BEER WITH A (BELGIAN) SOCIALIST: Thanks for the Abbaye des Rocs Triple Imperiale vintage one-off. Now can I please have St. Bernardus Tripel on tap?

It should come as no surprise that I've had to learn the beer programming game all over again since my return to the biz at Pints&union.

Ten years ago when the wholesale supply chain was starting to be told that establishments intended to rotate draft beers as much as humanly possible, the middlemen gazed back at us in baffled "who is this space alien?" amazement.

Now it's the same reaction when I tell them I just want to keep the same beer on tap all (or most) of the time, and never mind this was the default standard operating procedure for something like 70 years following the end of Prohibition.

Right now, at this precise moment, if I could snap my fingers and make it so, there'd be a draft line at Pints&union pouring Spezial's elegant smoked amber lager from Bamberg, flown over monthly just for us at an eminently reasonable price point.

Okay, so that's utterly impossible.

Restricting my wish to the attainable, this draft line would function as such:

Pour two sixth-barrels of St. Bernardus Tripel in a row, followed by one sixth-barrel of a kindred rotating traditional Belgian ale style; rinse, and repeat -- and if the Tripel maintains popularity, skip the rotating slot every now and then.

In fact, this is so very possible that for a few months at the end of 2018, it actually was occurring. Our customers enjoyed St. Bernardus Tripel, as I knew they would. Then one day I ordered more and the wholesaler was out of stock. This kept happening, and I kept asking. As usual, it took a while to get to the bottom of it, but eventually it was conveyed to me that the inventory was depleted because there were no plans to order any more.

Turns out we were the only account in the whole damn state of Indiana selling sixth-barrels of St. Bernardus Tripel, and in case you're wondering, this brand is my preference because (a) I'm a huge fan of St. Bernardus, and (b) I know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to making intelligent classicist choices like this.

My natural response: "But maybe both the wholesaler and the importer would be delighted to know that I intend to sell St. Bernardus Tripel on draft for roughly 2/3 of each year, and since the St Bernardus ABT 12 is still coming to Indiana in kegs, how hard could it be to accommodate me?"

The wholesaler duly inquired, and came up with this: the importer will ship only full pallets of St. Bernardus Tripel, not split pallets, and this would mean bringing in 20 kegs at once, and despite the very long shelf life, the wholesaler views this as far too many for a brand it apparently hasn't been pushing anywhere else, anywhere, apart from the bizarre new account directed by one hellaciously obstinate contrarian in New Albany.

Silly me. I was expecting to hear importer and wholesaler reply in unison: "GREAT. Now all we need to do is sell a handful of kegs elsewhere in the ENTIRE STATE OF INDIANA to make this work."

Mind you, I like this wholesaler. It's a company chock full of good, helpful people; if not, I wouldn't have gotten the lowdown prompting this rant. Credit them for answering my questions, even if there's a disconnect somewhere higher up, because what I really needed to hear, and still do, is this: "We'll get on this and figure it out."

I sent a detailed e-mail to the importer asking if they'd reconsider the "no split pallet" decision and received ... absolutely no reply in return.

St. Bernardus remains a great personal favorite. I can't say much for their representation in America, at least yet, although I fully expect at some future point someone will call me and say "wait -- I get it! You want to sell one of our products most of the time and will do so, though only if we send it to the wholesaler first!"

Um, yep. That's the size of it.

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At this point the story gets even more weird.

The wholesaler carries a serviceable substitute brand, Abbaye du Val-Dieu Tripel, albeit at a higher price point than St. Bernardus, so I asked to be sent a keg of that one. It arrived looking a bit battered, but okay; that's not unusual for imports. It sat for a week in the cooler, then it was time to tap it.

Out came liquid that did not look or taste like a classic Belgian Tripel, and did not match on-line descriptions or my own memories of the brand. To be truthful, it tasted wonderful; dark and strong, though turbid and with some brown-sugary oxidized character. To be truthful, it tasted like some of the vintage Belgians we used to drink at 't Brugs Beertje when Daisy would haul up examples of the cellar stock.

I reported all this to the wholesaler and took a close look at the keg label, which revealed a completely different brewery.

It wasn't Val-Dieu at all, but Brasserie des Rocs, a wonderful artisanal brewer. The words "Triple Imperiale" were plainly visible. I might have looked closer when it arrived. It seemed as though an honest mistake might have been made in the warehouse.

Now the fun began in earnest and a conversation commenced. The wholesaler could not find any record of such an ale in its inventory. Shortly thereafter, the importer was contacted -- the same one that brings us (or more accurately, doesn't bring us) St. Bernardus draft -- and they asked the wholesaler how on earth it had a keg of Abbaye des Rocs Triple Imperiale in stock when the brand no longer was being imported, and hadn't been for at least three years.

Well, here's how: our wholesaler acquired the rights to St. Bernardus from another wholesaler roughly six months ago. When the deal was done and the stock was transferred, this orphaned keg hopped a ride from the storage area where it long ago had slipped under the radar.

This answered one question, because if the previous wholesaler didn't even know what it had in stock, perhaps the same caliber of neglect had allowed St. Bernardus Tripel to go to seed in terms of statewide sales.

So, did I want to pour Abbaye des Rocs Triple Imperiale at Pints&union or send it back?

To reiterate, to me it tasted good. Obviously it was vintage, which would not have sufficed for a Carlsberg, but this one was big enough when fresh to have developed nicely as it aged.

It made me think of a sunny fall afternoon in 1995 in Antwerp, Belgium.

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We’d started drinking early at the Elfde Gebod (Eleventh Commandment) café, where religious statuary both sacred and creatively profane lined the walls. The eccentric tableau was just creepy enough to be inspirational, and viewing “Jesus with the head of a dog” while sipping Westmalle Tripel made Elfde Gebod my kind of place.

Borrowed image. My photos are somewhere.

Later that afternoon, my pot of North Sea mussels steamed in dry white wine was superb. Endless, graceful “bollekes” of locally brewed De Koninck amber ale were equally fabulous, and later we found Rodenbach on tap somewhere at a bar upstairs on the other side of the cathedral.

Belgium’s diamond capital was a city filled with food, drink and nightlife, and the conclusion of our lengthy Antwerp session came at the famous beer bar called the Kulminator, where Dirk was featuring ten-year-old vintage dark ale called Breughel, brewed by a long defunct brewery and supposedly salvaged from a forgotten stash hidden in a friend’s garage (since then it has been revived as a going concern).

Miraculously, the process of aging had been quite friendly to the Breughel. Oxidization offered a velvety patina of sherry-like nuttiness to concentrated fruitiness, on the order of plums, pecans and toffee. I drank one, ordered another, and lit an authentic Havana: The Romeo y Julieta Churchill, purchased a few days earlier at a tobacconist’s in Brussels.

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I decided we'd serve the Abbaye des Rocs Triple Imperiale, and I hope at least some of you have enjoyed a glass of it by now. As of Sunday it was pouring, so those of you interested might wish to stop by early in the week.

I'll make every effort to convey this nostalgic essay to the wholesaler and importer in the hope we'll be allowed to do what we'd like to do, which is:

Pour two sixth-barrels of St. Bernardus Tripel in a row, followed by one sixth-barrel of a kindred rotating traditional Belgian ale style; rinse, and repeat -- and if the Tripel maintains popularity, skip the rotating slot every now and then.

As always, I'm strangely optimistic rationality will prevail.

TRAVEL PRELUDES: For a town so small, Watou packs a big gustatory punch.

It was in the year 2000 that our little band of bicycling bar buddies went for the first time to Belgium to ride. We came to Poperinge from Tournai on a Sunday and checked into the Hotel Palace. On Monday morning we rented bikes and started pedaling.

On Tuesday the riding schedule was light, but rich in intangibles, because Poperinge's tourism director Luc Dequidt and his wife joined us as local guides. They took us on a leisurely pace through the country lanes radiating from Poperinge, never very far from the smell of manure and the sight of hop trellises.

It became a pub crawl on human-powered wheels, commencing with a Westvleteren 12-degree Trappist on the terrace of the Café de Vrede opposite the St. Sixtus abbey. After cruising through the woods and fields to the fabled “brewing village” of Watou, there was refreshing Witbier from the hometown Van Eecke brewery.

Then we rode south and east via wooded lanes and more farms, back to Poperinge and a few rounds with the owner Guy at his hotel bar.

Buddy must have taken this one.

Out from Poperinge near Watou at the edge of the Helleketel forest there used to be a small brewery and tasting café known as the Brouwerij de Bie.

One of its flagship beers was named for the forest.

There is no Helle,

or even Kapelle,

in Hellekapelle.

Rather it’s a light, spicy beer,

named after the pub of its first little cheer

with the original brewery near.

The brewery lay next to the Helleketel woods

where flew brooms with witches in hoods.

With all that flying a good portion is a life raft

but one day one spilled her draught.

The pubgoers thought the new brew was a whopper

and that's how Hellekapelle came to be a topper.

The Bie had character galore, but it wasn't open on our riding day with Luc. Since then, the brewery has relocated twice and now operates out of Dentergem, near Kortrijk.

Amazingly, yet another brewery lies just outside tiny Watou: Brouwerij St. Bernard, which for a half-century (through the 1990s) produced beer under contract for the monks of St. Sixtus (makers of the famous Westvleteren mentioned earlier) under the brand name St. Sixtus.

When the monks expanded their brewing capacity, the contract was terminated, and the St. Bernard brewery responded sensibly by beginning to brew its own line of St. Bernardus abbey-style ales, landing understandably near Trappist style norms, and arguably the finest of all secular recreations.

The point to all this is that for a village so small (population 1,900) and a scene so bucolic, Watou is a happening kind of place, with the two aforementioned breweries as well as ’t Hommelhof, a world-renowned restaurant, which I'll come to in a moment.

First, a closer look at the two breweries. As a prelude to this 2012 link, note that 18,000 hectoliters is the equivalent of roughly 15,000 barrels (31 gallons each) as we know them in America. By comparison, in 2016 the Upland Brewing Company in Bloomington, Indiana brewed 16,000 barrels of beer.

Brouwerij Van Eecke down the street from ’t Hommelhof dates to 1862. It’s still family-owned (one of the 15 members of Belgian Family Brewers) and has only five employees producing about 18,000 hectoliters of beer a year. The brewery maintains a fleet of 10 trucks—each driver has 100 accounts—for villagers who can have their favorite Van Eecke beers delivered to their doorstep as in the olden days.

As for Brouwerij St. Bernard, I can't even touch Michael "Beer Hunter" Jackson's elegant prose.

This whole border region is hop country, especially around the Belgian town of Poperinge, not far from Ieper (Ypres). The town of Watou even has a statue of a brewer on one of its main squares. He is not identified as a particular brewer - he just serves as a symbol of the local industry. I have seen no such statute anywhere else. On another main square is a famous restaurant specialising in cuisine à la bière, 't Hommelhof (the name means hop garden).

At a time of instability in France, the monks from Mont des Cats moved across the border and established a chapter in Watou. "The Chapter" (in Flemish, Het Kapittel) gave its name to a range of fruity-tasting, complex beers still made by the Van Eecke brewery, just off the town square at Watou.

The chapter of monks also established a dairy farm and developed a local market for their cheese. When the monks returned to France, a local family of cheese-makers took over the business. In the recovery period after World War II, the family, called Claus, turned their dairy (also in Watou) into a brewery.

Confusingly the stimulus for this was a request to produce beer for another Trappist monastery, St Sixtus, in nearby Westvleteren. During that half-century, the monks of Westvleteren produced beer for sale at the abbey, while the Claus family brewed a St Sixtus range for wider distribution. When the monastery of St Sixtus replaced its old brewhouse with a bigger one in the 1990s, this arrangement came to an end.

Like the cheese-making monks who inspired it, the Claus family brewery had always been dedicated to St Bernardus. Its beers, in the abbey style, are now sold under the name St Bernardus, and new partners have joined the company to help market this range.

In closing, food.

I've been extremely fortunate to have enjoyed more than one meal at the 't Hommelhof restaurant in Watou, founded twenty or so years ago by Stefaan Couttenye and his wife, the late Sabine Dejonckheere. On one early springtime visit, hop shoots were on the menu.

When Chef Couttenye opened 't Hommelhof, the notion of beer cuisine in general, and local food sourcing in particular, remained a minority taste even in a place like Belgium.

It is an understatement to say he was far ahead of his time. I've purchased his most recent book, Cooking with Belgian Beers: Great recipes flavoured with the famous 'Westhoek' beers, written with Stefaan's son Simon, who now runs the beer program at the restaurant. A review is forthcoming.

The exact details elude me, but I remember one time in Poperinge when a few of us wanted to air it out at 't Hommelhof. It's only a few miles away, but we didn't have a way there and back for an evening to be spent eating and drinking. We were staying at the Hotel Palace, and Guy magnanimously volunteered to drive us to dinner.

Overly sated, a ride was fortuitously hitched back to Poperinge with a friendly local couple who overheard us talking during the feast.

There's a reason why I keep coming back to this corner of Belgium.