By Andy, Beverage Manager in Bushwick, Brooklyn
LOVE FOR THE BEER
I love beer. Have for a long time. And I love sharing what I love with our customers, many of whom love beer as much as I do.
Welcome to my first experience with beer.
I was 9 years old in a small rural town in central Pennsylvania. My brother had a friend over for the night and my parents had evening plans. You can imagine what that meant. We were bad, bad boys; we found an 18-pack of Coors Light that my father shouldn’t have left in the fridge in the garage and got really drunk, so drunk that my brother’s friend swung his pants around his ankles and jumped around pretending to be a frog. Hey, we were young; what can you expect! It was a marvelous feeling, of laughing and not knowing why. My first high . . . .
It doesn’t end badly either. I obviously liked it; whether it was the cheap 12 pack of Bud I had when I was broke to that magnificent angels-f**king-in-your-mouth experience of the Belgian quad that I paid $35 dollars for, it’s all good. Good enough for me to base a career on. That good.
CURRENT PREMIUM DRAFT
Here’s one I found true love for.
It’s St Bernardus Abt 12, A Belgium Abbot – Quad Ale (10.5% ABV).
This style of beer is traditionally saved for the most senior monk of the monastery, the Abbot. “Quad” simply means that sugar was pitched into the fermenting beer four times, making it quadruple fermented. Like most beers of this style, the color is dark brown. The flavor is amazing. Big malt base with a little bit of dark fruit flavor from the Belgian high gravity yeast. This beer was fermented openly. Having no cover on a shallow fermenter allows natural air-borne yeast to cultivate in the beer, instead of being added. Really cool process.
Another fact about this: I’M NOT GOING TO HAVE THIS ONE, BUT A COOL FACT INVOLVING ST BERNARDUS –
Westveletren Abt 12 – Consider by most beer snobs to be the best beer in the world.
Westveletren is an monastery five miles away from St. Bernardus. The monks at the abbey control the beer they make so strictly that Belgian citizens have to call months in advance in order to procure the beer, at which time, their names and purchases are recorded in a database. Belgian citizens are only allowed to purchase six cases of 12 11.2oz bottles a year. Non-Belgian citizens are allowed only one case. The story goes that 50 years or so ago, this ultra secret, illegal to resell recipe escaped down the road to a little brewery called St. Bernardus. 
Could St. Bernardus Abt 12 be the best beer in the world?
More on hoppy happenings next week.
*(ABV = Alcohol By Volume)
