Last week I took a trip to Belgium with two of my friends who were visiting from Seattle. We found an amazing little beer pub in Antwerp called Der Kulminator. This place deserves a blog post of it's own, as I believe it may be the holy grail of excellent beer. But for now let me devote this post to the very best beer I have ever tasted, and likely ever will taste in my life.
Der Kulminator has been run by a husband and wife team since the late 1970's and they have been storing up and aging beer since they opened. On their menu, which has about 500 listed beers, was a Chimay from 1982 which Nate decided he was going to try. At 18 euro, I was thinking it may be a bit steep a price and didn't get one of my own, but I had a few sips of his and it turned out to be more than worth it.
Now i knew that aged wines get better. I've tested out that theory, and it's true. I had also heard the same of fine beer, but never tried it until the Chimay. The bartender, the wife, was pretty excited to open the bottle, she had to pull out a special opener to carefully take off the bottle cap, which had started to rust slightly. She lovingly poured it into a nice wide Chimay glass and encouraged us to let it sit for a little and enjoy the smell. Indeed, it was like a blooming flower that smelled like all the most excellent scents of beer, the malt, the spice, the sweetness and a hint of honey-foamyness on the air. The taste following the nose was absolutely superb.
I think the best way I can describe it is to ask you to consider the taste of Chimay, and then imagine every element of that taste being heightened and perfected. For my philosophically minded friends, consider this being the true form of a beer, of which before then I had only experienced the shadow.
Lest you think that what I was tasting was simply in my mind...we got a bottle of new Chimay to compare side by side. The old one really was better by leaps and bounds.
You can see the dust of 26 years storage still on the bottle.
