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.
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!
