Balder and Dash, or H.L. Mencken describes Warren Harding's command of written English.

In Ohio, James Blaesing, the grandson of long-forgotten U.S. President Warren G. Harding (Blaesing's mother was presumed as the "love child" of Harding and his mistress), has gone to court to exhume Harding's body so all of this can be proven scientifically through DNA testing. 

Officially, Harding and his wife had no children, and oddly, a surviving branch of the family does not contest Blaesing's assertion. Rather, it is surmised that the grandson is angling for enhanced recognition of his mother at a museum in the president's home (an historic site) as well as his presidential center, neither of which can be imagined as prime tourist destinations even before the pandemic.

However, perhaps some day we can include Harding on a road trip itinerary. After all, I've been to my hero H.L. Mencken's house in Baltimore, and Mencken detested Harding. This sounds like a circle in need of closing. Following is a brief excerpt from the Sage of Baltimore. The whole work is here.

    

Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English I have even encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

But I grow lyrical. More scientifically, what is the matter with it? Why does it seem so flabby, so banal, so confused and childish, so stupidly at war with sense? If you had first read the inaugural address and then heard it intoned, as I did (at least in part), then you will perhaps arrive at an answer. That answer is very simple. When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.

Memo to Nawbany: "How Cities Can Reclaim Their Streets From SUVs."

 

Something seldom considered hereabouts: “Safety of people outside the vehicle — pedestrians, cyclists, or other motorists — is obviously a legitimate object for regulation.”

How Cities Can Reclaim Their Streets From SUVs, by David Zipper (CityLab)

Pickup trucks and large sport-utility vehicles have flooded the streets of U.S. cities, a trend that’s been lethal for pedestrians and bike riders. Here’s what urban leaders could do about it. 

 The American fetish for SUVs and trucks isn’t just an environmental disaster. It’s an urban safety crisis. Larger vehicles that share streets with pedestrians and cyclists are more deadly than compact or mid-sized cars, both because their greater weight conveys more force upon impact and because their taller height makes it likelier they will crash into a person’s head or torso rather than their legs. Worse, because SUV drivers sit so much higher than similarly sized farm-near-me/">minivans, blind spots can prevent them from seeing people standing in front, especially children.

Typically, The Onion gets down to the heart of the carnage.          

Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident (The Onion)

“I don’t need anything fancy, just a practical, midsize SUV that gets good mileage and will easily slaughter a family of five during a 60-mph crash. The last thing I want is a flimsy sedan that takes out Mommy and Daddy in the front seat but leaves behind a couple of orphans in the back.”

Do you think a single New Albany city official has so much as considered this issue? Most of them OWN vehicles like these, don't they? 

It makes this sentence particularly poignant: "If local leaders want to make a statement about the importance of safer, smaller automobiles, they could start by looking at the vehicles the city buys." 

I can't stop laughing. Or is it crying? It's so hard to tell the difference here in His Town.

ON THE AVENUES: Stuck inside of Nawbany with the Flanders blues again.

I’ve never denied the extent to which angst and aimlessness characterized my early twenties. Somehow I had stumbled through university and emerged with a degree. Beyond this, my future was a big fat question mark.

At some point in 1983, I decided the answer was to take a trip to Europe.

It took almost two years to save enough money to finance this seemingly crackpot solution, but in 1985 I managed to go and do it. As crazy as it sounds now, those three months in Europe on less than $25 a day opened my eyes and meant far more to me than a Europhile in the making merely scratching an itch.

Only afterward did I come to understand how planning the trip, working to finance it, and actually achieving such a goal on my very own time and dime finally provided a sense of direction utterly missing before. It was a first step in the process of finding myself. 

Granted, I was extremely fortunate to have an opportunity to make these European crusades the focus of my life for almost a decade. I know it. I’m thankful for it.

But it’s equally true that once smitten, I worked hard as hell to make my excursions into educational seminars abroad rather than leisurely vacations. For me, they were the equivalent of graduate school. 

Accordingly, I always tried as best I could to teach, and to pass along to others what I’d learned while roaming abroad. A few years later when my passion for travel merged with good beer as a viable career, one might say that the myriad possibilities for a cultural fusion became clear.  

I was alone while traveling in Europe in 1985, apart from a few days with my cousin. As the years passed, friends and family increasingly became involved. My affiliation with the Public House began in earnest in 1992, and with it came an exponential broadening of a circle of friends sharing an interest in beer and brewing.

By 1995, I was toying with the idea of learning about beer by putting together little groups of these friends, using public transportation. The first trip came in spring when seven of us chased beers in Prague and Bavaria. That same year in fall a quartet convened In Belgium, and in 1997, another itinerary for five took us to Germany and Czech Republic.

My confidence steadily grew. European beer industry connections were developing nicely thanks to the Public House. In 1998 the time was right to push things up a notch.

I contacted a Belgian mom ‘n’ pop motorcoach company and started making arrangements for a spring group tour through Netherlands and Belgium, visiting numerous beer shrines and absorbing much local non-yeast culture along with them. 16 persons signed up, which was enough to make the money work.

Key point: be sure the bus has a toilet. 

Somehow, most likely via Tim Webb’s Good Beer Guide, a hitherto unknown locale called Poperinge, tucked obscurely into a corner of Belgium near the French border, came to my attention. I’d almost made it there in 1995 during a daytrip from Brugge to Ieper (Ypres), the Great War battleground, but there wasn’t enough time. Now, in 1998, Poperinge seemed promising.

Intrigued, I duly contacted the Poperinge tourist office (was it newfangled e-mail yet, or the fax of old?) and learned that they were hip to the gradually escalating possibilities of beer tourism.

A whole plan of operation had been implemented for tour buses filled with inebriates just like us, including a local English-speaking guide, a brewery tour of the Van Eecke brewery in Watou (now called Leroy), beers at a traditional old-school café and the chance to play old-school tavern games there, and admission to the Hop Museum in Poperinge.

This half-day excursion from Ieper seemed perfect for my still cautiously choreographed organizational baby steps, and so I booked it.

The Poperinge visit proved to be a great hit with the group, especially the AuNouveau St.-Eloi rural tavern and de facto community center. There had been an unfortunate fire at the main building just before our arrival, and the whole operation as moved to an adjacent outbuilding, but it was filled with friendly people and a good time was had by all.

(The tavern has since been rebuilt, and the outbuilding is its festival hall.)

Later, back in Poperinge at the hop museum, a complete stranger sidled up to me and asked if my name happened to be Roger. I immediately recalled the scene from the film Top Secret, and the double agent ostensibly selling “souvenirs, novelties (and) party tricks."

If this had been Moscow in 1987, I’d have assumed this mysterious man was about to solicit my thoughts about a black market currency exchange at the best possible rate.

However, the estimable Luc Dequidt was no Soviet-era entrepreneur. Rather, he was chief of Poperinge’s tourist bureau. Having monitored my communications with his staff, Luc wanted to convey personal greetings and make sure our tour was going smoothly; and by the way, was I aware of the next installment of the triennial beer and hop festival, coming in 1999?

Hmm. 

By sheer coincidence, I’d already started plotting to up the beer tour ante in 1999 and doubling the group size for a more ambitious, wider-ranging itinerary. The festival became a part of the plan. 

Let it suffice to say that Luc and I have been friends ever since the hop museum meeting in 1998, and the only beer and hop fest I’ve missed since 1996 was in 2011, when I was incarcerated at the NABC Bank Street Brewhouse Brewhouse penitentiary, serving a sentence of my own making.

I could not have foreseen the immense impact on my subsequent European travels of this fortuitous meeting with Luc. As we’d say in the food and drink business, I quickly became a regular.

---

From 1998 through 2008, I turned up in Poperinge under one or another pretext nine times, missing only 2003 and 2006. Five times there was beercycling involved; motorcoach beer tours accounted for three; and in 2007 the late Kevin Richards and I dropped by in late winter for a few days of beer drinking, just for the fun of it.

The NABC Bank Street Brewhouse project started in 2009, and my travel life was altered. For three years, we didn’t go anywhere. Since then, I’ve been to Poperinge only twice (2014 and 2017), and both stays were nostalgic and enriching.  

If not for the pandemic, we’d have been in Poperinge this weekend (September 18, 19 and 20) for the fest and parade. My fingers are crossed for next year’s postponement dates. COVID-19 obviously far outweighs our travel plans, but a boy can and must dream.

It's probably obvious that I spent all week thinking about the many lovely days I've had in Poperinge and environs. One way to approach making sense of them would be to make lists, like favorite recurring parade floats, the countless wonderful meals and beers at establishments like the Hotel Palace, Poussecafe, Café de la Paix, and ‘t Hommelhof (in Watou), or those legendary local beers one always returns to.  

The problem is that I’ve spent just enough time in Poperinge, and on so many occasions, as to become slightly confused about what exactly happened, when and why.

There were city walks and countryside bicycle rides, brass bands and rock concerts, food and drink, frolics and laughter, and those somber, touching visits to the World War I cemeteries intermixed with farms all over the countryside when you think nothing could possibly be funny, ever again.

My thoughts constantly reference the intrepid traveler’s recurring conundrum. Way back in 1985, I spent those three inaugural months in a state of perpetual euphoric motion enabled by a Eurailpass. It was no more than an overview, if a dazed and exhausted on occasion.

For the encore in 1987, so much had yet to be explored – but how could I go all the way to Europe a second time and NOT return to places like Vienna, Munich and Copenhagen, which I adored (and still do)?

But  ... what about the other towns, cities, valleys, mountains, rivers and seaside idylls? Furthermore, why not small areas instead of larger ones? 

And yet, shouldn’t you spend extra time in the locales that intrigue you most, and get to know them better?    

In the end it all blends together into a pleasing, reaffirming  sensation for me. From the moment Luc introduced himself at the hop museum 22 years ago, Poperinge has been welcoming. It's a part of me now. Going there never seems like a “waste” of time, which might be better spent elsewhere. To the contrary, the feeling always is is comfortable, and I never fail to learn something.

To me, that’s what traveling is all about. Cheers to Poperinge, and another chapter on the way in 2021. 

---

Recent columns:

September 10: ON THE AVENUES: The Weekly Wad lives on in the minds of malcontents.

September 3: ON THE AVENUES: If you really want to be my friend.

August 27: ON THE AVENUES: Structural racism, white fragility, and my old school.

August 20: ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

Utrecht destroys street, restores canal as Pinocchio sings "I've Got No Strings."

Automobile supremacy has taken a hit in Utrecht, Netherlands, and while this is a victory, it reminds us that Americans by and large display no comprehension about such matters. This wouldn't be so bad if we didn't continue electing and appointing them.

I can already hear Pinocchio Rosenbarger's excuses. Is he retired yet, or still merrily suckling at the public teat?



A more detailed rendering of the Utrecht project is here.

Utrecht restores historic canal made into motorway in 1970s, by Daniel Boffey (The Guardian)

Swimmers and pleasure boats gather as Dutch city celebrates reopening of Catharijnesingel

It is being viewed as the correction of a historic mistake. More than 40 years after parts of the canal that encircled Utrecht’s old town were concreted over to accommodate a 12-lane motorway, the Dutch city is celebrating the restoration of its 900-year-old moat.

In an attempt to recast its residents’ relationship with the car, Utrecht’s inner city is again surrounded by water and greenery rather than asphalt and exhaust fumes.

From 1999 (new post): Our group tour descends on Poperinge for the hop parade.

Editor's note: This weekend would have been the latest installment of the triennial Poperinge (Belgium) Beer and Hop Festival, but the pandemic postponed it, along with our trip. Consequently I'm living in the past and flooding the blog pages with reruns of past visits.

The first time I ever set foot in the Belgian city of Poperinge was 1998, a brief stop coinciding with my inaugural motorcoach-powered beer tour. There four other such group extravaganzas to follow before I retired from hosting in 2004.

As an aside, my 2004 retirement came in fits and starts. There were two further efforts to field an excursion, but both fell short of the farm-near-me/">minimum in terms of participants. I knew that if these were to continue, I'd have to up the ante in terms of my own performance, and decided to devote the time to the existing business instead.

The 1999 bus journey was the largest of them all, with 30 of us aboard, and one soon discovers that while greater numbers offer an economy of scale in terms of costs, they also reduce the chance of demonstrating the charms of an elusive back street specialty beer bar with only five tables.

In short, compromises are inevitable, and in the case of the 1999 tour, it quickly became clear to me that Poperinge didn't have a hotel capable of housing the group during the time of the triennial Beer and Hop Festival. Consequently, we stayed ten clicks down the road in the larger city of Ieper (Ypres) at a pleasant business traveler-oriented hotel near the industrial park.

For the hop fest itself, Luc Dequidt arranged a package that included group seating on the bleachers for the hop parade and passes into the German-style beer tent. I advised everyone about the local cafe and restaurant options, trusting they'd break up into smaller groups to explore, and they did.

Everyone was told the location of the motor coach and the deadline for returning to it, assuming they wanted a free ride back to Ieper. We had a long trip to Germany the following morning; hangovers could be nursed on the bus, because drivers must take breaks and cannot be worked beyond contractual limits.

I stressed this point. It also was the pre-Uber era, and while mobile phones existed, they were not common. Taxi service was available, if not optimum. Poperinge was, and remains, the last stop on a branch rail line through Ieper, and trains do not run very long into the evening.

Counting heads as we prepared to depart Poperinge, I saw that a few were missing. There was a fifteen-minute grace period, then we left for Ieper. My tour members were adults, and Poperinge a friendly, accommodating place.

What could go wrong?

Morning came, and it seemed everyone was accounted for. However, as I dug into a plate stacked high with the items from a fabulous breakfast buffet, one of the tour members approached me with a request. His son had flown into Brussels the previous day and joined us in Poperinge for parade. I knew Senior and Junior had connected; I ran into them several times while wandering the streets.

What I didn't know is that the son's commute from America to Europe had taken twice as long, sleeplessly, owing to flight cancellations and delays. Too many beers, not enough shut-eye, and perhaps a stray demon; he'd been involved in a bizarre fracas at the beer tent.

Poperinge authorities merely shrugged, scooped, and deposited Junior into the drunk tank for the night, all quite professional and polite, with instructions to his father as to when he'd be released in Poperinge next day -- this being precisely the same time the bus was scheduled to leave from Ieper.

Hence dad's request for a dispensation, and so of course we waited. It was only 45 minutes, and somewhat comical in the end considering the physical condition of the recently incarcerated. I'd planned on charging him a pro-rated fee for transportation, but decided to require that he buy the first round of beers in Germany, which he did.

I digitized just a few of the photos. I'll get around to the remainder someday.

From 1998 (new post): The first time I visited Poperinge, with previously unpublished photographs.

Editor's note: This weekend would have been the latest installment of the triennial Poperinge (Belgium) Beer and Hop Festival, but the pandemic postponed it, along with our trip. Consequently I'm living in the past and flooding the blog pages with reruns of past visits. 

As I've been saying for 23 years, Poperinge is an interesting place in its own right, as well as a great base of operations to explore numerous destinations of worth nearby, most of them accessible by bicycle. However, the first two times we arrived by bus v.v. the motorcoach beer tour packages I put together in 1998 and 1999.

My usual ON THE AVENUES column slot this week will be a summary of my experiences in Poperinge. The first was in 1998, when I learned that the tourist office in Poperinge was hip to the gradually escalating possibilities of beer tourism, and had a plan for tour buses. It included a local English-speaking guide who'd come on board; a brewery tour of the Van Eecke brewery in Watou (now called Leroy); beers at a traditional old-school café with an opportunity to play old-school tavern games; and admission to the Hop Museum.

The Van Eecke brewery tour was standard; I didn't even take a photograph. However the Au Nouveau St.-Eloi tavern ("estaminet" in French; in Flemish, "kroeg," or pub) was a standout choice. The attraction for foreigners was seeing the old pub games being played; another visitor to a different establishment took these notes:

We try a round of 'baanbolling', bowls played with balls in which the weight is unequally distributed. The skill is to throw the balls so they follow as straight a course as possible. A minor detail: the bowling lane itself is hollow. Hoefijzerwerpen - horseshoe throwing, shooting the 'liggende wip' which is a form of archery, 'vliegende vogelpik', a throwing game with a moving board. "Uitebolling" is another ball throwing game similar to "Shove ha'penny" in the UK or the Dutch 'sjoelen', in tonspel you try to get the puck in the hole, there are table skittles, throwing rings ...

In 1998 we pulled up to find that there had been a recent fire at the tavern, with the whole operation moved to an adjacent building. These days the latter serves as the feestzaal (banquet room), while the damaged building has been completely rebuilt.

Note that Belgium ends and France begins quite literally on the other side of the country lane from the pub's entrance.

The Hop Museum in Poperinge followed. I took only these photos during my first visit, and many more in 2014/2017 after a major refurbishment.

From 2017: "Time for remembrance at Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery outside Poperinge."

I'm moody this week because the pandemic postponed Poperinge's Beer and Hop Festival, and so this week I'll be flooding the blog pages with reruns of past visits. As I've been saying for roughly 23 years, Poperinge is a great base of operations to explore numerous places of interest nearby, most of them accessible by bicycle. 

When the Great War began in 1914, Lijssenthoek was a small village near Poperinge, perched on the rail line to France.

Amid the stupendous carnage of the battles around Ieper (Ypres), which were renewed in various incarnations for four years, Lijssenthoek quickly became a place of great importance.

The rail line was the single most important Allied supply route, and a farm at Lijssenthoek was available for use as a field hospital and evacuation point. Most of the war, this vicinity was out of German artillery range.

For four years, trains arrived from France filled with healthy soldiers and supplies, and returned with wounded, but of course not all of the wounded survived, hence the military cemetery. Needless to say, it filled quickly. Today it is the second-largest Commonwealth cemetery in Belgium.

While most of the burials are British, Canadian and Australians, along with other troops from the British colonies, some Frenchmen and a handful of German troops also are buried at Lijssenthoek, as well as Chinese laborers. There is one American grave.

On Monday, Luc drove me to the cemetery. The village no longer exists, apart from a former pub building where the Englishman working as cemetery caretaker lived for many years.

At some point in the past the railroad tracks were torn out, and the N38 roadway built along the right-of-way. Because the N38 is the most direct route from Poperinge to France, it's the path we chose to bike in the direction of Cassel during those first two beercycling trips in 2000 and 2001.

However, we never stopped for a sag at the cemetery. Dozens of burial grounds dot the landscape around Ieper, and perhaps at some point a visitor no longer notices they're there.

If you ever go to Ieper and environs, take the time to stop and look at the graves. World War I knocked civilization off kilter. I'm not sure we've regained our balance, 100 years later.

This chart marks the daily number of burials in the cemetery. The highest points depicted here occurred almost exactly one hundred years ago at the time of my visit as a result of the Battle of Menin Road Ridge, itself one phase of the idiocy known to us as Passchendaele.

It was a battle that lasted three and a half months, achieved almost nothing, and resulted in 275,000 casualties under British command and 220,000 Germans.

Each day, the video screen in the comprehensive visitor's center focuses on one interment.

These are the faces of some of the 10,784 men (and one woman, a nurse named Nellie Spindler) buried at Lijssenthoek. Only 35 are unnamed. This is because if a soldier could be brought to the rear for medical attention, there was a much better chance of identification. Conversely, such was the horror of the Passchendaele battles that 90,000 bodies could not be identified, and 42,000 were never recovered.

The fence by the road outside is another artistic representation of the volume of burials.

Luc showed me the numeric mapping system enabling individual graves to be located easily. It's still in a book, not an app.

Gaps in the headstones usually indicate a burial moved to a different cemetery after war's end.

I was unaware of the reason for stones being placed atop the graves of Jewish soldiers.

All the explanations have one thing in common — the sense of solidity that stones give. Flowers are a good metaphor for life. Life withers; it fades like a flower. As Isaiah says, “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty like the flower of the field; grass withers and flowers fade” (Isaiah 40:6-7). For that reason, flowers are an apt symbol of passing.

But the memory is supposed to be lasting. While flowers may be a good metaphor for the brevity of life, stones seem better suited to the permanence of memory. Stones do not die.

Ironically, this is the (larger) Stone of Remembrance.

Members of the Chinese Labour Corps.

As for the remainder of the day on Monday, almost every eatery and watering hole in Poperinge was closed, although the shops were open. Diana and I went to the grocery and purchased sandwiches and salads for a day's meals in the apartment.

It was cool and rainy, and the city's workers gradually disassembled the festival infrastructure. The two of us read and rested.

At times, it's what you have to do.

A view of the river; at the The Aggregate, investigative journalism has not died.

The Aggregate is going where local mainstream media evidently fears to tread, and good on them for taking journalism seriously. But first, a number.

It's hard to write a song with bitter fingers
So much to prove, so few to tell you why
Those old die-hards in Denmark Street start laughing
At the keyboard player's hollow haunted eyes
It seems to me a change is really needed
I'm sick of tra-la-las and la-de-das
No more long days hacking hunks of garbage
Bitter fingers never swung on swinging stars, swinging stars

Bernie Taupin never wrote better lyrics, but I digress, because there isn't a trace of bitterness in my soul, just contentment that others are stepping forward to carry the baton -- or something like that.

Broken Promises: City Contradictions on the Riverview Demolition, by Daniel Johnson and Leah Wilkinson

After a series of contradicting statements from local officials concerning a public housing complex in New Albany, some feared the city was preparing to push them out. Their theories were confirmed at a building meeting in early September.

From 2005: "TRAVEL PRELUDES: Poperinge and a date with Westvleteren."

I'm sore because the pandemic postponed Poperinge's Beer and Hop Festival, and so this week I'll be flooding the blog pages with reruns of past visits, such as I can remember them. They never taught memory loss at beer pioneer school.

Three views from 2005. Diana and I rode into Poperinge from the coast; we stayed in Ieper and rode the train back and forth to the hop fest.

Guy, the co-owner (with his wife Bea) of the Palace Hotel, was serenaded on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

Hops on the cycling route into Poperinge.

One slice of color from the parade.

In 2005 Diana realized she liked beer after all. Certain kinds, that is. The revelation came in Brugge, when she absconded with my Trappist ale, a Rochefort 10, during our session at t' Brugs Beertje.

Hence this dispatch from Poperinge, where she closed the deal. It was dated September 22, 2005 and written following our return home for publication at The Potable Curmudgeon.

---

In the grand tradition of beer advertising, we've chosen a beautiful woman to display the product being touted.



Trust me - it's really Westvleteren 12, the beer that “disappeared” from circulation when it was selected as the best beer in the world by readers of RateBeer.com.

Not that it was easy to find, even in Belgium ... even where it is brewed.

The Cafe de Vrede, across the lane from the Sint Sixtus Abbey, was closed for its annual autumn break, which seems usually to occur at the very same time that beer lovers gather in nearby Poperinge for the triennial hop festival. We biked past the venue, and as my old friend Barrie would say, paused to kiss the lock on the door before proceeding into town.

Arriving at the marvelous Hotel Palace in Poperinge, we found no Westvleteren at that estimable cafe; actually, it wasn't clear whether Guy had had any from the start, or whether his stock already was depleted by the time we checked on Saturday.

Cafe de la Paix? Fine food and a great beer selection, but no, not there, either.

Then on Sunday, in preparation for the parade, we dined at the Poussecafe, located just up Ieperstraat from the Palace, and the elusive Trappist elixir was right there, printed on the paper menu, in full view.

I asked the server, who proved to be the owner Kurt, "Do you really have this beer in stock?"

He shrugged and replied: "It wouldn't be listed if I didn't."

An incredible lunch followed, and the food was good, too, but I still prefer Rochefort 10, with Westvleteren a close second.

Later, comfortably seated along the parade route, I was introduced to a great new way to enjoy Poperings Hommelbier.



Pitch the lemons and limes, and go back to the basics.

From 2014: Poperinge pairings, tattoos and a meal to remember."

I'm being petulant because the pandemic postponed Poperinge's triennial Beer and Hop Festival, and so this week I'll be flooding the blog pages with reruns of past visits. Here's a throwback to 2014.

Remember the rainbow? By Saturday morning, Poperinge was clear and temperate, and the tasting stations were operating on the Grote Markt. Those wishing to sample would buy a small glass (to keep or bring back for a refund) and tokens, then redeem the tokens for beer and food portions. Only those beers certified as using Belgian-grown hops were on the list. Local chefs conjured interesting dishes, including a Waterzooi soup using stock made with dry-hopped Poperings Hommelbier.

Before the merriment could start in earnest, there was a cash flow issue to be resolved.

In the afternoon, something new for me: A marching band "tattoo."

For those doubting its place as part of a hops festival, consider the definition:

The word "Tattoo," is derived from "Doe den tap toe", or just "tap toe" ("toe" is pronounced "too"), the Dutch for "Last orders". Translated literally, it means: "close the (beer) tap". The term "Tap-toe" was first encountered by the British Army when stationed in Flanders during the War of the Austrian Succession.

The beer taps were not closed prior to the tattoo's commencement. Somewhere behind the throng is a beer trailer.

Four marching bands participated, and the tattoo was far more enjoyable than I'd have imagined.

Saturday was slated as the occasion for our blow-out meal, and as usual, Café de la Paix was chosen as the venue. You can read a full description of my religious experience here.