Ticker's wet dream

I forgot to post this the other day when talking about Brouge. It appears to be a menu card with tick boxes. That right, a tickers wet dream with several prizes to collect as you drink your way through the menu. Personally, the thought of drinking so much Belgian beer turns me off, but not as much as the encouragement of tickers. But then, I have become an accidental ticker! As I have mentioned before, this blog will be getting an overhall in format and appearance in the new year.

Rochefort 10

The 'other' beer I had while dining in the Brouge bar last Saturday night. It's strong (11.3% abv), tastes like plums and raisons and gets served in an oversized wine glass. I had some cheese with it which was nice, but not spectacular. I can't remember what kind of cheese it was.

A tickers description;

"Reddish-brown colour, with a very compact head and an aroma of figs, feels like honey in the mouth. The alcohol profile is a major component in the flavour of this rich ale. It is very similar to 6 and 8, but has much more of everything. Some may find the high alcohol content to be disagreeable"

Geeky Stuff:
The brewery is located inside the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy, near the town of Rochefort, and has been brewing beer since 1595. There are approximately 15 monks resident at the monastery. The monks are very secretive about the brewing process, and the brewery is not open to the public, therefore much of the information publicly known about the brewery comes from only a few sources.
Like many strong Belgian beers, those produced at Rochefort age well and can be cellared for at least five years whilst maintaining quality. Each of these beers is brewed to the same recipe, with the only difference being the alcoholic content. The water for the beers is drawn from a well located inside the monastery walls.
As with all other trappist breweries, the beer is only sold in order to financially support the monastery and some other good causes. The monks will not increase production based on demand or profit motives, but only enough to support themselves, resulting in a fairly limited supply of beer availability. In practice, there is currently no shortage through regular channels. Also worthy of note is that these god botherers have not sold out to a larger brewery yet.

Website

Maredsous 8 Bruin

On Saturday night my wife and I headed out to Richmond to catch up with some friends over dinner and drinks. The venue, which I discovered much to my delight was a new Belgian place called Brouge. Unlike other pseudo Belgian café's in London, Brouge is classy and is on par with any number of fancy/posh restaurants that my wife like to drag me too. The service was as good as the leather bound 'volume' which was the beer menu. I opted to initially try the draught serving paddle, which consisted of 8 x 50mL tasters of their draught beer products. I won't go into too much detail about these, but they were Hoegaarden, Leffe Blonde, Stella 4%, Fruli, Belle-Vue Kriek, Franziskaner Hefe-Weiss, and two others which I can't recall right now (a framboise and a bruin).

Anyhow, for my first 'proper' beer I ordered a Maredsous 8 Bruin (8% abv), which I thought would be a good accompaniment to a steak. The beer is nice and is actually quiet drinkable for its strength and I actually enjoyed this beer. As a few may have gathered, I really do not appreciate beer just because it is from Belgium, and think that beers such as Chimay, Duvel and Orval are highly over-rated. Anyway halfway through the beer, I decided to change my mind from the steak to the Moules Frites with garlic croûtons. it was delicious.

Maredsous is a Trappist monastery and the monks of the abbey used to make beer. This can be seen as a good thing, however the greedy souls at the Duvel Moortgat brewery started brewing Maredsous beers under licence in 1963.