This post is a part of the 2015 New Beer Every Day Beer Diary Challenge, #ottbeerdiary. Over the course of 2015, I will be trying a new beer every day. Please read the background in the link above, and enjoy reading about the most recently tasted beers below. If you’d like to join the challenge as well, let me know in the comments below, and be sure to check out Grown-up Travel Guide and his #grownupbeerdiary, where Andy Higgs came up with the diary format in use below. You can catch up on all of our posts as part of the challenge under the tag ottbeerdiary.
Day 73: March 14, 2015
Diary entry:
Today was an early morning. Much earlier than I normally would have liked.
No, nothing wrong…just Cantillon is having their public open brewing day today from 6:30 AM, and I wanted to attend. But no…I didn’t wake at 5AM to be there for the 6:30 opening. I still slept in until almost 8AM, and made it to the brewery before 10.
As always, the Cantillon Public Brewing Days are a great time. Steampunk meets Brewing, as the brewery is still using much of the original equipment they’ve been using since the early 1900’s! It’s so great seeing such great beers still being made with such traditional equipment and methods.
Another great thing about this event was that I managed to wind up on a very small tour group, just two other people, so we had very personal attention from Flosh, our tour guide. He’s the same guide I had on my last public brewing day tour in November, 2012, so I was very glad to see he was the one again. Very informative and entertaining! But the small size of the group would up leading to a few beers after the tour, as we shared some bottles in the brewery. This joined us up with some other Americans there, and a perfect opportunity to try and share up almost every bottle they had on offer, which led to some great finds!
In exchange for this opportunity, I led an impromptu tour four two new friends I met today to some other cult-status Belgian Breweries, such as 3 Fonteinen, Westvleteren and De Struis. Which resulted in a quick stop on the outskirts of Ghent to score a bottle of the extremely hard-to-obtain 3 Fonteinen Framboise! Looking forward to getting to try that one at some point…
A mad rush back into Brussels to get one of my tour mates onto a train to London, and then a check-in to Hotel Miraveaux, which will be the venue for the 2015 European Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference before a few beers in town to check out Moeder Lambic and a couple of the other bars well known for their beer selections. Was most impresses by Booze ‘n’ Blues from the ones I stopped into…
The Beer:
Name: Pineau d’Aunis
Style: Lambic
Producer: Brasserie Cantillon
Alcohol content: 6.0%
Bottle size: 0.75l
Purchased from: Brasserie Cantillon
One of the best aspects of visiting the brewery at Cantillon is that sometimes, they have special blends available for tasting that are not ever going to be distributed. These beers will only ever be available at the brewery for limited periods of time.
Today, perhaps timed with Sint Lamvinus still being available in the brewery, there were two other red-wine-grade blended lambics available, one with Pineau d’Aunis and the other with Carignan. My beer of the day is the Pineau d’Aunis, mainly because I’ve never heard of it before!
This is a tannic lambic, with peppery and fruity flavors and a dry finish.
Pinot d’Aunis is primarily grown in the Loire Valley, which has always been a favorite of mine for their Cabernet Franc, so it’s no wonder I enjoyed this one!
