Verbatim: A pair of Leffe Brune. Not both for me, honestly. Though I have always usually been more a fan of the Brune than the Blonde. So to speak.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: Like a lot of these at-Malthouse but-not-working-at-Malthouse entries, I was there with some of the people I worked with at the time, at a pretty-awful bar down the other end of town which is probably best left anonymous. For my sake. They did have a decent whisky selection, though. I got to basically be the curator of that, which certainly helped my Nerdery — my CV at the time covered both the beer and whisky bases by invoking the term “Malt Nerd”.
The wedges were awesome. A pain to make, apparently, but awesome. It is kind of a shame we don’t do them anymore.
Verbatim: Westmalle Dubbel. A fine example of a Trappist beer, them being the only thing to tempt me towards Religion.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: That beer list made for a handy prop. Little did I know I’d eventually take over its editing, and spend endless nerdy hours tinkering with layouts and fonts and phrasing.
Verbatim: Kapittel Watou Tripel. 330ml, $6 or so, 10%, 12/9/07. Random find at Rumbles. Funny cartoon monks on the front. Bottle conditioned, nice bubbles to show it. Amber, but smells and tastes darker. Nice low fruitiness.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: Correctly listing / categorising these things sometimes gets quite tricky, when you aren’t able to read the language — and when the marketing gets slippery. This one’s apparently branded an ‘Abt’, and a ‘Tripel’, and a ‘Quadrupel’, depending on who you ask.
And in terms of Diary timing, there’s another four months just plain missing. Weird.
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.)
Verbatim: Liefmans Frambozenbier. $?, 37.5cl, 4.5%, neat champagne-cork, paper-wrapped bottle. Belgian. Best before end 2014! Darker than you’d think, rich bubbles, still around, fruit all over as poued. Smells just like cordial. Warm beeriness in the background. Just great. Gold medal @ Peterborough ’98. Perfect for “I don’t like beer” girls. It’s raspberry for grown ups.
Afterthoughts, October 2010: And finally, my first fruit beer in the book. Unlike seemingly-many Beer Nerds, I am very fond of the style, actually — for its inherent yumness, for its evangelistic potential, and for its messing-with-people ability. This was starting out right, too; very highly-regarded proper old-school authentic stuff.
