Belgium: Day Three (Part Two)
Returning from my beer hunting trip to find Cnudde Bruin I met up with pingopark at Ghent station and we headed off in search a bar called Hopduvel, the meaning of which I reckon you can have a good stab at. We found it trying to blend in with a street of terraced houses. Which is odd, as it's hardly "shy and retiring" in way of its decor once you get in. We sat in the garden which as well as the large gold Buddha you can see in the background of the photo also featured a nativity scene and a pink and pastel striped unicorn. One of the inside rooms was rather overfull of red upholstered gilded wooden sofas, looking like they'd come from a closing down sale at a Baroque palace.
It definitely seemed like the sort of place it was worth staying for a few beers, so I started with:
36 - De Ryck Special
An easy drinking pale ale. Nothing showy about it but an unobtrusive style done very well. OK, a bit damning with faint praise there but I didn't take any notes and it was ages ago. So, good but not stunning. You'd be quite happy to have a night on it, and at 5.5% you could, but it's never going to be a beer you're going to shout about.
After a couple of beers at the Hopduvel and checking out another nearby bar that we didn't bother with we headed back into the town centre and had a nightcap at the nasally prodigious Trollekelder, where we'd drunk on the first day. I ended up changing my mind on what I was drinking at the last minute and plumped for...
37 - Westmalle Dubbel Trappist
Yes I've got a bottle aging somewhere, and yes you can get it on draught in London if you go to the right places, but what the hell, it's what I fancied. Anyway, I'd rather have it on tap in Belgium than London. So I did.
This is pretty much the beer that defines the style of a dubbel, in much the same way that the same brewery's tripel also defines that style. Not necessarily the best of each but it's the one you'd give as a standard example. So, we're talking a dark red-brown, 7%, full bodied ale with a bit of sweetness and a nice dark malt flavour. It's a classic really, and the opinion seems to be it's "better than it was when it wasn't as good as it used to be". Or something.
I tend to remember it as being the first Belgian beer I had. I certainly remember drinking it at the Dutch Worldcon in 1990 and being mightily impressed. (Cue wibbly flashback effect and smell of Werther's Originals). Anyway, I tend to think of this a gateway drug to the whole getting into Belgian beer thing. It's still occasionally spotted in supermarkets over here (though slightly rarer than Chimay) and is one of only two Trappist beers available on draught outside of the monasteries (the other being Chimay Tripel). So find yourself a bottle and it might just convince you that you want to try more of that sort of thing.
And as The Sun probably currently has a downer on all things Belgian is there a better time to celebrate their achievements?
This blog post was brought to you courtesy of BrewDog Punk Monk (Punk IPA with a Belgian yeast) and basah (Black Belgian style IPA, brewed in collaboration with Stone brewery of California). While we're with California, Bear Republic's Red Rocket Ale in The Rake earlier was rather tasty too.
And now I've spent so long trying to get LJ posting to actually work I've had to open a Chaos Theory. Oh dear.