cradled the beer in my arms as he rattled off a list of instructions. Store on its side in a cool but not cold environment. Let the beer sit upright at room temperature forty-five minutes before serving. Gently remove the cork. Gently! Pour the beer with the bottle tilted at a slight angle. Not too fast. Not too slow. Most important, “Drink this beer with someone who will appreciate it,” he admonished. “It’s special. It’s not a beer for someone who doesn’t like beer.” As I tucked the beer into Klara’s backseat and thought about securing it with a seatbelt, I wondered how the beer would survive the trip to Portland. Because the person I wanted to drink the beer with lived five thousand miles away and had probably just packed a small lunch that included a starch, protein, vegetable, and fruit. Armand hadn’t given any instructions for that part of the journey.
The evening before Sarah caught her plane to D.C., we drove through a blue fog on the way back to our hotel in Brussels. It had been an exciting day: we’d visited a small brewery called Alvinne, where two Spanish brewers were brewing a collaboration beer. Then we’d toured Rodenbach, a brewery founded in 1836. The brewery produces the country’s most famous Flemish red ales, which are fermented in giant wooden foeders, barrels capable of holding a whopping 553 barrels of beer. (The foeders are so important to the production of the beer, they’re crafted at the brewery in an on-site cooperage.) During our tour, Sarah kept fidgeting and sighing loudly. Rudi Ghequire, brewmaster and brewery manager, who boasted a thirty-three-year tenure at the brewery, gave us a tour that included very basic facts about brewing and fermentation, an obvious regurgitation of a tour he’d give anyone off the street. For a moment, I felt briefly annoyed with Sarah for not appreciating that, unlike her, I might appreciate hearing rudimentary summaries of the brewing process. But in reality, I was also bored during much of the tour. As I was starting to think about saying goodbye to Sarah, I realized how much I’d miss the way her perceptions brought mine into sharper focus. I had learned so much from her, not only about brewing, beer distribution, and the culinary world, but about the joy of exploring foreign beer landscapes with a friend.
“I’m really glad you were with me at Alvinne,” I said. “I don’t know what it was, but I would have felt uncomfortable being there by myself.”
Every so often, at beer events or in breweries, being a beer woman outnumbered by men bothered me. I tried to make a conscious effort not to notice, but more often, I counted the number of women in the room and then figured out gender percentages. Five percent. Eleven percent. Twenty percent. For some reason, the numbers had mattered to me at Alvinne. There had been five men: two Belgian brewers, two Spanish brewers, and an English brewer. That made me and Sarah 29 percent of the people in the room, a fairly high percentage of women in the grand scheme of the beer scene. The mood had been festive—jamon Iberico and a strong Basque sheep’s milk cheese for snacking, which paired well with the jubilant anticipation of a beer festival that weekend. There was no logical reason why I would have felt uncomfortable, and yet, while I was taking pictures of barrels filled with beer for a summer wedding, I was comforted by the fact that Sarah was upstairs.
“My husband put it to me this way,” she said as her hands gripped the wheel. “You’ll always be the anomaly. You’ll walk into the room at any beer event, and you’ll be the anomaly because you’re a woman.”
“So, you’re okay with that?” I asked.
She paused. “Yeah, I am.”
I thought about her answer. Even though I was always prepared to be in the minority, I never liked it. A sleek BMW zoomed past us in the left lane. We hung back behind a boxy truck.
“I get really tired of being one of the only women in the room,” I finally said.
“I know,” she replied.
“It’s not fair.”
“Eh,” she said, “it is what it is. This isn’t the only industry where women are under-represented. It’s not the first, and it won�
��t be the last.”
“Maybe someday that will change,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
Sarah held her line, keeping her eyes on the road.
She turned down the volume on the robotic female GPS voice, flicked the turn signal, pressed on the gas, and steered us into the left lane. We glided past the truck that had been holding us back for so many miles.
The next morning, before the sun rose, I drove Sarah to the airport, then returned to Saint-Gilles and ate a soft-boiled egg at our favorite neighborhood café, Le Dillens. I watched people drinking coffee before they went to work, and I felt a pang of loneliness. I wished I could tell Sarah how the toast soldiers were perfect (she’d appreciate the way the butter nearly soaked through the toothsome whole wheat, even though a glimpse of the unctuous egg would have made her ill), but she was somewhere over the Atlantic. I buckled in for the drive to the Hainaut province of Belgium, near the border of France, where I would meet Olivier Dedeycker, brewmaster at Brasserie Dupont. For the rest of the trip, just Klara and me would be shifting ratios.
PERFECT PAIRINGS
It is impossible to have bad taste, but many people have none at all.
—GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
AS THE SUN SET on the sleepy town of Watou, population about 1,900, I pedaled a bicycle down a road flanked by fields of dirt clods. I could see a distant hill, which I knew sat just over the border in France. The smell of earth and farm animals was thick, as though summer’s sun had been baking the fields all day, but it was only early March. I felt like I was riding through the fumes of a funky sour ale, but really, spring was just standing at the door, getting ready to knock. When I arrived in the town center, an eerie quiet wrapped the historic buildings and laminated the cobblestone streets. It was Thursday night, and every car that passed me seemed to be filled with someone heading home for dinner. I was the only one on a bicycle, which didn’t bother me one bit. After more than a week navigating Belgium’s roads inside Klara, I was delighted to discover the bed and breakfast where I was staying had bicycles for guests.
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