Duval, Delirium Tremens, Piraat

Categorizing Belgian strong ales can be a bit of a mug's game but I am going to try to distinguish between golden stongs, dark stongs, triples and dubbles over the next few weeks by finally taking apart a small collection I have gathered over the past months. Today, the smallest of the groupings will go with a little freezing rain outside and a reciprocity of NFL from the sofa inside. Pierre Rajotte in Belgian Ale collects golden strongs and dark strongs as "special ales" as a convenience, a way to make sense of the Belgian brewers' sense of invention and the consumer's appreciation of it. At page 35 he writes:

In this category you will usually encounter hoppy beers. However, what the Belgians call a hoppy beer is not quite the same as what a North American would call a hoppy beer. To Belgians, hoppiness is more subtle and more refined. Traditional American brewing aromatic hops such as Cascade are unknown. Belgian brewers use generous amounds of low bitterness varieties such as Saaz, Hallertaur, or Styrian. This gives a generous hoppy and spicy aroma without the accompanying bitterness.

• Piraat: Whisky hot at 10.5%. The pour leaves a fine white light foam head. The colour is medium straw and cloudy what with the swirl of real yeast at the bottom of the bottle. The taste is sugary mousse with a fine pale malt seam running through the middle, empire biscuit faintness of cherry. Quite juicy despite the sugar levels. The hops are subdued by spicy, with perhaps a bit of corriander, their aroma sitting below the smell of cotton candy. Not very complex but a treat given the utter disappointment with this brewer's pathetic amber. The Advocatonians approve.
• Delirium Tremens: At 8.7% this beer is noticably lighter than Piraat - which is saying something about how hot Piraat drinks. A lighter shade of straw, the head fades quickly. The nose is spicier with less of the cotton candy smell of Belgian candi sugar, a crystallized sugar 100% fermentable sucrose that is used to lighten body and raise alcohol. The taste is more malty with a nice citrus tone from the hops which also provide background spice - maybe some corriander and white pepper as well. The brewer, Brouwerji Huyghe, founded in 1654, makes some really delicious low alcohol summer beers under the name Florisgaarden and this is an honourable corresponding expression of a winter's ale. Like Piraat, the weight is not as great as the alcohol might make you imagine but this beer is more flavourful and somehow moreish, not something I thought I would think with this sort of ale. Quite a fresh finish. Towards the end of the glass, I am loving the green apple and vanilla flavours. Very fine ale. BAers approve greatly.
• Duvel: a snow white souffle of a head explodes from the bottle - be prepared. The smell is of orange-lemon icing. At 8.5% it is the lightest in strength as well as colour. The subtleties of differeence between this and the other two strong ales I have reviewed this afternoon are a bit of a challenge as this one has a little less complexity than the Delirium Tremens and a little less heat of the Piraat but otherwise they are very close. One the mouth, there is some orange peel and a milky rather than creamy effect from the yeast. If the Delirium Tremens has a hint of green apple, this is more like gold delicious - less acidic and sweeter. The hops are the most subdued and it is the least malty - finesse. Lots of lacing are left in the glass and a decent foam remains at the end when I might be tasting passion-fruit and maybe faintness of nutmeg. If you are into such things, as dedicated a website or actually websites as I have ever seen to one brand in a brewery's range. The history page alone is worth the time. Big ups from the BAs.

From Paul, our beer vendor [Ed.: ale-monger?] extraordinaire of Bury St. Edmunds, England, comes notes on a beer from Belgium's Brasserie de Silly Brouwerij called Silly Saison:

This very fine Belgium beer is a dark amber colour, with a creamy head. It has a malty, slightly sweet toffee flavour with only a slight bitter aftertaste. Callard & Bowsers in a bottle ! Very moreish. Don't be put off by the name. No sediment. 5.0%. As good, if not better than Innis & Gunn!

I had such high hopes for this post, comparing four of the brews in the South Burlington Vermont's Magic Hat Winter mixed 12 pack. Then the holidays hit, then the guests arrived, then the defence of the bottles began. Right now I have maybe 30 singles of beer stuck away for later comment at a measured pace. Enough to get me into February easy - as long as I can keep the hands of others off of them. Eleven of the Magic Hats were sacrificed to that cause. All except one of their porters named Ravell.

Porter has become one of my favorite styles, if only due to the uncertainly brewers have facing the problem of what it is supposed to taste like. Porter was one of the earliest industrial products and led to a capacity war from say 1790s to 1820s London which had a great effect on mass production of other goods as well as the local production of beer. By the mid-1800s, it had been replaced by other beers due to two discoveries - lagering and true pale malting. As always, when technologies change, tastes shift and the demand for this dark and sharp style faded to be replaced for a while by mild in England, followed by pale ales and then by the ubiquitous industrial lager-pop most drink today.

Due to the trade secrecy surrounding brewing, there is not a great deal of information about what porter actually tasted like in its heyday. Was the yeast sour or mellow? Were the hops or roast malt more pronounced? Approaching opening a porter like Magic Hat's Ravell, then, is all about paying attention to what the particular brewer considered the answer to those questions were. The beer pours brown rather than black like an oatmeal stout or deep garnet like Guinness. Its head resolves to a thinish beige foam. The taste is definitely built around a soft water profile. One of the things that makes a local beer local is the expression of the water table's mineral count. Dublin is chalky soft, Plzen is neutral and Burton-on-Trent is incredibly hard. From my recollection of the others in the 12 pack, Magic Hat is a largely soft brewing firm. [Sleeman, by comparison, is a fairly hard brewing firm.] The yeast of the Ravell, sour and fruity, is in the front of the palate, framed by chocolate malt and then some hop bitterness. I would not call this a balanced or rich example of a porter but originally porters from what we know were not round and balanced. They should not be confused with nut brown ales anymore than with oatmeal stouts. They were from an era that saw brewing and storage occur in wood and that would impart sourness like we see today in many Belgian brews. Here are the stats on the brew from Magic Hat:

Our Odd Porter

A porter brewed with whole vanilla beans. Available whenever young William and father John deem it so.

Yeast: English Ale.
Malts: Pale, Crystal & Chocolate.
Hops: Warrior & Fuggles
Alcohol by Volume: 5.60%
Original Gravity: 1.056
Bitterness Units: 22
SRM: 63.6

Not the first porter I would grab but certainly worth discussing.

New Year's Resolutions? Find more people who like to write about beer. David Akin is in Toronto and has made an excellent post about some of his favorite ales. I thought from his comment in the post below that he was in BC due to his reference to one of Granville Island beer but no - he appears to be a Newf in Trana. Maybe the LCBO is holding out on the hinterland, supplying the big smoke with ales not available to we few scratching a living out on the woods beyond the GO train.

Does such a thing exist? If speaking of the North American market, is it the low carb stuff which I doubt I will ever try or is that the boondoggle of the year? Personally, I will have to review my notes in the review archives but suspect it will be American and it will be hop-heavy. Maybe it was a particular pint in a particular pub? I will have to do some thinking about this...

What was yours?

In a shocking but true accouncement as reported in the New York Times, the US government has passed a regulation that will require what is taxed as beer to be at least 51% beer twelve months from now:

Popular flavored malt beverages must have the majority of their alcohol come from the process of brewing if they want to be taxed and treated as beer products rather than higher-taxed liquor products. That's the upshot of final regulations announced Tuesday by the Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Companies will have until early January 2006 to comply. The new regulations require that at least 51 percent of alcohol in flavored malt drinks be derived from the brewing process. No more than 49 percent of the alcohol may come from other flavorings added to the product, the bureau said in a release.

The BBC has a good piece in its Magazine section on the British temperance scene today. Apparently:

the British National Temperance League (BNTL), as it is known, has two staff and a mailing list of 1,200 people including social workers, teachers and police.

From the annals of the great cases in beer jurisprudence comes this recent ruling:

"Bob the Beerman" has lost his battle against Coors. Bob Donchez, known as "Bob the Beerman," was the first licensed vendor at Coors Field in Denver. He trademarked his character in 1993. He sued Coors about four years ago over the brewer's "Beerman" $100 million ad campaign. But a federal judge in Denver has ruled the term beerman is generic and doesn't infringe on the rights of Bob the Beerman. Attorneys for the Beerman say they'll likely file an appeal.