GUEST POST BY HANSOSAN.
Do you know that beer used to be just an alternative way to store grain, and make drinkable liquid available in an environment that got more and more polluted ? The stronger beers were only developed later as a way to evade the taxes on spirits. As always, we have a historic background - more lies and falsifications than facts, still - enough years to accumulate the myriad of details that builds up the fractal richness you taste now. But indeed - in the open-sewer industrializing cities like Gent, the clergy advised women to give their kids beer rather than the horrible water. It was sound advice then - and profitable too for all those brewer-monks. Figuring out how to control the yeast and bacterial processes involved came only very late - so don’t believe for a second that our current beers with the ancient sounding names like “Vieux-temps” and “Emperor Charles”, taste anything like the acid stuff our ancestors drank out of the stone jugs while working in the fields.
Beer drinking is learned young here. My pregnant wife was still advised to drink lots of fortifying stout, my small kids got to stick their fingers in the foam at parties - I drank my first glass way before I needed my first razor, in the youth house in the old converted city hall of Werken. Low-alcohol “table” beer was present everywhere, often instead of fancy waters, cola or wine. Somehow I suspect this led to a more mature use of alcohol later on. It wasn’t the forbidden fruit, or less the macho-potion or the oblivion drug it often is in more ‘regulated’ area’s.
One way I survive boring family parties is to go sit next to the oldest person alive and ask them to tell stories about beer when they were young. Those were the days that brewers were more common than bakers - in the tiny village my dad grew up in, there were already 7 pubs. There is one left now. The only brewery in the neighbourhood (Esen) almost closed, if a bunch of independent louts hadn’t stepped in and revived it all (the Dolle Brouwers, or Mad Brewers). They now brew some of the most creative concoctions around - I suggest you start with Dulle Teve (Mad Bitch). That brewery visit guided by their Mom I consider one of the best tourist trips you can take here. And this is the scale that seems to fit us : a small firm, making a living, and a unique, rich product. Whenever we try to grow beyond that (look at Hoegaarden), often the uniqueness disappears, the magic is gone. It’s this special link, me knowing someone that is related to the brewer, or knowing the order of the abbey, or weird facts that celts developed coopering for their beers while the romans were still using amphora’s for their wines, that makes beers special to me - not just something filtered out of the chemical industry, pushed on me by a marketing bureau.
I realised student life was over while slowly getting dizzy from the second or third Grimbergen Triple, under the jade shade of Ginkgo leaves in the garden of the Blauwe Schuit in Leuven, chatting to an old teacher friend. How long this beer culture will survive, I don’t know. Economics for slow food are all wrong - no wonder Interbrew is Brasillian now. Belgians evidently suck at protecting what’s theirs. The orchards producing the cherries in Schaarbeek, essential for the real Kriek taste - are all swallowed by the sprawling city. They are now coming from Pepingen or Gooik - if not from Hungary - if at all from a cherry tree… .
But, I once learned in a winecellar in Alsace, from the daughter of a long line of winemakers making the unique Rouge d’Ottrot: it does not matter that unique knowledge might disappear - it is the now that counts - so live to the fullest now. That is the only obligation we have. So I will open my 3 different bottles of geuze, taste each next to the other and compare. I’ll let my kids try them all, and ask their opinion too: so they may learn that details matter, that there is a level of quality you cannot measure with a stick, but that is perfectly noticeable with a bit of experience and openness to all your senses (yes, cheers to Christopher Alexander). Why don’t you pull up a chair and try it - there is still enough for all !
June 2nd, 2009 at
Oh dear. I’m afraid I’m deeply in love with all of you now.
How did that happen???
Hans, your handwriting makes me swoon and turn Euro in the sunlight as I read it.