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.