The Belgian Beer Bottle Bridge Part 2; The Cambrinus Beer Project

My friend Peter is taking the stand for this entry….the labels are all finished, and now you get to hear about the beer:)

The Cambrinus Beer Project: About 8 years ago, we moved into our house and met our neighbor, Chris who introduced me to the idea of home brewing which he’d been doing for nearly 25 years. When I eventually started brewing, the first beer I made was a Belgian Blonde. I dabbled in a few other styles over the course of the next year, playing with Pilsners, lagers, IPAs Double IPAs, etc. and I started reading about brewing traditions and beer styles. The more I read, the more I was drawn to the Belgian beers.
For one thing, I grew up there. I spent my formative drinking years in bars in Waterloo and Brussels. Drinking was how I polished my accent to the point where Parisians would hear me speak French and call me a “dirty Belgian”. You see, drinking in bars is a social endeavor and the drinking age in Belgium at the time was “How much money do you have?” In a bar, you are pretty much forced to interact with the people around you and that’s hard to do if you don’t speak the language. And, beer serves as a great social lubricant for those who are a little unsure of their speaking ability as it lowers the level of shits one gives about making grammatical errors. And if you accept the premise that one can’t learn without making mistakes then, by extension, the more mistakes one allows oneself to make, the faster one will learn.
The second aspect that appealed to me was that Belgian brewing tends to reflect the Belgian attitude toward life. That is to say while German/Dutch beers tend to require yeast to perform within a narrow, uncomfortable range of temperature, Belgian beer recipes seem to be more interested in finding a temperature where the yeast will be happy and then letting them do their thing.
Finally, with commercial breweries in operation since the 16th century (Brasserie Roman, still owned by the family 14 generations and counting), much run by monks who kept excellent records, there is a long history of Belgian brewing that provides a wealth of information on which one can draw when exploring ideas and thinking of possibilities.
But once I started playing with different styles, I found I had a small problem in that once the bottles were filled, it became harder to tell what was in them. This matters if you have a Quadruple ale (a hearty beer with up to 12% alcohol) and a Petite Saison (a tasty, refreshing beer with 3.5-4% alcohol). You need to be able to tell which one is more suited to the 90º summer day versus the 40º winter day. I initially tried putting them in different bottles, but that didn’t work because then I started experimenting with more styles and I only had 2 types of bottles: 22 oz. “bombers” and champagne bottles.
The obvious solution was to start making labels. After all I have a computer and a printer so it was simply a matter of getting some label stock and printing them. Done.
A new “problem” arose when I took the beer to parties to share with friends and they looked at my spartan, sans serif label full of information about the beer, and their eyes glazed over. As enlightened as we like to think we are, humans are still a very judgy, image obsessed species. If you ever doubt just how shallow we are, consider the wealth of information available to us about wines: grape varieties, regional differences, different styles, yeasts, treatments of grapes, etc. and then ponder the fact that over
90% of consumers purchasing wines make their choices based on the label. Even more telling is that the 80% of those people said they chose the wine because it had an animal on the label.
So because I want people to enjoy the beer, I realized that I needed to make my labels more appealing so that they didn’t prejudge the beer before they tasted it. Drawing on the information above about wine labels, I thought it would be smart to have animals on my labels. That led me to thinking about Belgian animals so I started mapping the styles of beers to specific animals. This had the added bonus of making it easier to find the beer I was looking for when I had them mixed together on a shelf or in a box.
As I was looking on line for some drawings of Belgian fauna, my good friend from high school posted on Facebook a painting of a monkey she had done for fun. It was a beautiful little monkey done, obviously influenced by the time she spent in Asia before coming to Belgium and I really liked it. Though Kirsten is now teaching art in Turkey, and I am in San Diego, I reached out and asked her if she would be interested in participating in my little branding project. If I remember correctly, I had a beautiful painting scanned and in my in box the next day.
At that point, I looked at the various styles of beer that I was hoping to brew and there were 7. The next step was to look up Fauna native to Belgium. The first link I clicked on in the results had 7 animals listed. Fate had intervened. I added one extra label for beers that I would try that were not strictly Belgian beers and we had a nice round 8.
This left us with the following (listed in order of strength until the last 2 which are kind of catchalls):

1.
Saison/Biere de Garde – The traditional farmhouse beers made all over Belgium. Usually a lighter beer served to farmers working in the fields. Originally, this was something that would be made in the fall after the harvest and then would sit fermenting until spring planting time. I chose the owl because this was the first beer I successfully got to bottle condition (the process of natural carbonation) and “owl” was my daughter’s first word.

2.

Patersbier – A lighter beer that monks brewed for their own consumption back when monks actually did the brewing instead of contracting it out to lay people. Not generally sold to the public outside of the monastery. For instance, Chimay Dorée was almost never found outside the monastery walls until 2013. The brewery has been in operation since 1862. I have been telling people that part of the reason I chose the pheasant was that I found out (through Kirsten) that pheasants are not actually native to Europe but were imported from Asia just as Christianity was not native to Europe but was imported from the middle east but truthfully I didn’t find that out until later and the true reason is that it was the last animal left after I had assigned all of the other beers.

3.

Blonde – The basic Belgian beer and probably what most people are talking about when they say they love “Belgian beer”. Though there was a case to be made for using the fox for the monks’ beer just as there was a case to be made for using the owl. However, I chose to use it for the blonde ale because it’s a blonde and there’s a tremendously juvenile, obvious, bad joke there for those willing to think about it. It makes me smile …

4.

.

Dubbel – At the time I was making these decisions, a badger took up residence in the tunnels of a Scottish castle and would not be dislodged for love or money. He was eventually lured out but not until he had done considerable damage to the place. A dubbel is a little dark, a little strong … had to be the badger.

5.

Tripel – Stronger than a dubbel but light in color like a Blonde. I consider the triple to be the noblest of Belgian beers. It’s quite strong, but not at all harsh. The most famous example is probably the Chimay Cinq Cents which is among the best beers in the world. I thought a noble stag would be a good symbol for a noble beer.

6.
Quad – Dark as a stout, seriously strong. A quad can take up to a year to make properly. This was the third animal to beer assignment I made (after the owl and the deer) and it was probably the easiest. The quad had to be the boar.
When I was growing up, we went canoeing in the Ardennes in the fall which used to be the season for hunting boar (the population has gotten so out of hand that they are allowed to be hunted year round these days). We were admonished to steer clear of wild boar as they had a penchant for tearing through anything and everything, including 5th graders, with their death dealing tusks. So terrifying, ferocious, and threatening were these demon spawned pig cousins, we were told, that even with all their guns, knives, and crossbows, hunters stalked boar from the safety of platforms set well up in the trees far from the slashing scimitar like tusks. Needless to say, had we been camping overnight, there would not have been a lot of sleeping going on.
Later in life, I was taken to a restaurant outside Charleston, Virginia that served only game. I had the most amazing boar chops with boar sausage. So amazing, in fact, that it inspired a dream (still unfulfilled) of returning to Belgium to hunt boar somer crisp autumn. A quad is like a boar, strong, dark, super tasty, and it will sneak up on you and kick your ass if you aren’t careful.

7.

Lambic/kriek/geuze/etc. – These are fruit beers that usually rely on the addition of odd yeasts that most brewers would consider to be infections. They have a fruity taste but also are far more tart than traditional beers because of the odd yeasts. I always think of these beers as cute so I thought they should be represented by the cutest of the animals available: the bunny. Of course, my opinion changed as soon as I tried to make one and realized they are a lot stronger than they taste. This fell nicely in line with the realization that the rabbit native to Belgium is the Géant de Flandres, the largest rabbit in the world reaching up to 22 pounds. Not quite Harvey, but about twice the size of the next largest breed. Our monster bunny is hanging around in the hop field. I have read that rabbits will actually not eat hops but it seemed like a fun confluence between beer related flora and Belgian fauna so we’ll pretend he’s just hanging around there stopping to smell the flowers.

8.
Finally, I needed a label for my “experimental” beers. Basically any beer I tried that was outside the Belgian canon. For this, I chose the raven. And since I need to be reminded that non Belgian styles are heretical (I kid!), I asked Kirsten for a foreboding raven, wings spread, sitting on a cross, in front of the full moon. The Raven was also a bar we used to go to in high school so it worked well.

And now…
At this point, the brewing is becoming more than a hobby and I am considering some possibilities for moving forward with some kind of beer related business. San Diego, where I currently live, is awash with breweries but we only have one of the 120 or so that specializes in Belgian beers and they have veered off into the weird experimental realm of flavored beers (earl grey infused pale ales, guava beer, etc.). I think it’s partially because they are too close to Los Angeles. San Diego is known for it’s India Pale Ales but so many people lament the fact that that is all they can find to drink, that I think there is a significant market for something new and fresh.
The blatantly obvious answer is a brewery. But the other possibility that springs from the Belgian tradition is a brasserie. A true brasserie would be made up of a smallish brewery with an attached casual restaurant. Or a casual restaurant with a smallish brewery attached, depending on your personal priorities.
There is a myth in Belgium about a guy named Cambrinus. It’s a long, involved story about a young man who makes a deal with the devil to get revenge on the girl who spurned him. He becomes a famous musician but then makes a fortune when he starts making beer to quench the thirst fo the villagers who are compelled to dance when he plays for them. He is proclaimed the King of Beer with a crown and everything (yes, Anheiser Busch stole that from the Belgians). Eventually, the devil comes to collect but Cambrinus has already died and had his soul turned into a beer barrel so the devil can’t find him. It makes very little sense and the ending sounds a bit like the way I used to close out stories for my daughter when she should already have been asleep.
Thus, there are two final painting pieces of the puzzle remaining.
First would be a painting of the devil (I’m thinking a satyr – torso and face of a man with the legs and horns of a goat – rather than the weird guy with a cape, and a pitchfork of my catholic school youth). He is standing in a medieval town square by a stack of barrels looking pissed off.  One of the barrels has a crown on the side.
The second would be a simple painting of that barrel with the crown on it.