Tuesday tasting: bike trip beers, part one 14 July 2009 3:17 pm
Posted by Tracy in : food snobbery,geekery,Holland,local food,Netherlands,reviews,taste test,travel , trackbackI learned a new appreciation for lagers on this bike trip in Holland, which is that hoo lady do they ever go down deliciously on a hot, sweaty summer day. In particular, I have never enjoyed a Heineken as much as I did with our rijsttafel dinner in Hoek van Holland — but honestly, my judgment was probably completely ruined that night by all the babi pangang spek. NOM NOM NOM. Anyway. It turns out I’m way too long-winded to write just one post about all the beers I tasted during Bike Trip! Holland! 2009! so I will break things up into shorter posts, organized in chronological order. Our first stop is
Erik de Noorman, Huisbrouwerij Klein Duimpje
This is one of the beers Peter and I picked up on our beer run through Rijpwetering on June 25. In particular, it’s the big one Peter’s loading to the back of the bike in this picture, here:
Oddly, the Landwinkel (full name: Kaasboerderij en Groene Hart Landwinkel Castelijn) sold pretty boxed Klein Duimpje five-bottle samplers for way more than the price of five individual bottles, so we opted to pick out our own sampler and fit it into the bag shown above. The brewery website (including the Erik de Viking page) is in Dutch, but the long story short of it is that Klein Duimpje got started in Hillegom in 1998, after Erik de Viking beer was brewed for the second time. The name Klein Duimpje, by the way, translates to “Little Thumbie,” which is a reference both to the brewery’s small scale and a Dutch fairy tale which I had confused with Tom Thumb until Wikipedia straightened me out but good. (Insert the giant sucking sound of me losing a few hours of my life to online folklore studies.) Enough, you say, what about the beer?
Peter and I shared the big bottle with my brother Piett over dinner the night of our beer run ride, and my dad and Oma had samples, too. Survey said: not bad at all! I failed to take notes, but what I remember was that the beer was a dark, fairly heavy ale, malty with an appealing bitterness, maybe a bit too strong for summertime drinking (further investigations of the label and suchforth suggest Erik is, in fact, a winter beer, and at 9.5 percent alcohol, the brewery’s strongest). On the whole, quite tasty.
Next stop: more from Klein Duimpje, done in semi-blind taste test style. Stay tuned!
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P.S./By the way…
If you like reading about beer, you’ll love my friend Kevin’s Real Beer blog. True!
