Verbatim: Grimbergen Double. 330ml, $8, 6.5%, 3/4/05. Bless those Belgian monks. The Nobertines have made a great, accessable abbey beer. Dark red-brown, bubbly, but not overstrong. (Despite neat / freaky eagle on the label.)
Afterthoughts, October 2010: From this entry, and the previous, it appears I occasionally have trouble with spelling the word “accessible”. I’m also wrong to credit the monks; a lot of these Belgian “Abbey-style” beers are just Abbey-style, these days, with production done (as here, and with the Judas immediately prior) by giant commercial breweries who have either swallowed the original makers in the various waves of mergers and acquisitions that go on, or are just paying licenses for the name.
Verbatim: Judas. 330ml, $5, 8.6%, 19/3/05. Belgian Blonde. Cool, scary bottle; how could I resist? Nice golden cloudless blonde, bubbles don’t hang around much. Got a pleasant little fruitiness in it. Really very good, more accessable than you’d guess from its design.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: Well, at least the ‘Duvel as lager’ fiasco from the previous Christmas seems to be behind me by this point. That’s a relief.
Duvel, several years later, when I'd finally bought a camera
So. This is perhaps the best example why the decision to publish the ‘ancient’ Diary entries as-is was a bit of a Zen exercise. I like Duvel a lot, for inherent and circumstantial reasons. I have done so since I first had it, here on Christmas Day in 2004. But I clearly wasn’t a proper Beer Nerd at all, yet, because I just blithely call it a lager. The shame. The nearly-unutterable shame.
But hey, everyone starts ignorant, right? Ignorance is not a problem, what you do with it is. And you can’t really be blamed for mistakes like these, when some breweries go out of their freaking way to muddy the waters about beer styles and perpetuate the simple-but-wrong idea that golden is lager and non-golden is ale.
Diary entry #19.1, Duvel
Verbatim: Duvel. 330ml, $5, at Wellington, on Christmas. It’s sunny, so a lager with lunch. Bubbles aplenty, nice cloudy gold. Full flavour, but not bitter. Malty, Dad says. Nicely complex smell and taste, but not at all too much. Goes brilliantly with timing and weather.
Diary entry #19.2, Duvel
Afterthoughts, October 2010: “At Wellington” means at my family’s house; so many entries are just tagged “at home”, and sometimes that gets tricky to define — here I was at the house where I grew up and lived for twenty-something years, but I also had a permanent-enough place of my own that “home” became an ambiguous word. Which leads to wonderful sentences like “as soon as I get home I should make sure I buy a plane ticket home”. Huh?
The little “meanwhile” note is also evidence that my take-the-damn-notebook-with-you habit hadn’t yet properly formed. The next entry is from three months later; I must’ve remembered that I’d had those in the intervening time. I have no idea how many other entries fell through the gap between bad habits and bad memory. I suppose that’s why I should keep a Diary. (And why I do.)
