Denouement, Part 2

The weekend, spent between Brussels and Leuven, requires a blog entirely of its own. Amongst other famed beer spots, we visited Delirium Cafe, Restobieres, Poechanellekelder, Moeder Lambic, and Brocante. Had it not been for European piety and Sunday closures, we would have added Porte Noire and Bier Circus to that list as well. Alas, one can only get so upset that he got to go to only five famous beer bars instead of seven in Brussels.

Boarding the bus on Monday of week two, I felt a different vibe in the air, and my own feelings were shifting. Though we had four more days of visits ahead of us, everyone was eyeing our return to Munich and the flights back to the US. Beer school was in its final week, and like horses nearing the barn, all of us were feeling anxious to get home.

Adding to the shiftiness, Michael announced that we would be getting our final exam results that morning. To pass the course and earn the brewer's diploma, you had to score an 85% or higher on the final. Scoring between a 50 and 84% allowed you to take an oral exam in Munich. Michael, thanksfully, ended the suspense in short measure, and I learned that I had passed the written final. "We're graduates. That's crazy," John Dykstra said to me later in the day.

Our Monday trek took us across Wallonia, the southern, French-speaking part of Belgium that is also called the Ardennes, to the far eastern corner of the country. Here, in what is called the Vallée des Fées, "Valley of the Fairies," the countryside transitions from the Dutch-like lowlands in Flanders to rolling valleys and lush farmland. It is also home to Brasserie d'Achouffe, a sucessful Belgian microbrewery known in the US as one of the pioneers of the so-called "Belgian IPA."

The brewery takes the local fairy tale lore seriously, it's flagship beer, La Chouffe, means gnome or dwarf in the local Wallonian dialect. There, the brewmaster toured us through their production and bottling facilities, gifted us all with Chouffe glassware, and gave us what was undoubtedly the most bizarre piece of brewery schwag we received the entire trip: a bell-tipped gnome hat.

It seemed oddly appropriate that the final brewery of our final week at school was famous for its interpretation of an American style of beer. Brasserie d'Achouffe's Houblon Chouffe ("Hoppy Gnome") combines American and Noble hops used in North American double IPAs with a Belgian-style trippel. That Belgian brewers would look to American craft beer for inspiration was a point of major affirmation for US brewers, and for both its significance and unique flavor, Houblon Chouffe is a darling of American beer geeks.

That afternoon, we crossed into the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a country that I never expect to have occasion to visit again. It is a nice notch on the belt of a traveler, I suppose, and our visit to the Brasserie Nationale Bofferding was very enjoyable. Their eponymous lager proves that not all light European lagers are created equal: theirs easily topped all the others we had had for drinkability and crispness.
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Our Tuesday visits took us back into Germany to KHS, a company that makes filling machines, and Kieselman, who specializes in valves for breweries. It will be many years before I'm able to purchase or use anything that they make.

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Wednesday and Thursday saw us zigzagging across southern Germany, Switzerland, and Austria as we visited four final breweries, each noteworthy in its own right.

Leaving Freiburg on Wednesday morning, we climbed high into the Black Forest. We pulled in to the parking lot at Rothaus, the highest brewery in Germany, early enough to allow us to have a snowball fight. We saw their stunningly shiny brewhouse, visited their fermentation cellar with over 65 tanks, and sampled both their pilsner and marzen. Mohren, just over the Swiss-Austrian border, was the most reviled brewery we visited, in part due to their racist caricature of a logo. That their beers were dull seemed like karmic justice.

Our final day, spent in and around Salzburg, was spent at the Trumer and Stiegl breweries. Trumer, which operates a North American brewery out of Berkeley, makes the most award-winning pilsner in the world, and Stiegl is the largest brewery in Austria.

The "end is near" effect had really settled in by Thursday morning, and everyone was looking forward to our return to Munich. Indeed, it would have taken divine intervention to get people as excited for a brewery visit on Day 12 of our tour as on Day 1. Thankfully, Trumer gave us just that in the form of our tour guide, Joanna. "This woman is curing my hangover with her enthusiasm," one of my classmates said. "She's got sunshine coming out of her ass."

Joanna's enthusiasm for all things Trumer was contagious. She showed us the beautiful lounge next to their lager fermentation room--where, unusually, they use open fermentation in cylindro-conical tanks--and the "Creative Brewery," where locals can come in and brew their very own batches on a small 1 barrel system.

Stiegl, then, had much to live up to as our final and (only) post-Joanna tour. And their generosity, offering us dinner and numerous halbs in their bierstube made for an appropriate end to the tour.

We returned to Munich that evening. Our stomachs full of two weeks worth of pork, our suitcases weighted down by gifts and beers collected along the way. We had finished the round trip in good style. We were ready to graduate, return home, and brew.