Some beers are promoted to taste better ‘fresh’. These tend to be the bland, tasteless factory produced rubbish.
On the other hand, some beers are better with age. My stash of Westvleteren is aging well at the moment with a case of 8 being just over 3 years old now.
Some bars feature aged beers – Kulminator in Antwerp have a fantastic list. Not so well advertised is the famous Delirium Cafe in Bruxelles – they have a number of older beers on their menu but are not advertised so – you just have to pick a beer that isn’t that common and hope it’s an older one.
This leads me on to a ‘find’ that Filip Geerts from Belgian Beer Board discovered. He was visiting the abbey at Westvleteren to collect some beer and stumbled across a case of really old Westvleteren 12. He managed to procure a couple of bottles.
After drinking one, he presented the other to a Vintage Tasting Event at Brugge Bier Festival the other week – more details here.
I was at the festival – if only I’d seen the info on his blog in enough time! *cry*!
