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.

Newcastle Brown Ale 2

Ok, I am only posting this due to the fact that I enjoyed this particular bottle in the Gateshead Hilton Hotel, in Newcastle itself. I whisked my wife away for the weekend as it was our first wedding anniversary. Why Newcastle? Well we got married in Sydney, in a small church which overlooks Sydney Harbour Bridge. As we could not go back to Sydney, I decided to do the next best thing and visit the Sydney Harbour Bridge's smaller cousin in Newcastle.

We also went to posh noshery 'The Fisherman's lodge' for a nice meal. It was good weekend, before I had to return to Wuppertal on Monday.

I originally blogged about Newkie Brown back in February. You can read about it here.

BTW - we had our office Christmas party last night. It was a good night, but the beer was crap - Stella or Becks. I had a chronic headache this morning because of this. I did manage to get a couple of pints of Fuller's London porter in at The Counting House before hand though. Good times!

Newcastle Brown Ale

Newcastle Brown Ale (4.7% abv), commonly known as 'Newkie Brown' is well a brown ale! This one again is a Tesco pick up! Which is the story of my life these days with my hectic schedule keeping me away from the pub, well many pubs! A quick glance around the web reveals yet another outstanding website: http://www.newcastlebrown.com/ with enough content to satisfy even the most tech-savy beer geek. A brief commercial description of the beer;

Available filtered and pasteurised in keg and bottle. Newcastle Brown Ale was first brewed in 1927 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, by JimPorter after three years of development. Production moved from Newcastle to Gateshead at the end of 2004.

My example was the bottled variety. The beer itself is rich and malty with little hope character and a subtle roast aftertaste. Over all a very satisfying beer!
Historically the beer has been brewed in batches and a fresh portion of the beer is mixed with an aged portion of the beer at bottling to give its unique flavour. This practice ended however, as production has moved with the times to provide a cost effective production. The beer may be a shadow of its former self, but there are no complaints from me.