I noticed a pattern. The first dish was prepared with the same beer with which it was served. So was the second. Stefaan had left me with a copy of his cookbook, an engaging dining companion with zero conversational skills. I started flipping through the pages. Sure enough, every recipe was paired with the same beer that was listed as an ingredient. I wondered if he was going for a no-fail practice that would inevitably lead to harmonious pairings, which seemed like cheating.
“Taste is very personal,” Stefaan had said before he left the table and went back to work in the kitchen.
I knew the jolly bald man who marked the beginning of course three: a defrocked monk, he was the smiling Medieval man on the label of every St. Bernardus beer. Earlier that morning, I’d walked from my bed-and-breakfast next door, to the St. Bernardus brewery, a place with a unique significance in the canon of Belgian beer.
During the Middle Ages, when beer was first being brewed in this place now called Belgium, the area was already experiencing what would develop into a long tradition of being conquered. Counts of Flanders claimed towns, and began fortifying their borders to protect them from Norsemen. Then German kings made claims. In 977 Charles, Duke of Lorraine, built a fortress on the Senne River, the skeleton of what would become the city of Brussels. Then a more peaceful tribe entered the region. Inspired by the Benedictine abbey Molesme, a monastery that focused on the teachings of Saint Benedict, who taught devotion to God through labor and self-sufficiency, a tradition began. As part of the Order of Cistercians, the monks farmed their own land and cultivated vineyards. The Order began to decline in 1342, but the teachings inspired La Trappe Abbey in Normandy, which began to institute reforms based on the Saint Benedict traditions. By 1664 the monks who adopted these practices, which included silence, prayer, and living by the work of their hands, were called Trappists, men who brewed beer, made wine and cheese, and baked bread. The Rules of Saint Benedict don’t mention beer but do address wine consumption, stating that monks can have a “hemina,” or just under half a liter, of wine per day: “we do not drink to satiety, but sparingly, because ‘Wine maketh even the wise to fall away.’”
In Belgium, Trappist monks developed a reputation for brewing high-quality beer, especially ones with higher amounts of alcohol and more flavor. When hard liquor was banned from cafés in Belgium in 1919—a law designed to spare the working class from the damages of alcohol, not repealed until 1983—the high-alcohol Trappist beers became even more sought after. Monks brewed to financially sustain their monasteries, supply themselves with beer, and create money to donate to charity. In 1962 the Trappists claimed their brand by insisting that only products made inside certified Trappist monasteries be labeled as Trappist. Other provisions stipulated that monks oversee brewing and that the brewery be secondary to the functioning of the monastery. These days, there are twenty Trappist monasteries, eleven of which make some of the world’s most well-regarded beers: Westvleteren, Chimay, Orval, Rochefort, and Westmalle. The most recent addition to the fold happens to be in the United States: the monks of Saint Joseph’s Abbey in Massachusetts brew under the label Spencer Trappist Ale.
In 1946 the monks at the Saint-Sixtus Abbey in Westvleteren licensed their brewing operations to a nearby dairy and cheesemaker in Watou, where the beer was brewed under the name St. Sixtus (the monks continued to brew beer for themselves at the monastery nearby). In 1992, all brewing operations were returned to the monastery—the end of the St. Sixtus label—but the brewery at the dairy kept making beer under the name St. Bernardus. As part of the secularization of the brewing operations, St. Bernardus changed the monk on the label to a Medieval man wearing a jacket instead of a religious habit. St. Bernardus continued brewing using similar recipes, and possibly the same yeast, but Westvleteren became famous. Today, the monks there brew some of the most highly sought-after beers in the world. Westvleteren produces just four thousand barrels a year, which makes every bottle of their beer somewhat of a rarity. To get your hands on the Westvleteren 12, a quadrupel of 10 percent ABV, you must call the “beer phone” at the brewery, which Reuter’s reported receives as many as 85,000 calls an hour, sixty days in advance of the date on which you plan to drive at the brewery to pick up your one case of beer per car. St. Bernardus beers, on the other hand, are available at my local Fred Meyer. While I suspect the St. Bernardus Abt 12, also a quadrupel, may be just as good as the Westvleteren 12, I’ve never tasted the Westvleteren. Someday I’ll do my dream tasting of the two beers side by side and come up with the definitive answer.
The St. Bernardus third-course beer was a tripel, a classic Belgian-style beer invented in 1932 at the De Drie Linden brewery. Two years after that, Westmalle Abbey released its own version, which has become the iconic representation of the style (“the mother of all tripels,” according to the brewery’s website). The name of the style refers to the amount of malt and the original gravity of the wort before it begins to ferment. That triple strength translates to notoriously high alcohol, between 8 and 10 percent ABV. The beer in front of me looked golden and benign, but with one sip, I knew its appearance was a trick. The tripel was complicated and intense, with a soft texture that evolved into a bloom of intense cloves, fruit, and yeast that finished dry and neat. It came with the meal’s pièce de résistance: fat pink slabs of duck breast braised in—what else—the tripel, and topped with a pretty pile of spring vegetables and hop shoots.
At this point in the meal, I made note of a few things. One, the hop shoots were starting to lose their poignancy. In fact, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to see any more of them until next spring. Two, the more food I ate, the more I could drink. It was so simple! And so hilarious! For the grand finale, the server delivered a bottle of St. Bernardus Abt 12, a beer I knew from the night before. We’d shared a bed. It isn’t every day I drink beer in bed, but as you might expect from a bed-and-breakfast that shares a door with the St. Bernardus brewery, the B&B’s honor bar was filled with St. Bernardus beers. I’d dropped some euros in a jar and helped myself to an Abt 12. A couple from Brazil, who was touring Belgian breweries and also staying at the B&B, had either left the building or scurried off to their room to drink something from the honor bar. Instead of sitting in the common room by myself, where, sadly, the large fireplace was just a cold, dark hole, I poured the Abt 12 into a goblet and went to my room, where I sat in bed and savored the decadence of drinking the beer all by myself, without having to utter a single word or take any notes.
At the restaurant, even though I wished I could have a sip of the Abt 12 and call it a night, I felt obligated to eat the “hop shoots phantasy,” a complex arrangement of cakes, creams, cute yellow dots, and a puff of white meringue that was sliding off the top like a beret. Stefaan returned to my table after I’d eaten the mélange, and helped me dissect the dessert with autopsy-like precision. There had been a hop shoot meringue, hop shoot ice cream, brownie, white chocolate mousse, and a sponge cake.
“What about the foam?” I asked.
“Ah, right,” he said. “Espuma, a mousse of hop shoots.” The mousse tasted warmly of nutmeg, a flavor that came alive with the beer, the final note of a meal I would remember as decadent but slightly disappointing, a feeling that started when I discovered the predictable pairings. Under a waning moon, a sliver slight of full, I slowly pedaled back to the bed-and-breakfast, past the dark, open fields. I wished I could spend another day in the countryside, but tomorrow I would return to Brussels. I had to make an important meeting.
Meeting a stranger at a European train station felt like playing a role in a juicy spy novel. In this case, the stranger and I used the coded language of text messaging to make plans. We would come together to exchange goods then travel to a secret location. There, we would brew some beer. When I found the stranger in the Gare du Midi in Brussels, he didn’t seem all that strange. Emilien Hommé had a kind smile and ruddy cheeks; he seemed like a mash-up of old friends. We had some important things in common: we love beer, and we love bikes.
The previous summer, Emilien and his girlfriend, Hélène, had gone on a five-month bike tour through the United States. When they were in Portland, they’d stayed with my friend Diana, who’d put us in touch. “You must meet my friends!” she said. “They’ll even brew beer with you.”
Emilien and I took the Metro to a stop he told me was near the Atomium, a building shaped like the basic structure of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times, constructed for the World’s Fair in 1958. Emilien knocked on the door of a house in what felt like a typical Brussels neighborhood: old residential buildings tightly packed together, row-house style, on a narrow street lined with parked cars. A man with a long brown ponytail and a wide smile, who looked like he was in his early thirties, opened the door. Ronoy De Smedt was a member of La Foire Aux Savoir-Faire, a DIY group in Brussels that organizes projects like making elderberry syrup and teaching children to create weavings on a bicycle wheel. The homebrewing subgroup included Ronoy and Emilien, who got together a few times a year to make beer.
We followed Ronoy to the back of his house, where there was a narrow kitchen with cabinets painted in primary colors that felt bohemian. Sliding glass doors revealed a compact courtyard with a budding tree waving against a stark blue sky. Even though the room was small and a bit cluttered, I immediately felt comfortable; it was obviously a communal house populated by eclectic people, where an American student of beer could relax. Before Emilien and I arrived, the day’s brewing session had begun. Lionel Etienne, who was brewing for the first time today, was wearing a thin scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. He stood next to the glass doors, stirring a steaming porridge of mash with a wooden paddle that looked like it belonged with a canoe, the kind of tool used to make beer before humans discovered yeast and bacteria. The kettle was sitting on the floor on a burner linked to a tank of propane. One time someone’s pant leg had caught on fire due to the setup, the three guys told me. Not to worry, they said. The pants had had very wide legs.
When Emilien invited me to brew, he told me the process would take ten hours, a vast extension of the three or four hours it took Tony and me to brew. I assumed the Belgian brewers would be doing a batch of all-grain, which they were, but I wasn’t sure what else would take so long. As Lionel stirred, Ronoy showed me pictures of their hand-crafted milling contraption, something the group used at the start of every brew day to mill the malt. At that moment, I started to understand their dedication to the DIY ethos, time be damned. I’d never spend ten hours brewing on any day in Portland. But, here, I was free. I had nothing to clean, mend, consign, or return. I didn’t have a child who needed to be fed, dressed, or assisted in making Lego creations.
The guys told me they were brewing a stout, which would become a maple stout if they decided to add a can of syrup gifted from some Canadians. The malt bill was a mixture of Cara munich, CaraRed, Munich, and Pilsner malts, a mix that was designed to create “900 EBC,” Ronoy reported. Not only I was struggling to keep up with the rapid-fire French between the three men, but I realized I’d also need to translate their language of brewing. Thanks to Google, we figured out EBC is the same as SRM, Standard Reference Method, the way many brewers quantify beer color. I could only imagine what other conversions were headed my way.
The recipe reminded me of high school algebra:
M = (B × D) / 26
M = quantité de malt en kilo [how much malt]
B = quantité de bière désirée [end amount of beer]
D = degré de bière désirée [alcohol by volume]
They hoped to end up with 48 liters of beer, or 12.6 gallons. (Tony and I usually brewed 5 gallons at a time.) Ronoy told me that once he’d calculated their homebrew cost at 1.40 euros per liter, or 70 cents a pint. He insisted they weren’t in it for the cost savings.
On the recipe, hops were categorized as houblon amere or houblon aromatique, bittering or aroma hops. There was space to record épices, spices, and I guessed that levure must mean yeast. The French words made me feel the strong presence of the nation to the south, the wine country with a surprisingly strong beer tradition. Brewed in small batches in rural villages, table beer has long graced French glasses. The country’s most well-known style, bière de garde, is an earthy, funky ale that was originally brewed in farmhouses in Northern France. It tastes like a cousin of Belgian saisons.
Despite the language differences and conversions, I felt a warm familiarity. After all, beer is just beer, something I hadn’t yet contemplated on this trip. There was something about being in a small kitchen with a wooden paddle that humanized the drink I’d been analyzing for nearly a week in a foreign place. When I took my turn stirring with the paddle, I scraped the bottom of the kettle vigorously, to prevent the malt from sticking, remembering the kettle burn that created my snow-globe beer last summer. When I’d visited Dupont a few days earlier, I learned that brewers there intentionally caramelized some of the sugars in the mash using a direct gas burner under the boiling kettle. This traditional technique gave extra body to the beer, but also created a daunting cleaning project. I tried to stay focused on stirring, knowing at least one of us would need to clean the kettle later that day, but everything seemed distracting, from the French to the strange assortment of objects in the room, including a bubble machine and turntable.
Eventually, the man they called master brewer arrived. Bertrand Backeland was a good-looking Frenchman and artist in his thirties who was wearing an oversized Norwegian sweater. (“He doesn’t have trouble getting girlfriends,” Hélène would later tell me.) He shook my hand and mumbled that he was sorry he had a cold and didn’t know English very well, which was not what I was hoping to hear from the person who knew the recipe best. Bertrand said he wanted to raise the temperature of the mash four times, which reminded me of Ben Edmunds’s lesson in step brewing. By piecing together sentences between Ronoy and Emilien about the emptage, or mash, I gathered that the first steps required holding the mash at 50 degrees Celsius for five minutes, before raising it to 63 degrees for thirty minutes. The flame seemed small and imprecise. I guessed that keeping the temperature steady for any amount of time would require someone to adjust the flame by centimeters every few minutes. That’s when the group’s driving philosophy emerged.
“We like to talk about plus ou moins,” Emilien said. “In English it means more or less.”
“It can be the answer to every question,” said Ronoy.
Plus ou moins—which Bertrand told me can be written as +/–, like on a battery—was the name of their first beer. “It means beer is not an exact science,” Bertrand would tell me later in an e-mail. He said the temperature on the top of the mash might be 63 degrees while the back of the mash was 65 degrees. “It’s more or less,” he wrote. “What’s important is to take the temperature in the same manner.”
Immediately, I had a clearer understanding of the ten-hour brew session.
Between the French and the metric system, my mind was tired, and I started slipping from active participant to cultural observer, which may have had something to do with the fact that we had started drinking beer. Ronoy poured me a splash of a previous homebrew.
“What kind of beer is it?” I asked.
“We don’t know, and we don’t care,” he replied with a flourish. “Does it taste good?”
In fact, it tasted great. The beer was reddish and highly carbonated with a dry finish, which I guessed masked a high amount of alcohol. It tasted Belgian, through and through.
For lunch, Emilien went for takeout and returned with frites and gyro-like chicken wraps that were sloppy and perfect with our rotation of mystery homebrews. Emilien ate a giant spectacle of a sandwich called a mitraillette (which translates to “submachine gun”), a wide baguette filled with slices of fried meat, fries, and a goopy sauce. Eventually we opened a bottle of St. Bernardus Pater 6 that I’d brought from Watou. The fresh, fruity dubbel reminded me that, even though I was in an unknown location with a bunch of guys I didn’t know, I was still in the same countr
y as yesterday, the place of abbey ales and hop farms.
The guys kept talking about drêche, spent grains. Ronoy said he liked to dump the drêche in his neighbor’s empty lot. (The neighbor had given permission.) But to get the spent grains, we needed to separate off the wort. Bertrand had crafted a metal filter for the inside of the kettle and a tap that attached to the bottom. That’s where the wort drizzled out into various small plastic containers sitting on top of an adjustable stool. When the small plastic containers were full, we took turns dumping them back into the kettle, so the wort could seep down through the grain bed again, which extracted more sugars. The containers needed to be monitored and switched so they didn’t overflow. “Recirculating is the step of a very artisanal gesture with this homemade material,” Bertrand would write. He hoped to recirculate the wort at least three times, which filters and clarifies the wort, but without knowing how much of the wort had circulated, it was just another plus ou moins activity. The stool collected overflow wort in a small, brown puddle.
“I want to sit on it,” Emilien said.
He reminded me of something I read about the late Middle Ages. In Alsace-Lorraine and Bavaria, regulators would pour beer on a wooden bench and sit on the wet bench for an hour. When they tried to stand, if the bench stuck to their pants, the beer met their regulatory standards. If their pants easily separated from the bench, the beer was too light and would need to be sold for cheaper prices.
My Beer Year Page 20