Old Friends: Unibroue La Fin du Monde

Let me take you back in time. It is late December 2008 (yeah, I know, it seems like entire lifetimes ago), Mrs V and I have yet to leave Prague for the United States - in fact, at this point we didn't really know where in the US we would be moving to, given Mrs V hadn't found a job. At that time, my parents lived in an impossibly gorgeous hamlet in the Haute Vienne region of France, in an old farmhouse that still had a couple of acres of land attached. They had a small orchard, a pond, and green fields as far as the eye could see in every direction. Around 5pm every afternoon, the neighbours ran their herd of cattle, and the ground would gently tremor at the stampede. With Christmas just a week or so away, Mrs V and I flew to Paris Orly at some ridiculous time of the morning, to catch the train from Gare d'Austerlitz to La Souterraine, where my parents would pick us up and head to their hamlet.

That particular winter I had ordered a load of beer from the UK, since my parents were visiting my eldest brother, who lived in Kent at the time, so that was waiting for me when we arrived. However, I wanted to try local French beer, such as the La Lémovice I found at Limoges market (fun fact, they are sitll in business and now have a website), as well as some thoroughly disgusting shite being made by an English bloke, for which we drove an hour or so for a night time market - oh well, at least the market was delightful. As was traditional with our trips to the French countryside, a jaunt to the nearest sizeable town, the aforementioned La Souterraine, and a supermarket revealed new horizons. Unrelated to this post, but I love French supermarkets, in this case it was an E.Leclerc. It was at this E.Leclerc that I discovered that it was possible to get Orval for an insanely reasonable €1.30, as well as picking up today's Old Friend beer, Unibroue's La Fin du Monde, for the first time, along with a couple of other Unibroue beers.

Back to the present and having spent Sunday morning in the garden, moving raised bed frames, pruning blackberries, and cleaning up in preparation for winter, I sat on my front porch with the 750ml bottle to dive on in and revisit a beer I hadn't had since before the twins were born, which is 8 years ago now!

I have to admit I was a little surprised by just how hazy this one poured, though it had been in a pretty cold beer fridge for a while, so some of it is likely chill haze. Goodness me though, look at that glorious, dense, cloud of foam sitting there atop the orange beer. It was at this point I took a moment to read the back of the bottle and that Unibroue market this beer as a tripel, not a style I drink very often to be honest. That foam though, it lingered, slowly collapsing in on itself until about a half a centimetre remained, and stayed around until I refreshed the glass - yeah I kept this all to myself, Mrs V was off playing fiddle, in my defense.

Sitting on my deck, the kids playing whatever games they were, I stuck my nose as close to the foam as I dare, and was regaled with a notable graininess, subtly backed with a spiciness like coriander and ginger, and some light citrus that reminded me a lemon zest. Swimming around in the mix was also a gentle sweetness, like light honey or simple sugar syrup. As I mentioned, tripel is not a style I readily gravitate to, but the aroma was doing a number on my senses and I just wanted to dive on in to the taste, so I did.

That sweet syrup thing I had been smelling was definitely not a figment of the imagination, it was there in the flavour, though perhaps with hints more of very light caramel, to be honest it floated between that and honey. Beneath the honey was a biscuity thing that made me wish there were a middle ground between the venerable digestive and a more savory water biscuit - I have a digestive recipe in one of my cook books, perhaps a project to make a less sweet variant is in order? The citrus thing from the aroma decided to join the party too, this time as a marmalade character, but not traditional orange marmalade, rather lemon marmalade - not sure if that is still a thing back in the UK, but I had a moment of thinking about how much I liked lemon marmalade on my toast as a kid. 

Did I mention yet that tripel is not really a style I am regular drinker of? Well, that might have to be caveated with "unless it is La Fin du Monde". So many tripels that get made in my neck of the woods tend to be cloyingly sweet and almost sickly, so much so that I wonder if they are being brewed as a distinctly untraditional all malt beer? By comparison, this had quite a dry finish that, when coupled with the aroma and flavor notes, made me think it may actually use a decent amount of sugar. There is just enough bitterness as well to offset the sweetness, and at 9% abv the absence of an alcohol hit was much appreciated. Thinking back on that foam, yay for bottle conditioning and the carbonation being noticeable but not spikey, as some highly forced carbonated beers are.

Yeah, I'll be buying this again, and not leaving it for goodness knows how many years.

Old Friends: Boddingtons Pub Ale

I am starting to think that my eldest brother has an awful lot to answer for, and not just the horse racing I mentioned in the last post. Fun fact, when my younger brother and I were around 11/12 years old, the eldest, then about 19 I think, came home to stay for a while, and so naturally he taught us how to read the form for the horse racing. 

We loved having our big brother at home, he was our hero and we thought him the very epitome of cool, every Saturday morning we would head up to the local shop, at the time we lived in a place called Sebastopol, not in Crimea, but just outside Cwmbran in Wales, and buy the paper. We would then sit and go through the races for that day, and my brother would give us both a quid to put on any horse we wanted, when the National came round he bumped it to a fiver. It was he that told us to always keep an eye out for a horse that has come fourth in both its previous outings, the frequency with which they win is interesting. Anyway, said brother, the one with an awful lot of answer for, is who I think of whenever I think of Boddingtons, which we called "Bod", it was one of his tipples, along with Guinness.

Apparently Boddingtons is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment back in the UK, with it being brewed under license by J.W. Lees and available on cask in the pubs of Manchester - not going to lie, I'd be a pig in clover if casks of that found its way to Virginia, but alas it is unlikely. I was blissfully unaware of these developments when I was picking cans and bottles of stuff I hadn't drunk in ages from the shelves of my local Wegman's, including a can of today's friend for a revisit...

It may well be heresy to pour a Lancashire beer into a Yorkshire pint glass, the nonic didn't feel appropriate, nor yet the dimpled mug, and of my British glasses that would have left another Yorkshire glass anyway, so the Sam Smith's tulip it was. Little side story, I was once sat in a diner in Charlottesville when the folks in the booth behind Mrs V and I asked the waitress "what kind of beer is Boddingtons", to whuch she replied "it's kind of like Guinness", I almost spat coffee all over the diner. I guess she was referring to the nitro nature of Bod, but that light copper is as far from Guinness black as you could imagine (artistic license there, yes I know there are paler beers). Still, topped with a healthy amount of firm nitro white cream and strikingly clear, it was a beautiful looking almost pint of beer.

When I drank Boddingtons as a student I wasn't paying much attention to the aromas and all that jazz, seriously did any of us? We were more consumed with whether the drink in our hands conveyed any sense of cool to those around us, though being more of a Guinness/Murphy's/Caffrey's drinker at the time, the only cool I could muster was likely the cold shoulder of hoping nobody would speak to my shy arse, whilst desperately wanting someone to talk to me - ah the joys of youthful insecurity coupled with crushing shyness and the need for Dutch courage. So, having given up ambitions to coolness, I stick my nose on in the glass and came back with...well, not much really (yay nitro beer head that blocks anything interesting). There was a slight sweetness that reminded me of golden syrup, maybe a little earthiness, some fruity notes, like blackcurrants that made me wonder if Bramling Cross hops are in the mix somewhere. That sweetness thing was present in the tasting as well, though more in the realm of Hobnobs than specifically golden syrup, think gentle biscuit and you are there. Alongside the biscuit was an orange marmalade thing that made me think East Kent Goldings, but the kind of marmalade with finely shredded zest in it, including a little pith to just add a whisper of bitterness.

So there you have it, Boddingtons from a nitro can, in my notes I have the phrase "non-descript" and that's really not very fair as that term has become short hand for "boring" or "bad" but Bod ain't bad, and it certainly isn't boring, it's just kind of there, perfectly inoffensive, technically accomplished, and something I'll be happy enough to drink from time to time. It's kind of like coming back to where you grew up and everyone except yourself has stayed at home and is still living like it's 1995, no alarm, no surprises, no changes, no growth. Fine to come home to, but you'll be on your way again soon enough.

Old Friends: Leffe Blonde

Dipping into some of the dimmest and most distant of crevices in my drinking memories today for this resurrection of my Old Friends series. Back in the days when I was a college student in Birmingham, I got the train from New Street early one Saturday morning to go to Esher in Surrey. The main purpose for the trip was to spend the day at the Sandown races with my eldest brother, who lived down that way back then. Having spent the day frittering money away on thoroughbreds of varying uselessness, we headed into central London for dinner at a non-descript curry house, non-descript in the sense that I don't have the foggiest as to what I ate, but weirdly 2 beers are lodged in my memory, the Żywiec I was drinking and the Leffe Blonde that was my brother's choice that night.

Being a good younger brother, by 8 years, I was suitably in awe of his sophistication and worldly wiseness, and so at some point back in Brum I made a point of trying Leffe, in the comfort of the All Bar One. Given that I studied theology at Bible college, I was definitely not supposed to be there as we were supposed to not partake in the demon drink and all that jazz - I wonder if the college authorities knew that plenty of the married students kept a stash of booze in their flats that the singles among us would take advantage of from time to time, or that I would disappear for a few pints of Caffrey's at a pub called The Trees most afternoons?

Anyway, I developed a liking for Leffe Blonde, and so in the shop the other week, seeing it available as a single bottle in a build your own six pack, I thought, what the heck, and on one of the rare occasions the house was empty, I cracked it open to head down memory lane...

Wracking the old grey matter for hints of what lay ahead of me, I had a notion that what I was going to find would be distinctly sweet, even slick and syrupy, with a nose full of sugar. Still, it looked grand going into my one and only vaguely appropriate glass for a Belgian abbey ale.

It certainly poured the colour I vaguely recalled, a beautifully rich, deep, golden with superb clarity - I assume it is filtered. The head was a half inch of white foam, with some large bubbles that soon popped as it dissipated to a thin schmeer. I don't recall if my urbane brother sniffed his beer that night in London, but I certainly did here in Central Virginia, and prominent was a spicy character that made me think of ginger and cloves, not quite Christmas gingerbread from a European Yuletide market, but subtly lingering there, along with traces of golden syrup and marmelade.

Ok, just drink the damned beer already...cloves again - the thing with that clove thing is that it really is like the dark side of the Force, once you head down that way "forever will it dominate your destiny", there is no escaping it, even if it is a yeast derived ester. In the mix though was also dark honey, a trace of oakiness, and dried fruits, almost a rich spiced fruit cake, but with a light pithy bitterness in the background to keep it interesting.

So that sweet attack that my memory had me expecting didn't happen, don't get me wrong, it is sweet, just not syrupy and overwhelmingly cloying. I was actually pleasantly surprised and while it is hardly the most characterful abbey ale in the world, he says as if he drinks them regularly, it was decidedly drinkable and might have to make more regular appearances in the beer fridge, especially for soaking the currants, raisins, and co for my annual Yule cake.

Homebrew - Victorian Style

There is something delightfully pompous, perhaps a little insane, about book titles in the Victorian era that always reminds me of the "Connections" TV series presented by James Burke. In episode 2 there is a segment about Victorian weather science in the Highlands, that describes the effect of science on the people of Victorian Britain, in that it:

"made them all lunatic in the same way".

An example of a daft book title is this magnificent tome from 1852...

Can you get much more condescending than the head chef to the Royal Family should advise the working classes on how to cook? Admittedly I bought the book precisely for the title and out of curiosity about what the servants of the upper echelons though regular folks should, could, or even would be willing and able to cook. Francatelli even gives a list of equipment that said "working classes" require for the recipes and techniques in his book, which would cost £6 12s 4d in pre-decimal currency, that's about £700/$930/€800 today, and includes such things as a potato steamer for 2 Shillings, a 2 quart tin saucepan for 1s 6d, and a 12 gallon copper "for washing or brewing" to be had at the princely sum of £1 10s or £160/$213/€185 in today's money.

A 12 gallon copper for brewing you say, don't forget that in 1852 the Imperial gallon had been standardised for nearly 30 years as being 4.6(ish) litres, as opposed to the old gallons being 3.8 litres, and still in use in the USA. A 12 gallon copper would hold 54.5 litres. Also included in the list of essentials is a "mash-tub" for another 10 Shillings (£50/$66/€60) and two "cooling tubs" again for 10 Shillings, though Franctelli does allow the downtrodden masses to use "an old wine or beer cask, cut in halves" as this "would be cheaper, and answer the same purpose". Seemingly used casks were to be had for a mere 6 Shillings (£32/$42/€37).

All of this detail would suggest then that the book has a recipe for brewing your own beer, and thankfully it does not disappoint, as number 130 is handily titled "How to Brew Your Own Beer", though confusingly our chef friend recommends a 30 gallon copper and a we actually have a size for the mash tub, 54 gallons, which is 245.5 litres. The other equipment recommended is:

"another tub of smaller size, called an underback; a bucket or pail, a wooden hand-bowl, a large wooden funnel, a mash-stirrer, four scraped long stoutsticks, a good-sized loose-wrought wicker basket for straining the beer, and another small bowl-shaped wicker basket, called a tapwaist, to fasten inside the mash-tub".

A recipe though, a recipe? I hear you cry as you so dearly want to go and make some Victorian style homebrew. Hold your drays sunshine, first things first, water. In a world without universal in home plumbing, what is a homebrewer to do? Well, apparently not to use spring water for a start as "its hardness...is unfit for brewing", remember that at this time geology was very much in its infancy. Ok then, no spring water. Rain water perhaps? Sure, if it is collected in clean vessels, but Francatelli recommends "water fetched from a brook or river" being "free from all calcareous admixture", basically water lacking in calcium carbonate, because the "consequent softness gives them the greater power to extract all the goodness and strength from the malt and hops". Ok, soft water it is then, though if you are an industrial labourer in the cities of Britain leading the Industrial Revolution, I am not convinced you'd be dipping into the Thames, the Trent, or the Clyde for your brewing water.

Eventually, we do get to a recipe, of sorts.

"In order to ensure having good wholesome beer, it is necessary to calculate your brewing at the rate of two bushels of malt and two pounds of hops to fifty-four gallons of water".

More maths...an Imperial bushel is 36.4 litres, a litre is a kilogram, therefore an Imperial bushel is about 36.4kgs, or 80.2lbs, we need two of those for making 54 Imperial gallons, so 160.4lbs of malt and 2 pounds of hops, whole leaf of course, since T-90 pellets weren't a thing yet. After a lot of head scratching and double checking my work, I think this means we would be looking at a starting gravity of about 1.067, and potentially an ABV of 6.4% - assuming the use of pale malt.

What about the hopping? Well for a start, no named variety is mentioned in the book, and if I understand the process correctly, the Victorian homebrewer would have practiced "first wort hopping" as we call it today, viz:

"put your hops into the underback tub, and let the wort run out upon them".

The first mash lasted three hours, and while the runnings were in the underback with the hops, a second mash of 2 hours took place. Eventually giving the brewer sufficient wort to require 2 boils, with the hops split between them. The boil lasts for 90 minutes, and again assuming my numbers are correct we would end up with about 35 IBUs - making the assumption that something like Fuggles were used at about 4% alpha acids.

According to Francatelli, this will eventually "produce three kilderkins of good beer".

Now, I have yet to try and make a beer based on this text, but I do intend to try at some point, though sourcing period appropriate ingredients may be a stumbling block, especially as Francatelli doesn't say what kind of malt his working class readers should use - my hunch is that given diastatic brown malt was still a thing, it might have been that given that Francatelli doesn't mention starting gravities or alcohol content at all, but elsewhere is focused on price of ingredients, and brown malt was cheaper than pale from a monetary stand point.

If I ever figure this out, it would be fun to try and create a recipe and maybe brew it with one of my local breweries...all that is for another day though.

What The Schnitt?

Yesterday I introduced you to our friend Mr Bílek, shoemaker and fundraiser for Czech national causes extraordinaire, yet he was far from alone in his endeavours, as I discovered in the German language daily "Znaimer Tagblatt" from January 1900.

Znaim is the German name for the modern city of Znojmo in Moravia (minor aside, I always find typing "Moravia" rather than "Morava" weird) and if ethnic maps of the late 19th and early 20th century are accurate the city, and its attendant region, was predominantly German rather than Czech. The history of Bohemia and Moravia within the context of the wider Austro-Hungarian Empire is delightfully complex and multi-ethnic, and I don't want to get into that fun here. However, what is clear is that Czechs and Germans living in Bohemia and Moravia used each other to prod and cajole their fellow citizens into ever greater demonstrations of national fervour.

According to this story, the fund raising undertaken by the likes of Mr Bílek at U Fleků had raised a total of 26,614 Florins in the 20 years since 1880. One thing that I find fascinating is all the different names for the same basic currency throughout the Empire. If the 14,000 Złoty raised by our shoemaker friend was about $90,000 then over the course of 20 years, the proud Czechs of U Fleků raised about $170,000/£126,000/€146,000 for various Czech national associations, specifically the Czech School Association, Czech Association in North Moravia, and the Sokol, a gymnastics association.

And so this success makes the "Deutsche Blatt" ask the question "and what are we Germans doing?". Seemingly there were a pair of Moravian "Bunds", one in the North and one in the South, for whom an annual contribution of a mere 20 Kroner or even a single Krone respectively was, perhaps hyperbolically, considered "already too much".

The writer continues to berate their fellow German Austrians that a single "schnitt" fewer every day wouldn't be so bad and that the savings would build up to a sizeable fund for civic associations tied to the ethnically German population of the Empire. And here we have again an example of the cross pollination of cultures that was Bohemia and Moravia in the 19th century, evidenced today through the use of a transliteration of "schnitt" into Czech, "šnyt" as the name for effectively a half pour of beer and lots of foam. "Schnitt", if you know your German means "cut", because it is a cut down pour of beer, that is "better than nothing", at least according to Bohumil Hrabal, or was it Karel Čapek, when he wasn't inventing the word "robot"?

Anyway, clearly the writer in the Znaimer Tagblatt thinks Czechs are more effective as patriots, reminding his audience with his closing line "organising festivals and dancing for national purposes is far from fulfilling one's duty".

Collecting Coins in the Pub

I am always fascinated by the social and political aspects of the pub, perhaps more so even that the beery ones. Pubs, beer halls, biergartens, are all inherently social and political spaces, because they are places where humans get together and talk about the things that are important to them, or at least on their minds. Sure, folks can prattle on about not talking about politics or religion in polite society, but the pub, beer hall, or biergarten are not necessarily polite spaces, and so it is no surprise when you dig into the role such places have played in history that you learn interesting things...such as this story from the "Kuryer Lwowski" - that's Lemberger Courier for the non Polish speakers amongst us...

As you can probably tell from the highlighted sections, I was doing a search on the legendary Prague beer hall, U Fleků, but this story from May 4th 1893 has nothing to do with black beer, or any other shade of booze, rather it comes from a story titled "How Czechs Collect Donations". For historical reference, at this point in time, the Polish people were divided between the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empire. There was no independent Polish state, Gdansk was in the German Empire, Krakow in Austro-Hungary, and Warsaw in the Russian Empire.

In the 45 years since the popular nationalist uprisings of 1848, many of the national minorities in the Austro-Hungarian empire has asserted their identities as distinct from their German or Hungarian speaking overlords, and none more so arguably that the Czechs. This assertion of national identity often took the form of civic society projects, such as the building of a national theatre dedicated to performing only in the Czech language - which the Czech had to do twice because the original building suffered a catastrophic fire just a couple of months are first opening. If I remember rightly, the Imperial crown refused to provide funds for such an independent Czech cultural institution, and so the money was raised from the people themselves.

How did they manage to raise the kind of money needed to buy the saltworks upon which the theatre was built, and then to actually build the thing? One way was that people asked for donations in places like U Fleků. People like the shoemaker, Mr Bílek in the story above, would collect small amounts in popular places, and where is more popular in Central Europe than the beer hall? By collecting loose change, Mr Bílek raised 14,000 Złoty (as Poles in the Empire referred to the Austro-Hungarian Krone), or about $90,000/£65,000/€75,000. According to the story in the Kuryer Lwowski, having done his rounds Mr Bílek would put the donations in a box, the keys to which were held by two other people, and thus he collected such a sizeable sum for the "People's School Society".

The writer of the Kuryer Lwowski article finishes off their piece recommending that the people of the province of Galicia, which included much of modern western Ukraine, take lessons from the Czechs and likewise raise their own money for similar projects.

I wonder what else I will find about U Fleků in the archives...

Haus Lagerbier Update

In the very first post on Fuggled this year, I wrote about my main homebrew project for 2025, namely to take my many, many years of lager drinking, my fewer years of experience brewing my own beers, and come up with a beer that would be my "house" lager. I have named it, somewhat unimaginatively I am sure, Haus Lagerbier.

The aim is to have something I brew 4 times a year, on the first Saturday of each quarter, to compliment in many ways my house best bitter, a brewday that I could probably do in my sleep. For this year, I wanted to dial in my preferred yeast strain before messing with hops and malt, etc. As such, batch 1 was brewing using the near ubiquitous 34/70, while batch 2 switched to S-189, which is a strain from Switzerland.

Batch 1 went on tap in March, and looked like this in the late winter sun...

I was most remiss with Batch 1 in that I didn't take the time to sit down and really analyse it with my modified Cyclops set up. A fact likely due to the fact that it tasted good and between Mrs V, myself, and some of the neighbours, we cranked through the keg in double quick time.

Thank goodness for it being a year long project, and so a couple of weeks after kicking batch 1, I brewed batch 2, exactly the same beer but with the different yeast. One thing I noticed about S-189 as opposed to 34/70 was that it took an extra couple of weeks for the green appley thing of youth to fade out of the beer. Those early pints looked like this.

However, I got my shit together and sat down one Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago to write some notes, with the beer pouring absolutely beautifully and looking like this.

On to the notes then:

• Sight - yellow to light gold, good couple of inches of white, rocky, foam, fantastic clarity (not fined with anything), and good head retention.
• Smell - Lightly toasted malt, some crackeriness, floral hops, kind of like walking through a mountain meadow on a breezy day.
• Taste - nicely bready, with slight toasted edges, nice hop spiciness, think cinnamon in particular
• Sweet - 2/5
• Bitter - 2.5/5

Damn it I am happy with that beer. The mouthfeel and body were just what I wanted, medium bodied and such easy drinking. The bitterness hits right at the back of the mouth, leaving me wanting more, and invariably more is what I had. I was genuinely sad when the keg kicked last weekend.

Now though, I find myself on the horns of a dilemma for batch 3 as I would happily stop and just make batch 2 the default for Haus Lagerbier. Yet, there are plenty of other bottom fermenting yeast strains out there that might be even better than S-189...what to do, what to do?