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Pilsner

Tasting Beers – Special Event

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How to Taste Beers

Ginger Beer
A Blissful Bavik Super Pils

On March 12th I ran a beer-tasting event for the Jewish community in Antwerp. My good friends at the Special Belge Taproom hosted the evening and supplied a broad variety of beers on tap.

One of the challenges of arranging a beer tasting is to line up a suitable variety of beers which are good representatives of the different styles. As this was an introduction to beer tasting, the selection had to be more main-stream. While I would have loved to present some sours and lambics, this was not the appropriate forum.

The wonderful pictures are courtesy of a beer loving photographer, Moshe Yonatan.

The Selection on Tap

For a beer tasting where you are explaining to people how to enjoy and savour beers, you have to ensure that the beers are from the best available. When they hear the word beer, a lot of people think of the cheap lagers they see in the supermarkets. They are often unaware of the wide variety of styles and the skill that goes into brewing a beautiful pint. Here was our selection:

  1. Bavik Super Pils 5.2% – Belgium’s only unpasteurized Pilsner beer on tap from de Brabandere
  2. Lupulus Hibernatus 9% – a strong dark beer with an extra flavour
  3. Lachouffe Houblon 9% – a classic American style IPA
  4. Franc Belge 5.2% – a strongly hopped Belgian Amber, a joint venture with De Ranke and Spécial Belge
  5. De Nest SchuppenBoer 8% – A full bodied strong Belgian blonde
  6. Hof ten Dormal Gin Barrel Aged Blonde 12% – A special blonde to finish off the evening.
Jeremy Sulzbacher explaining a Lupulus

Content

As it is difficult to taste 6 beers one after the other without any breaks, we arranged some content for discussion.

Although each beer had an introduction, we looked at some other issues:

  • Judaism and alcohol and its association with life events
  • How beer with hops in the Babylonian Talmud predate hops in Europe by about 500 years
  • Beer in Jewish law and custom
  • Beer’s major contributions to civilisation

The Next Tasting

Quite a few people missed the beer tasting because they had prior commitments, and we hope to arrange more beer tastings in the future.