If it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium
by Bruce Stevens

Although I missed several summer HTB meetings, Mark said he would grant an excused absence since I was in Belgium at the time. I remember one HTB meeting last year when Ray recalled his unfortunate restaurant experience common to Americans in Bruges, and so I took his advice and stuck to mussel places that did not speak any English at all. The mussles in cream with a Liefman Kriek were great! We stayed at the University of Liege in a dorm for a few days while I was at a meeting there with my family. What really blew my mind was that the student dormitory cafeterias each had 4 or 5 local brews on tap! In each dorm cafeteria there is a glass-rinsing machine that an attendant uses to rinse the beer glass when you ask for your beer, and no one seems to mind that you hold up the cafeteria line while the head settles down for the attendant to scrape it off!!! (My kids were quite surprised by such differences in US vs. Belgium culture.) Interestingly, even the crummiest little quickie-mart type food marts there seemed to stock nearly all 6 of the truly Trappist brews at single bottle prices that were cheaper than bottled water! Of the bottled stuff, I would say that the true trappist Westmalle "Dubbel", or the fake- trappist (i.e., "Abbey" beer) St. Benardus were among the best I had there--amazingly complex with many layers of different estery flavors that appear, then linger, and then dissapear at different times (sort of like a Willie Wonka lollipop). Although Michael Jackson raves about the Westmalle "Triple", I found the "Dubble" to be more to my liking, so I merely dumped the "Triple" down the sink and reached for another "Dubble" (warning: Do not try this at home in Gainesville). As you know, there are dozens of "abbey" breweries that are commercial businesses, but these are really not "trappist" because technically they are not brewed at a real Trappist monastery. The "expiration date" printed on many of the Trappist and Abbey bottles were generally quite far in the future, one had 2002 (so much for the marketing ploy of Bud Light's freshness propaganda). While we were in Belgium, I wanted to visit a trueTrappist brewery, of course, but some of the university people actively discouraged me from trying because apparently there are no formal tours or visitations, and their only real contact with the public is to sell wholesale to local stores and pubs once a week. Interestingly, I learned that the only way that the Trappists deliver the bottles to distributors is if they physically drive to the site and pick it up, and even then the monks put a quota on the number of cases that any given distributor can get per week. This pretty much ensures that large numbers of bottles won't make it out of the region, much less be exported to the US. Based on this, it appears to me that the stuff that makes its way to the US occurs only due to enterprising large-scale smugglers. Dorn's laughed when I asked if they carried any of the Trappist brews. Remember that there are only 7 Trappist breweries in the world, and 6 are in Belgium; the sixth one recently started dispensing--within the past year of so. Sorry, but I could not bring any back because we were living out of single carry-on packs while traveling on trains. The tour guide in the Straffe Hendrik Bruges brewery (a mediocre beer, by the way) mentioned that there were estimates of between 800 - 1000 different brews currently made in Belgium (an official exact number is not known because it is a moving target that waxes and wanes weekly). The search goes on . . .

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