The joy of organs 5 March 2011
Posted by cooperatoby in beer, Uncategorized.Tags: beer, museum, organ
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I’ve discovered a new joy in organs – of the street, café or dance variety.
Enthralled children at the Museum Speelklok in Utrecht
As we were shown round by Jelle Verhoeks and Alberic Godderis, I had a sudden flashback. I remembered how once day in the late 80s I’d set out on a beer expedition to Beersel, a village southwest of Brussels. We tracked down the Oud Beersel pub on the outskirts, which had a reputation for its home-blended gueuze. We installed ourselves in the middle of the room, at a party table encircled by a round bench. As we supped our sour beer, the landlord walked over to a contraption built into the wall, opened it up, pressed a button and played us a rousing tune. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but now I realise I was privileged to be listening to what was probably Belgium’s last café organ, a Mortier Orchestrion. The pub is now a flower shop and the organ has been sold to an American collector. Happily the brewery nextdoor was reopened in 2006.
Until quite recently an organ grinder toured the back streets of St-Gilles a couple of times a year, but nowadays it’s quite rare to find an organ, a Dutch trademark, on Holland’s streets. There are plenty of collectors so they are no longer being broken up. But it’s a real shame that such uplifting and essentially public instruments should be hidden away in private and never heard.
Holland in miniature 17 October 2009
Posted by cooperatoby in beer, tram.Tags: beer, museum, Netherlands, trams
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A fortnight ago, in perfect autumn weather, we visited the Nederlands Openluchtmuseum near Arnhem. it has everything: a tramline to get around on, a brewery and even its complement, a street urinal.
Of course it covers all the Dutch stereotypes: it is dotted with windmills of various types, and has a steam-driven dairy where they will sell you various sorts of gouda. It has a reconstituted pond out of the Zaanstreek (strangely out of place up there in the Veluwe), with a green weatherboard house from Marken and a white drawbridge and a hand-hauled rope-guided ferry. You can shop in the bakery and the cavernous sweetshop, and sit and eat poffertjes or try riding a penny-farthing.
There’s an appelstroop manufactory, a piggy-bank collection, an Indonesian house, a maze…
The whole thing strikes exactly the right balance between its high-minded educational mission, national nostalgia and commerce. You can even get there by trolleybus. It makes a perfect day out.
Raven Mad – pub co-op owes its birth to TV 8 October 2009
Posted by cooperatoby in beer, cooperative.Tags: beer, co-operative
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Amazing to see the media industry creating the “reality” it is more conventionally supposed to report on – but this time with a result we can approve of. In February this year, production company TwoFour announced that it would like to film a series about a community saving its own pub. “Twofour will work with the current owners to encourage the local community to muck in and run the pub for one month, with support from our expert landlord and presenter, Jay Smith, who owns a number of successful bars in the north of England. Everyone involved will be trained in all the necessary skills to run their pub,” it said.
And hey presto by September, the inhabitants of Llanarmon-yn-Ial, near Mold, Denbighshire, had bought the Raven and formed a co-operative guarantee company – Raven Mad – to run it.
A TwoFour spokesman quoted in the pub trade newspaper The Morning Advertiser, said: “With so many rural pubs closing around the country, Twofour is delighted to have the opportunity to help save some of them. The precedent of community run pubs has proved successful, and hopefully this show will encourage more to go down this route. We wish The Raven every success.”
After standing empty for three months, the historic pub was auctioned in July, but no one would bid the £250,000 guide price. However Raven Mad has now secured a six-year lease. The pub reopened on 30th August.
Co-operative spokesman Doug Macpherson recognised the encouragement the TV company had given: “The village is one of few remaining with a shop, post office, school and pub. Villagers were very saddened to see the pub close but, like many other communities, felt powerless to do anything about it. The offer from the television company has enabled the community to come together with the support of an experienced mentor to re-open the pub.”
Good news about Dutch beer 29 May 2009
Posted by cooperatoby in beer.Tags: beer, cycling, Netherlands, recycling
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Before and after a sip of Texelse Stormbock
The harbinger of unexpected good fortune was when we took a break in Schoorl, an outpost of Texelse Tripel. I never knew the island had a brewery, and certainly not one aware enough to be brewing a tripel. The execrable offering at the Den Helder ferry terminal – canned Heineken or canned Heineken to a captive market – how do they get away with it? – was extremely discouraging. But sure enough, the Texelse Bierbrouwerij opened up 10 years ago in a disused dairy just outside Oudeschild, the island’s main port. It brews 400,000 litres a year in the form of nine excellent bottle-conditioned beers, from witbier to Stormbock (9.5%), which are widely available on the island but hardly anywhere else – 85% of output is drunk there. The two bocks won 3rd place at last year’s Dutch bokbierfest.
The malt is island-grown, but oddly enough is exported to Belgium to be malted. Another oddity is that they use only brand-new bottles, and let the mega-breweries do their recycling for them (a 10-cent bottle deposit is legally required – unlike in Britain where the good old recyclable London Brewers’ Standard pint bottle seems to have quite disappeared over the last decade).
The place also makes a tourist industry out of brewery tours – they cost 7 euros and come complete with jokes about how drunk the sheep get when they eat the spent grains (there are 16,000 sheep on Texel, a few more than the number of humans). And of course there’s the proeflokaal or brewery tap. Beer gardens are a fine invention, and on this sunny weekend, it was bliss to taste (part of) the Texelse range in the yard behind the brewery.
The IJbrouwerij‘s garden forms this blog’s masthead in case you hadn’t recognised it – and it now has a competitor!
