The Yokohama Winter Beer Bash

After an uneventful train ride to Yokohama, we met up with Ian's friend Patrick, who had been living in Japan for ten years and is now happily married. Patrick lives and works as a wellness coach in Yokohama, in addition to several other business interests.

Patrick took us to lunch at a favored soba restaurant, where I had a delicious bowl of hot soba with slices of duck breast. We proceeded along the bay (which is great...a wide park between the city and the water running for maybe a mile) and then through the city to the beer fest, which was held at a pier in the industrial section of the waterfront.

The fest itself was far smaller than what I expected coming from the US, but made sense given the younger beer culture in Japan. Japanese craft beer seems to be 15-20 years behind the US. The beer list in restaurants is (literally) a choice between "draft beer" and "bottled beer" and (according to Patrick) there is no concept of beer beyond watery mass market Asahi/Kirin/Suntory for most people. There were maybe a dozen breweries at the festival, and probably half of them were started by American expats. I will have to list the beers I tried in a separate post, but the short story is that they were all new to me, which always makes me happy.

During the fest, I met a really nice Québécois, named Luc, who had brewed in Montreal for 10 years and was now going to start a brewery north of Tokyo...I will try to meet up with him at CBC this year in Washington, DC. The win for the day though, was meeting Scott Brimmer, who opened Brimmer Brewing just outside of Tokyo about a year ago. Scott brewed at Sierra Nevada for nine years before moving to Japan. We talked for a while and, unsolicited, he offered an invitation to visit his brewery, which I am doing today (Monday). Details to follow!

Observation: inside the cultural bubble that is Craft beer in Japan, the brewers and other drivers in the industry are rock stars, and I think they get a lot of people trying to ride their coattails, or get their attention. For example, Patrick had gotten me in touch with Bryan Baird, owner of Baird Brewing in Numazu, before arriving. We had a good conversation about beer in the US vs. Japan at the festival, but I got a very polite brush-off when asking about visiting their brewery (which is how I met Luc, fortunately). Likewise, I was introduced to and tried to speak with Ry, who publishes Craft Beer Japan, and got a very rude response, as in "I'm not even going to stop walking to tell you to buzz off." (In fairness, he was in the middle of running a beer fest, but come on.)

Finally, we wrapped up the day by walking back to the commercial district, very quickly visiting the Cup Noodles Museum, and having dinner at my favorite conveyor sushi restaurant in all of Yokohama. It was very helpful to have a near-native speaker with us to order all manner of delicious plates. Below: three cuts of tuna from "shitty" to divine o-toro. Of course, the worst cut was far superior to anything I could hope to get back home in Nashville, with apologies to Mr. Choo and Samurai Sushi.

Tokyo, take 2

I know there is no "take 1" on here, because I have been delinquent, due to having an infant (now toddler) and opening a brewery. I would say that I haven't travelled much, which is true except for the trip we took to Tokyo last March (2012).

Now I am back to visit Ian before he moves back to the US this spring. I am here for one short week, which is the longest that I'm wiling to leave the brewery in other people's hands. (In fairness, I am pretty pleased that Fat Bottom is stable enough that I can walk away for a week and be confident that nothing will collapse.)

It is Sunday now, and we are getting ready to go to the Yokohama Winter Beer Bash...more on that later. I left Nashville early Wednesday morning and got to Ian's place in Tokyo just before dinner Thursday. The weather here has been fantastic for January...clear and temperatures in the 40s, maybe touching 50 at midday. I came here on a beer and noodle mission, and can proudly say that I ate nothing but ramen and onigiri until dinner last night, which was tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet).

On the beer front we have done well. At dinner we generally drink local macro brews (all that is available in most restaurants), but we went to the Baird's Brewery taproom in Meguro on Friday night to enjoy some local craft beer and the poetry of Robert Burns, since it was his birthday, read by a very drunk and friendly Scottish-Japanese guy.

Singapore, Day 2

Marginally delayed (as usual), here is the account of Day 2 in Singapore. On the agenda:

• Singapore Botanic Gardens
• IT Malls
  
• SAM - Singapore Art Museum
• Beer (duh)
• Iggy's

First, the Gardens

Check it out at http://www.sbg.org.sg/

I was and still am very, very impressed with the botanic gardens.  The grounds are urban, in that the area is only a few minutes drive from the central business district, has connecting bus routes, and will soon have a subway station.  I arrived at the gardens around 7 AM, after waking up early (thank you, jet-lag) and then realizing that the gardens opened at 5 in the morning.  For reference, sunrise was probably around 6:45 AM, and the temperature was in the mid-80s, rising to the mid-90s by 11 AM.

What most impressed me was how much the gardens are used by people living in Singapore.  Entrance is free (with the exception of the Orchid Gardens), and there were hundreds of people out and about, running, walking their dogs, and particularly doing tai chi in groups of 1 or 2 up to 100.

The gardens are broken into several sections, including Swan Lake, the Ginger Garden, an urban rain forest, Palm Valley and Symphony Lake, and the spectacular National Orchid Garden.  Symphony Lake has a band stage in the middle of the lake, where the symphony presumably plays open air concerts.  Seating is on a grass hillside (Palm Valley).

The Ginger Garden is just what it sounds like...a garden of different ginger varieties.  Ginger is not a particularly spectacular plant, but it is obviously very important in Asian cuisine and to the regional economy.  Swan Lake has (you guessed it!) swans, both of the live and sculptural varieties.  The rain forest was where I started, and was really nice.  There are a few boardwalks wandering across a heavily wooded hillside, with some incredible trees...some with trunks 7 or 8 feet across.

I should set aside a special paragraph for the National Orchid Garden (NOG).  While I always knew that some people go nuts over orchids, breeding plants that might take a decade to produce a flower, I never really understood the obsession.  Having visiting the Singapore orchids, I get it now.  The NOG is about seven acres of orchids, bromeliads, and related plants.  I saw (no joke) thousands of different orchid varieties, some with flowers half the size of a fingernail, some with flowers bigger than my hand.

Ok, enough about the flowers!

So.  After a coffee and pastry in the gardens, I headed back to the hotel to cool off, and then popped out at noon to see the Central Business District (the CBD).  Sidebar: Singapore is obsessed with acronyms.  There is the CBD, the MRT (mass rapid transit), the SBG (see above), the CTE, PIE, and ERP (I don't know...something about roads).  So, I took the subway (MRT) on down there.  First stop: lunch.  I stopped into Ah Teng's Bakery, which is in the famous Raffles Hotel.

Lunch, and yes that is a coffee in the background.  Apparently coffee or tea is appropriate for lunch in Singapore.

Once that delightful sandwich was gone, I departed on a post-prandial tour, checking out two of the IT malls.  That's right...this is a city obsessed with shopping to an extreme.  There are many many malls in the city, including several (more than the two that I visited) that specialize strictly in electronics.  And I'm not talking about some wimpy American mall with 50,000 square feet of retail.  Both of these malls took up an entire city block, went up seven or eight stories, down one or two, and sold everything from cameras to laptops to chips to LEDs to specific cooling fans for a 1995 HP desktop that you can't even find online.  How happy was I?

Wanna know the weirdest thing about these two places?  In addition to all of the electronic goodies, they each had several sporting goods stores.  Because when I think of IT weenies, my mind immediately goes to athletics.

On to the afternoon!

One more stop before a quick run back to my hotel (I said I was tired!): the Singapore Art Museum.  The museum itself was quite interesting, as it is a converted colonial mansion.  There are open breezeways all the way around the building, which have been glassed in to protect the art.  The museum focuses on Singapore native artists, as well as regional artists from Malaysia, Thailand, China, etc.  No pictures inside, of course, but to the right is one of several sculptures in the museum courtyard...a wise man leaping over the mountain. 

On the plus side, I got in to the museum for free, but on the minus, the whole first floor was closed off to change out the exhibits.  Oh well...I leave you with the Buddha riding a dragon, with the museum building itself in the background.


My final activity of the day, after another visit to the hotel (I was still tired and sweaty), was to visit the waterfront and esplanade. They have built a large concert hall along with a long park, stretching many miles along the bay and coast.  The design of the hall was apparently inspired by fly eyes and durians...two things which I find particularly uninspiring.  Looking towards the hall:

And the other way, across the bay:

How crazy is that?  If I was in heavy construction, I would sure want to be in Asia.

It's been quite a day so far, but I'm not done yet.  Before the day was through, I found one of two brewpubs in Singapore and I had a late reservation at Iggy's restaurant, both of which I will save for another post.  The teaser is that Iggy's is on several "Top 50" lists for worlds best restaurants, and ranks #1 or #2 in Asia, depending on who you ask.  Yum!

Where am I again?

I'm in Singapore.  See, the thing is that I've always wanted to go to Asia, and then I found a pretty incredible deal to get over here while surfing flights and frequent flyer websites.  Strangely enough, even cheaper than just flying to Tokyo or Hong Kong, both of which I am flying through this week.  Cheaper than going to Europe.  In fact, cheaper (by several hundred dollars) than flying to Newark, NJ from Nashville.

So, I asked Dru if she wanted to go, but she was completely uninterested.  So then I asked what she thought about just me going, and I got an answer where she said "I don't have a problem with that" but the unspoken language (which boys can't hear, obviously), was pretty much "are you out of your mind?"  So I got my tickets.  Besides, Dru left me at home alone this year already, going to a frozen yoga retreat in the Smokies.  Basically the same thing, right?

Singapore, Day 0 (Travel)

Part A of this little saga is the journey from East Nashville to my hotel in Singapore.  I won't beat it to death, but let me point out that it is a LONG way...right about 10,000 miles and 29 hours.  I left for the airport a little before 6 AM on Saturday morning, for a flight to Chicago.  After sitting in O'Hare for a few hours, I got on a plane to Tokyo.  On a side note, it was my first time on a 747 probably since I was about 5 years old.  Big jets get me hot, and there is not much bigger than a 747 (okay, the A380, but I'll get to that).  So, ORD to NRT is scheduled at 13 hours in the air, and we used all of that.  Funny thing is, that is a heck of a long flight, but I wasn't even 2/3 of the way there yet.  I got off the flight and got on another plane for seven more hours.  Yikes!  At the end of the day, I had left home at 6 AM on October 31, and arrived in Singapore around 1 AM on November 2.

Singapore, Day 1

I was understandably bushed today, after a long journey and a short night of sleep.  I got up at 7:30 AM, showered and unpacked, and had a look at the guidebook.  The plan was basically to take it easy, see the city, etc.  I mapped out a route down Orchard road, which is probably the shopping mecca of this part of the world, and then over into Little India.  Little India was really neat.  While Singapore as a whole is very much "build it bigger, more steel, more glass", Little India consisted entirely of 2-3 story buildings that looked like they had been there for 50 years.  Every foot of street level space is shops, restaurants, and markets.  I did nothing but walk up and down the alleys for about 2 hours, soaking it in.

Finally I settled in at a place for lunch, serving Indian food, obviously.  I had chicken biryani, which was spicy and good.  Turns out that utensils are not par for the course, as everyone around me was just digging in with their fingers.  When in Rome....  Interestingly enough, napkins are also not standard, which left me with some greasy hands after lunch.  At this point, I decided to stumble on home, probably about a 2.5 mile walk.

Singapore is just one and a half degrees north of the equator, and I had heard about the heat, but I wasn't concerned.  Looking at the weather, the high was going to be mid to upper 80s, with humidity around 60%.  Ha! I said...I'm from Nashville, where we have 95 degree days with 95% humidity...mid 80s is a cakewalk!  Well, I set off on my trek, with my jeans and shoes.  After lunch, I needed a siesta, becase it was getting HOT!  The temperature may have not been through the roof, but that tropical sun was beating down.  I think the combination of the long plane ride followed by the heat got me pretty dehydrated and overheated, because I was litteraly stumbling down the hall by the time I got back to the hotel.  I drank about a gallon of water and went to bed.

After a nap and a cooling rainstorm, I hit the streets again, to find Chinatown and dinner.  Chinatown, interestingly, was not especially Chinese.  It was not like going to Chinatown in Boston or San Fransisco, where you have sudden culture shock walking in.  Singapore is extremely diverse, full of transplants from Malaysia, India, Japan, China, Britain, and many other places.  Hence, there are Chinese businesses all over the city, rather than being concentrated in one neighborhood.  The same is true of all those cultures...Chinatown is home to a number of very British-looking law firms, plus the Singapore office of Williams-Sonoma.  (Note that I have not seen a WS store, just the office.)

Dinner was at a hawker center, which I will write up in another post.  Suffice it to say that it was delicious and cheap.  Future posts will also include shopping mania and a strange observation on businesses here.  Sorry that there isn't much for pictures, but I am saving them for future posts.  With that, it is 9:15 PM here and 7:15 AM at home, so I think I'm tired.

Alaska is Perty

Wow, it has been a while. Two main updates in my life:

1) Our house got robbed, but whatever.
2) I spent a (truncated) week fishing in Alaska. Sweet!

Alaska

So, my dad and I had planned all summer to go on a fishing trip in southern Alaska, Thursday to Wednesday. Wednesday night, I get home to a guilty looking dog, a broken window, and a half-eaten piece of pizza. The burglars broke a back window, took a piece of pizza out of our fridge to settle the big dog down, and proceed to burgle my Xbox, Dru's laptop, two bottles of wine, and a broken iPod. I understandably felt violated over the invasion of the fridge (for the pizza), really wanted to play some Halo to calm down, and had a "well, crap" moment. Several hours later, police report is filed, house is dusted for prints (really!), and Dru and I were trying the new Pho place in our neighborhood. In the end, our departure was pushed back to early Saturday morning, but we still had to come back Wednesday for a variety of reasons.

Up North

We traveled to Juneau via Salt Lake and Seattle and then took a float plane about 60 miles out to the lodge. The picture up top is the view from the dock...the peaks are the mainland and all the low hills and foggy area are islands in the channel. Alaska is totally awesome...where else can you see sea otters, whales, sea birds, porpoises, and sea lions in the same place? Here is a whole mess of sea lions, lounging on some very sharp rocks and hanging out in the water.

Just doing their thing

The fishing was fantastic; salmon, halibut and bass on the ocean, plus salmon and Dolly Vardens (a type of trout) in the rivers. The Dollies are probably the most fun, just because the salmon are swarming and everywhere...they literally bump into you in the river because they are so thick. The picture to the right is representative of a small group working up the river. All those dark marks in the water are fish. (Click to get a big version.)

Here's me in the river, waiting for a bump:

Like I said above...AK=perty.

Re: ocean catches, I brought back a fresh halibut (60 lb fish!) and several salmon. To the left , the partitioning of said fish.

Food on the trip, as you can imagine, was lots and lots of fresh halibut, salmon, bass, and crab. In fact, the folks we were with have several shrimp and crab pots in various places around the island, so our very last stop on the day we left was at the shrimp pots, for fresh shrimp to bring home.

All in all, I ended up with about three pounds of cleaned shrimp. It would have been more, except for a very happy octopus that was doing its thing in one of the pots...not too many shrimp in there.

So I leave you with an amused Ben and a floppy octopus:

San Francisco - Day 1 (and Day 0)

As you may have guessed from the creative title of this post, we took a vacation to San Francisco for the 4th of July weekend! Above, the canonical (that's for Gregg) SF picture. (Note: I'm going to write SF instead of the whole city name from now on...too many letters and C's that sound like S.) We spent three full days there, arriving very VERY late on Thursday and taking an 11 PM flight out on Sunday night. Getting there was a travail, as well as travel.

Arriving at the Nashville airport, we heard that all of the United computers at Chicago O'Hare had gone down on Thursday morning, and that the agents there were issuing tickets by hand...big mess that we avoided by going through Denver, which made us very happy. However, we ended up stuck in a holding pattern over Colorado, which the pilot neglected to mention. He finally did come on the intercom (and I hadn't realized that we had been in the air so long), and opened with this:

"Good evening everyone, this is the pilot speaking. We have a fuel issue."

Big oops. That's how you start a panic, right there. He then proceeded to explain weather in Denver, holding pattern, blah blah blah, and oh, by the way, we're going to Omaha. So we proceeded the wrong direction across the country for an hour, landed, gassed up, and went on our merry way, only arriving about 3.5 hours late. United was kind enough to automatically rebook us on the next flight, which we missed, being in Omaha, and we ended up sneaking on the last flight to SFO much later that night. All in all, instead of landing at 8 PM and getting to enjoy a nice late evening meal, we landed at midnight and got to enjoy Quizno's in Denver. Bleh.

In SF, Finally

Ok, so we get there and check in. I booked us at the W Hotel near the convention center (swanky, eh?). If you are not familiar with the W, take an ultra-modern-looking hotel lobby, add techno music, a DJ (the good kind, not the wedding kind), and a bunch of expensive-looking twenty- and thirty-somethings. When the cab dropped us off, Dru had to ask to make sure we were entering the hotel with our suitcases, and not some club.

If you have never been to San Francisco, it is TOTALLY AWESOME. It is certainly the most liberal city in the US and probably the greenest as well. Every shop, restaurant, and museum has at least three waste cans: Recycling for plastic, glass, paper, etc., regular trash, and compost! Even the little plastic spoons that you get with your gelatto (more on that later) are bio-degradable! Plus, in the "awesome" column, they have good beer, better wine, and great food.

So, what did we do, already?

Well, we got up late and had breakfast at the hotel. We decided to take a long walk, so we went north, up through Chinatown and into North Beach, which is an Italian neighborhood. We walked up a giant hill (betcha didn't know they had those in SF) to a building of the SF Art Institute, where we heard they had a Diego Rivera mural, which they did. The building was a converted mission, with a tower, a gorgeous courtyard with fountain, and a great view over the city and of Alcatraz.

The mural was really neat. It filled the end wall of a vaulted room with high windows and big wooden beams...looked like it might have been the chapel back in the mission days. The rest of the room was a gallery with a half dozen pieces each by two artists (students?). You can check out a bad photo of the mural here.

Bring on the food!

By now, we had worked up an appetite, since it was at least 11:30 and we hadn't eaten since 9 AM. We had a few places on our list, and we started at a small chocolatier called XOX Truffles (www.xoxtruffles.com). Sweet! In a bitter way! The shop was itty-bitty, and basically sold chocolate and coffee. We got a sampling to try. On the left are Caramel, Earl Grey Tea, and Vin Rouge, and on the right are Matcha and Cinnamon. All of them were spectacular. Dru's favorite was (and I quote): "The caramel was really good. The green tea was really good. I don't really have a favorite. I want chocolate NOW." The matcha was probably my favorite...it was a truffle that is actually covered in matcha (powdered green tea), which made it super bitter but also rich and delicious. We had a conversation with the owner, who had been there for 13 years (!), making truffles with her husband. She made sure to mention that you could order them online, so check them out if you need a Valentine or Sweetie-I'm-Sorry gift.

Next, we tried to get lunch, at a little pizza joint called Cinecitta (cinema city). Unfortunately, it was noon and they didn't open until 12:30 (what??). So we dropped into the outpost of the Rogue Nation next door for a well-deserved beer (hey, it was like 3 minutes past noon at that point). At 12:30 we headed back and got served fantastic Roman-style pizza by a sassy Roman lady. Dru elected spinach, mascarpone, ricotta, and pancetta, and I went for homemade meatballs and mozzarella.

Finally, we headed down to get some gelatto as a second desert. In the picture, gelatto plus happy-Dru with gelatto:

We wrapped up the day with a visit to SFMOMA, the SF Museum of Modern Art, which was conveniently located next door to our hotel. In addition to a spectacular permanent collection and a new roof-top sculpture garden, they were running a joint show with Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keefe, both of whose works we love.

The two were apparently life-long friends who impacted each-other's works. For example, after meeting Adams and several other photographers in Taos, O'Keefe began playing with viewpoints and angles, and even went to the length of creating lens effects with light...painted effects that you can only see through a lens, not by eye. We got an audio-guide for the show, which was fascinating, as it featured interviews with the artists, Adams' son, and historians. I wish we had some pictures to show, but photos were verbotten. Definitely worth a visit if you go to SF this summer.

Dinner Time

For dinner, the hotel concierge got a reservation for us at a new restaurant called Waterbar, with a seat by the window with a great view of the Bay Bridge. They focus on raw bar and seafood, was was delicious. We went for oysters and a selection of appetizers, tapas style: Hamachi ceviche with coconut milk and lime, Australian Kingfish sashimi with golden beet relish, shaved fennel and snap peas (pictured), and octopus with cucumber and paprika oil. Epitome of class: knowing that we were splitting the dishes, they actually split them and served two plates, instead of putting the whole serving in the middle of the table.

Dinner was accentuated by a bottle of sancerre and wrapped up with a brown butter cornmeal cake, served with roasted apricots and sabayon.

Whew! Days 0 and 1 were epic! Tune it tomorrow for fish, butterflies, and hippies.

Wrapping Up Belgium ... Day 8

For our last day in Belgium, we had big plans - buying chocolates for friends and hitting up some kitschy touristy stuff.

First though - brunch! We went to Le Pain Quotidian - the original. This restaurant has since expanded to the U.S. (NYC, not Nashville), and for good reason. They get it right - excellent breads and pastries, superb looking sandwiches and salads, and tons of jams/spreads/ accoutrements for the tables. I ordered the big breakfast and was absolutely delighted.

We shopped a bit, weaving our way around crowds attending both the jazz festival and the grand opening of the Magritte museum, where they were handing out apples and plastic bowler hats amid costumed tableau of familiar paintings. Rather than spending a long time in line, we decided to head out to a suburb to see ....

ATOMIUM! This was erected for the 1958 World Fair, in an effort to show everyone how progressive and futuristic Belgium was in the post-war era. Pretty neat in a big silver structure kind of way. They actually had an interesting exhibit of what the fair was like and the world situation at the time. Of course, the obligatory pics of us holding up monuments:

Next up was Mini Europe. We were a little dubious about how cool this could be (it was highly recomended in the guidebook) and balked at the 12 euro entry price, but it turned out to be AWESOME! These people have made 1:25 scale models of well known landmarks in all the European Union countries. They have moving parts (boats, trains, clocks) and interactive features. They have done detailed research into historical documents and blueprints to get accurate models - they are ridiculously precise! It was so neat to see places we have been ... and places we hope to get to! Here is Ben holding up the real Tower of Pisa ... and the teeny Tower of Pisa. Ha!


Heading back into town, we stopped in the part of the city known for excellent seafood. The restaurant wasn't open yet, so obviously, time for a beer. We almost had a disaster because I ordered "Witbeer", or wheat beer which is unfiltered and delicious. The man misunderstood and thought I said "coffee with milk". So I said, "no, beer" and he replied, confused, "oh beer! Beer with milk?". So I changed my order to "beer" and got that. Phew!

The restaurant we chose only had seating outside on the sidewalk - no problem for us. The amuse bouche was a croquette with ham and gruyere. For appetizer we shared a tuna carpaccio which was heavily gingered and very refreshing. For entree, I got a seafood linguine with roasted red pepper sauce. Ben got langoustines with a herb aioli. Tiramisu for dessert. A great way to end the trip!

We headed out to the airport that evening to be ready for an extremely early flight the next day, the start of a very long (but luckily this time, very uneventful) trip home. As you may have gathered, we highly recommend Belgium as a wonderful place to visit for culture, food, and beer!

Wrapping Up Belgium... Day 7 (Ghent)

Ok, only 3 weeks after the fact, we are finally (finally!) sitting down to finish up the Belgium blog! This is mainly because we have new and delicious things to talk about at home, but in the interest of seeing things through (ahem, Ben), we will delight your food imaginations with our last few days of vacation.

We left off being stranded in Bruges. We woke the next morning in the most luxurious bed and decided to hit up the same coffee shop we had eaten in the morning before. Espressos and pastry needs taken care of, we made our way back to the train station. Since the original plan had been a day trip to Ghent and the train back conveniently stopped in Ghent, things worked out. We just had to wear the same sweaty clothes from the day before.

Ghent is a neat little town - there is a university there, so overall it is kind of funky and a younger crowd, made all the more interesting by the centuries old bell tower and cathedrals. Also, Ghent was major port city with many canals and old houses where the rich traders and tax collectors used to live.

We arrived and walked a fair bit to a beautiful park near the south of the city, where the art museums are clustered. We were particularly excited to go to SMAK - a relatively new contemporary art museum (officially the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst). The main exhibit was entitled "Beyond the Picturesque" and focused on landscapes. Multiple artists contributed, some whimsical, some thought provoking, some just weird and annoying. All fascinating and very enjoyable. We were really hoping the museum would have gift shop shirts, but apparently they are too cool for that. A picture had to suffice.

We walked about a mile north to the center of town, working up a pretty good appetite. I know what you are thinking - time for some pork products of some kind? Of course! We went to a restaurant loosely interpreted as "The Butcher Hall", complete with aged pig legs hanging from the ceiling rafters. Beers to start, and Ben had his favorite of the whole trip, a Ghent microbrew. After much deliberation about what to order (it all looked good!) we settled on "A discovery of east Flemish meats and cheeses" and discover we did! A huge plate of charcuterie (for you non-foodies, basically glorifed bologna and salami) with a couple types of cheeses and this ridiculously spicy mustard. Paired with this rustic multigrain bread, more beers, and a leisurely afternoon, this made for a pretty perfect lunch. Don't worry, we got some carrot soup for a vegetable.


Stuffed with "cultural discovery", we headed over to tour the bell tower and cathedral. We learned many interesting things from a lovely woman who conducted our tour extremely fluently, alternating effortlessly between Dutch, French, and English. Luckily, these bells were much more in tune! Across the way was a cathedral with a beautiful pulpit and impressive collection of art.

By this point, we were pretty tired of wearing the same clothes and hopped back on the train to Brussels. After a nap, we decided to try the restaurant literally across the street from our apartment. It is maybe a good thing that we didn't make it there earlier in the week, because we may not have gone anywhere else! It was delightfully decorated in French farmhouse-ish style, menus on a chalkboard, dried herbs and lavender hanging from the ceiling. Everyone else in the place was speaking French (and as Ben pointed out, "food just tastes better when everyone around you is speaking French"). We started with an appetizer with shrimp in a sauce with citronelle and fresh coriander, topped with edible flowers.

For our main, I had a risotto made from spelt (interesting! nutty!) topped with perfectly cooked scallops. Ben had veal topped with the "best potato chips ever". For dessert we shared a lavender creme brulee and a pair of chocolate pots de creme - one straight up, one with a zesty marmalade type surprise. The meal was SO good that we asked if they would be open the next day, but unfortunately they would be closed for the long weekend. So goes it, we are happy that we got to go once!

After the trip home (about 15 steps), we turned in for the night.

Belgium - Day 6 - In Bruges

Side bar: We are back on terra firma as of this post, having made the loooong trip back home. Woke up around 4:30 AM Brussels time (+7 hours from Nashville) for the flight to London. Got to hang out at Heathrow for 4 hours, then the big plane to Chicago. We got lucky in Chicago and came home a few hours early, by getting standby on an earlier flight to Nashville.

We were literally handing our tickets to the gate agent when a couple came running up, having just got off the plane from Dublin. They hold us and give our seats to those two (who had booked them), leaving us fuming. Fortunately, there were exactly two more seats available on the flight, so we got to come home.

Well, well...day 6 in the lovely city of Bruges. Don't hold the movie (which I've never seen) against it.

Bruges is an absolutely spectacular medieval city which left us lost culturally, spatially, and habitat-ually. Read on for details.

We caught an 8 AM train from Brussels to Bruges with the intention of going on a bike tour. This is the same tour that Chatty and Heath (shout out!) tried to go on when they were here last year. We had signed up for the tour online the night before and glanced at the meeting spot. We knew it was "in the square" but I had intended to log on in the morning to get the exact location. Obviously, since I'm telling the story, I did not. Guilty as charged.

So, we wandered around the main square in town, looking for a bunch of people with bikes, besides the bunch of people that reside in the city with bikes. Nowhere to be found. We ended up asking in a bike shop where the meeting spot was, as the tour was supposed to begin, and it was exactly where we had been standing, in front of the belfry. As I found out the next day, the tour company had send me an email at 2 AM indicating that the tour would not be held. Too bad, so sad. However, at the time we assumed that they just didn't show (which they didn't), so we climbed the belfry tower (belfort in Dutch).

Apparently, playing bells, in a bell tower, is a big part of Belgian culture. There are a number of towns which have belfries dating from the middle ages, which have several dozen bells attached to a keyboard and to what is essentially a big player piano. A person can play the bells, which each town does a few times per week, but otherwise they have a machine play a different tune every 15 minutes. The big cylinder shown here has pins on the outside, which strike keys above the cylinder, which are wired to hammers that strike the bells. In Bruges, you can hear a particularly awful rendition of "Danny Boy" at 15 minutes past the hour. (It is actually 11 minutes past the hour...the old mechanical clock is not the most accurate.)

After all of that excitement, we wandered around until lunch time, when we finally got to eat some mussels! We went to a restaurant which was recommended by our new Belgian friends (see Amsterdam) for seafood and local fare. Dru ordered moules au bier (mussels in a beer sauce) and I got moules aphrodisiac, which was a spicy sauce with onions and chili peppers, among other things. Fantastic, though it is early in the season and some of the mussels were a bit small. And of course it all came with a big bowl of fries. Before (each pot is one serving)...


...and after...


Boo-yah!

After that we tried some postprandial chocolates, since we were on a mission to determine the best chocolatier in Belgium, and toured the De Halve Maan brewery, as part of our mission to determine the best brewery in Belgium. We went to a shop called Chocolate Line, which had some interesting flavors. We tried (among other things), Tea, Chili Pepper, and Lemongrass. Quite good, but the Saffron chocolate from Marcolini is the best so far.

Dru is chiming in: Yes, Marcolini, indeed the best so far! As for Bruges, it is beautiful and we should know - we traversed it several times throughout the day, between searching for the bike tour, the brewery, the chocolate shop, and art museum, back down to the train station to check what time the last train out was, and then a stroll through the park by one of the many canals. By then, it was time for dinner and we were excited to try another restaurant recomendation. Once we found the one we were looking for, we were dissapointed to find that it was closed on zonterdag (or whichever the word for Thursday is in Dutch) and we consulted the guidebook.

This is all leading up to a social gaffe OF EPIC PROPORTIONS. The stage is set - we are dressed for a 3 hour bike tour, sweaty and smelly from walking, sunburned, carrying a backpack. We arrive at De Karmelieat, knowing that it was a "gastronomic" (aka a rating of three euro signs in the guidebook) so we were expecting it to be a little fancy. However, the dinner that followed exceeded all standards for froo-froo, posh, fancy-pants, hoity toity, classy restaurants that we have ever known.

Where to even begin. The door man in a three piece suit ushered us in (and offered to take our back pack) to be greeted by the extremely suave maitre d' who offered us a cocktail and repose in the lounge. Of course, we declined, being quite hungry, which earned us a small frown for not following the formula. Beyond that though, the staff and service were impecable, despite our extreme hoi poloi-ness...i.e., it was such a nice joint that they wouldn't even raise an eyebrow at the sweaty couple in jeans.

We were shown to a table and proceded to be waited on by a staff of no less than 9, including the sommelier and his assistant, our official waiter, another assistant, a young server, a man whose sole purpose was to describe the food after it was delivered, and a fromagier (but we will get to her in a second). We were given menus - the "ladies" menu did not have prices on it, which we did not even realize until conferring much later. For those of you unfamiliar, this is a largely antiquated practice of obscuring the cost of the meal, the premise being that the lady should order whatever she wants, regardless of the cost.

Now, as this whole process is going on, we are making mistakes left and right. Amuse bouche were given to us and I put down the menu to eat them - which signaled to the waiter that I as ready to order, even though I was not. This seems minor, but trust me, in the setting, it was mortifying. I pretty much had a perma-blush the entire time. But our embarrassment aside ... the food was fantastic. We elected the 3 course menu, which ended up somewhere around 7...a plated three part amuse bouche, as well as a shared plate of amuse, the appetizer, the entree, a cheese course, the desert, and mignardises and coffee. They also had a 5 and an 8 course menu, which presumably also grow proportionately. The food just kept on coming, always with long descriptions of many ingredients and components (there was foam invovled), and impecable service - new silveware, crumb wiping, saucing and re-saucing (half-way through the plate, the head waiter returned with more sauce), wine refilling (even if it was down a sip), and even a new napkin rolled out at Ben's place to cover the errant splatters. (Ben: I was enthusiasic about the meal.)

Now, given our predicament, obviously I did not want to pull out the camera to take pictures of this meal. However, when the cheese lady came out with her cart, another table asked if they could take a photo and I seized the opportunity. Unbelievable ... and delicious.

So, we wrapped up this experience around 10:30, walking out about 10:40. The trains back to Brussels left every half hour and we were a good walk from the station. Rather than run (as we were rather stuffed) we strolled and enjoyed Bruges at night - the lit up square, an accordian player, very content.

Until we got to the train station and saw that the last train had left at 10:58. There was no 11:30 train. Now for those astute readers, you noted that we did check this earlier in the day. Though no one admits to any fault in the situation ... we were trapped in Bruges for the night.

We walked back into town, hoping to find a hotel with a desk clerk still there at midnight. I offered to pretend to be pregnant, if that would help us find "a room at the inn". We did find a very nice hotel (very nice) and we are pretty sure the man gave us a discounted rate (and offered us toothbrushes). The room was beautiful and the bed was extremely comfortable. All in all, an evening of unanticipated luxury. And we are not complaining.

Tune in tomorrow for: A direct train Bruges to Ghent! More walking! Hanging cured pork legs! And dinner across the street from our apartment!

Belgium Day 5

We decided to spend the day in Brussels, in part so we could sleep in after the stormy night prior. We successfully navigated the Metro system (made all the more difficult by the fact that our map was outdated and construction had been completed - turning a “line” into a “loop”). However, we ruined our streak by promptly getting lost when we exited the station, entering a neighborhood which felt a bit sketchy. A very nice young man noticed our map and directed us in the way of the brewery, so chalk one up to Belgian friendliness!

The Cantillon Brewery was really interesting (and delicious!) and for more details see Ben’s previous post. I heartily second his recommendation to try the real type of beer - they are like the family drugstore that is struggling against a Wal-Mart. The true lambics are nothing like the thick sweet syrupy ones that the US is familiar with, they are refined and delicious!

So, after beer tasting for breakfast, we were ready for some lunch. And if you thought we had been eating well before, this is where it starts getting even better! We decided on a French place called L’Idiot du Village, on a tiny street near a cathedral. Wow. It was a tiny room with maybe 8 tables, funky classy décor (the chandelier was kind of antique metal, crystals, and blue Christmas lights), and not a tourist in sight. There of course were no English menus, and luckily the French we do know is mostly food words. We started with what has so far been my favorite dish of the trip - Fois Gras with vanilla and pepper sauce (seen here). Wow again! The sauce was full of vanilla (those are the whole vanilla beans on top) and sweet but savory, in a way that perfectly complimented the rich creaminess of the fois. It was almost like a crème brulee decided to jump the dessert ship and join the rest of the meal.

For entrees, I had Turbot (a white fish) covered in mix of fresh herbs (basil, cilantro, parsley, fennel) and tomatoes with a side of some sort of starch puree (potato and cauliflower? Turnip? Something with a large amount of butter in it at any rate!). Ben had a potage of rabbit, artichokes, and snails (yes he did have his escargot, big ones too). For dessert we had this fantastic concoction of merengue, gelee (ice cream), and caramel fleur de sal. Now, salted caramel is definitely in my top 10 flavors of all time list, and as you can see, the plate is covered in it. The sweet salty duality is second to none, kind of like kettle corn to the nth degree.

Stuffed and happy, we toured the cathedral and made our way back up to the chocolate shops. Of course we needed to sample another one to compare, right? We made our difficult selection and headed over to the Museum of Cocoa and Chocolate. This was tiny and marginally lame, but you get free samples, so who am I to complain? We also learned how to make chocolate molds from a delightful French man.

By then it was raining and cold again, so what do we do? Duck into a bar and have a beer, of course! I embraced my new-found love of lambic and got the house brewed raspberry. Yum!

Home for warmth and a nap, and then a late dinner. We were excited to have moules and frites at the bar down the street, but once we got there and decided what sauce to have - we were told that they had no mussels. No mussels in Brussels! Either the season was over or had not started yet, we were a little unclear, but at any rate, we had to settle for their other fare. Ben had some chicken and fries, I tried a local dish called Stoemp. What came was a giant mound of green mashed potatoes, flanked with sausages, and topped with bacon. Ok! The potatoes had been pureed with some sort of vegetable (broccoli maybe) so that makes it healthy, right?

Tomorrow - you must go to Bruges!

The Brewery Post

So we have visited two breweries/brasseries/brouwerijen (depending on where you live) this week. First:

Brouwerij De Halve Maan

A quick history: The "Half Moon" is the only brewery remaining in the city of Brugge. There has been a brewery on the site (which is right in the middle of the city center) since the 16th century, and the building was bought around 1850 by the Maes family. The business was purchased and shut down "by a big brewery" in the '90s and reopened as De Halve Maan in 2005 by the same family. Today, they brew under the brand Bruges Zot.

We visited the brewery and pub on Thursday afternoon and took a tour. I was pleased with the presentation, because it focused very superficially on the actual brewing process (which I already know something about). Instead, we toured the building, going all the way up to the roof for a panoramic view of the city, and the discussion focused on the history of the company, the building, and the historical brewing process. The building is actually a series of buildings, which continuously expanded as the business grew through the 1900s, and they are full of turn of the century brewing equipment...open air fermenters, a copper cooling pan, and a really interesting copper heat exchanger.

Here is a picture of the heat exchanger. It is constructed of a LOT of copper pipes, about 2 inches in diameter, stacked together. This is really just for exposed surface area...these are really "half moon" pipes. That's also why the whole thing is wavy...more surface area in the same height. The hot beer is (literally) poured in the top, which is open, and it then dribbles down and out a pipe, into a pan at the bottom. All that copper surface area radiates heat like mad.

Additionally, there are fittings on the side for water pipe (one is at the very bottom of the picture). There are additional sealed pipes inside that cold water flows through, picking up even more heat off the beer. This is a really neat piece of old technology, even though it must have cost a fortune to build, because it is exactly the same principle used in every brewery today from my back porch up to the big boys.

About the beer...

The beer was fantastic! They make three varieties here: Bruges Zot Blonde, Bruges Zot Brown (a dubbel), and a dark trippel called Straffe Hendrik. The blonde was light bodied, creamy, a touch hoppy, and had very faint aromas of orange and cardamom. (I'm cheating a little in naming that...they told us in the tour that orange peel and cardamom are in the recipe, but you can still taste it.)

The brown however, wow. It was my favorite beer of the trip until the next day in Ghent, when I had a beer made in that city. The brown is slightly higher alcohol, at 7.5%. (Note that I haven't seen a beer here under about 5.5%. The Belgians aren't scared to kick their beer up a notch.) It is much more complex, without some of the sweetness associated with the blonde. That is pretty remarkable...it is difficult to make a strong beer dry, simply because you are starting with and expect to end with more sugar.

Brewery Cantillon

The day before our visit to Brugge, we went to visit Brewery Cantillon, which is the last brewery remaining in the city of Brussels. Cantillon is also a family business, run by the sixth generation of the same family. They brew a much more traditional beer, but one which very few people outside of Belgium have probably ever had, and which is unfortunately dying off.

Cantillon brews lambic (lam-bik), gueze (gooz), kriek (creek), framboise (fram-bwoz) and a number of variations of those biers (beers). All of these are actually based on lambic, by blending and adding other ingredients. Lambic is a sour, flat beer, based on the way it is produced. I know that doesn't sound too appetizing, but it is quite good.

Lambic is produced by using wild yeast and bacteria in the air, rather than inoculating with a single known strain like modern brewers. After the boil, the beer is poured into an enormous copper pan in the attic of the building, which is exposed to open air. The pan is about 20 feet on a side, and about 8 or 12 inches deep. Leaving the proto-beer there overnight allows it to cool, as well as collect yeast from the air. After several hours like this, the beer is put into oak casks for up to 3 years to ferment. The beer is flat because these casks are not completely sealed...carbon dioxide slowly leaks out through the wood.

At Cantillon, we took a tour of the old building before sampling the wares. This was a really cool way of touring, because they just gave us a booklet explaining the process and set us loose. Really. They sent us down the hall and we got to poke around where ever we wanted. Here is a picture of Dru, hanging out with one of their two big copper brew kettles. From here we checked out their grain storage, old equipment, and wandered around the cellar (see the picture of me, above, with barrels of lambic).

After the tour, we sampled the gueze and the kriek. Gueze is a blend of 1, 2, and 3 year old lambic. Because it has the young beer, there is sugar going into the bottle, which is fermented, which carbonates the beer as it ages in the cellar. It was incredible...it tasted like a dry, sour white wine. The sourness is a bit of a kick when you first taste the beer, but it really grows on you.

Kriek is lambic which has sat on macerated cherries for several months before bottling. There are many other variations, using other fruit like grapes or strawberries, all of which have their own names. The kriek was not sweet like you would expect, because the sugar from the fruit was fermented as well. It was still a sour drink, but the essence of the cheries was quite prominent. Not my particular cup of tea, but Dru was a big fan.

A dying breed

These beers are dying off due to commercial imitators. As brewing technology advanced and the process became more commercialized, people looked for ways to produce more beer faster. However, Belgium does not protect the formula or production method of lambic beers, like you would for a certain variety of wine, cheese, or meat.

A lot of brewers today who produce these beers will simply add sugar and cherry flavor to a modern non-sour beer, rather than taking the risks of wild yeast inoculation and waiting for years before bottling. This means that most people know kriek as a very sweet, sugary, fruity drink, rather than a dry, sour one. I would encourage anyone to seek out and try a gueze or kriek, but you should make sure that it is a sour, traditionally produced lambic beer. While there are a few others out there, I cannot name another brewer besides Cantillon. The good news though, is that they are distributed across the United States, so it should be possible to find it.

That is all I have for now on beer and brewers...was it enough? I will leave you with a picture of Happy-Ben in the courtyard at De Halve Maan, drinking Bruges Zot brown.