Belgian Beers and Cycling with Rob Haden-Smith

Life is just better when we share things we like. In this case, cycling and beer. There probably isn’t a country that is as fanatical about cycling and beers as the Belgians. I invited my friend Rob over to share some of the beers he is importing into South Africa. You can order them from us and the “Milkman” will deliver.

Beers tasted are the Kwaremont Blond and the Petrus Aged Red

[Music] awesome good day and welcome to extra fresh one of the rare video appearances that we do but it’s special today because i got my good friend robert and smith with me and rob’s brought us some beers which we’ll talk about a little bit they’re also available in our next belgium mix crate so today we’re gonna i thought drop we’ll just like we both love cycling we both love beer we love a good time and i thought i’ll bring you on and just like um talk about the beer cycling um i think a good place to start is is where we’ve met yeah i like it evan thanks for having me on the show um yeah it’s uh well if any country combines uh our two passions beer and cycling it’s probably belgium yeah um yeah we met cycling um crazy waking up at five in the morning riding up hills um but yeah i just love the fact that uh belgium is a nation that sort of holds both cycling and beers up there they’re pretty hardcore works because if you look at the cyclocross which is in their winter now it’s mud and wet and hot cold their beers i think reflect that to a certain extent because they don’t have a lot of two percent three percent beers they’re all double triple quads um aged six percent to 10 12 you know it’s it’s what seems like quite a passionate group of people very passionate and they also have different beers for different seasons so certain beers like the petrus are drunk a lot in winter and other refreshing beers in summer so you know these things are seasonal too and sort of coincide with the cycling season too i think before we continue too much cycling i’m going to pour us a beer and i think we should start with the coromont so while i pour it would you mind opening that for us well i pour it so maybe just tell us a bit about guaramont um this is this is linked to cycling but what makes it what it is you know why is it so special so corolla for for this particular brewery is quite a quite a nubia well new as in it’s 10 10 years old or so and uh it’s like a baby it’s a baby in belgium like a brewery that’s only 10 years old it’s like no the brewery’s older the better the beer is their biggest brand is petrus and they do have a blonde in the petrous range called petrus blonde but coromont is one that identifies with cyclists um you know in cycling besides the grand tours there are five big races called the five monuments and uh one of them is the touroflanders um otherwise known as deronda or hollanders moisture turaflon is about 240 k’s okay and why it’s so iconic is it’s they’re about 23 or 24 cobblestone hills uh otherwise referred to as hellington and um made of this yeah cobble but they they very steep some of them 23 gradient and it’s always raining so guys struggle to get traction up there and um what’s interesting is that the the quorum on this the eau de cora monster climb it’s the second last climb in the race and it’s of often the decisive one so the winner normally launches his decisive attack there and then there’s one more climb but the kind of damage is done there so so yeah the brewery sort of you know even the glass has got a got a cyclist on it here and the beautiful cobblestone base oh that’s quite so and even the sort of brand manager for coromont is an ex-cyclist he won one of the other big races again to evoke him um and yeah they sponsor cyclocross you’ll see on the podium of cyclocross races they’ve got a huge paramount class yeah and i think do the winner drink out of a it’s like a 10 litre huge glass giant one of these it’s brilliant well listen cheers thanks for coming and sharing the knowledge and experience it’s great it’s a blonde style beer and it’s nice because it’s it’s it’s mildly boozy um but not overly so it’s a blonde it’s got a little bit of sweetness nice mouthfeel i i particularly like this form slightly colder weather and i think when you do cycle across in europe in in their winter it’s pretty cold i think this would go down well the other interesting thing is that the alcohol percentage is 6.6 which is the exact gradient of the great hill so the average gradient of the coromont i think it’s about two point three k’s long um is six point six percent which doesn’t sound that steep but given that it’s on cobblestones and very slippery yeah actually quite a tough climb and it comes late in the race um the other motto in belgium a big thing in cycling is this thing called the corpmine and the corkman’s the guy who pulls on the front because for those that don’t know cycling the guy on the front is taking the wind on his chest and doing a lot more work that’s all the odd work yeah so i guess the the brand with with quaremont is for the copman the guy who takes the lead not a follower you know and that’s really it’s a brave man’s beer basically well it’s phenomenal i’ve actually dug into quite a few after i got a crate from you and it’s nice coming home from work and just having one with dinner you know like having one or two of these it’s just hits the spot sometimes you get a bit tired of just all the light beers around and sometimes you want something with a bit more and body and character yeah i think in this case story so so that’s that’s that is phenomenal i actually have prepared a couple of questions and i’m just going to write them down here so rob as you probably picked up on us like a walking encyclopedia of cycling it’s incredible how do you remember like every race name like this was snowing and this i i just oh i don’t know if you’re just at school could you remember like the history stuff like yeah i was i was good at stuff that interested me funny enough um and you know basically i have a mind for useless information often when it’s important and it doesn’t interest me i have a bad memory but unfortunately for me even if it’s important that it interests me i forget it so i’m very i’m really mad at that so i’m always in awe you can just remember all of this we first time i in 2015 we went with some mates to do the amateur version of the tour flounders and we had this great idea that halfway up the coromont hill we turn and go to a pub and actually drink a coromont and then ride the last dedicated and we thought you know that would be quite cool to stop grab a quarant drink aquarium and then finish the quarantine to the last part of paterburg and ride into odinada but of course it was raining and cold and miserable and when you’re going up there we just were like we want to get to the finish here and get dry and it’s i mean there’s a lot of breweries in belgium and belgium is not big like how big is belgium smaller than the free state yeah that’s geographically small but there’s sort of two main there’s the flemish beers and the walloons or the french-speaking belgians and the flemish are the ones who speak well it’s at that version of dutch yeah but they both the one thing they really do agree on is beers so you know in the ardennes around towns like liege there’s other breweries so you’ve got the two the two you know um walloon beers or flemish beers but they everyone likes them all they they agree on it so it’s quite cool aged red i read up on this you actually sent me a youtube video and that guy tasted it it’s quite funny i mean it’s cheesy but it’s funny and and in a weird way this signifies a lot about belgian beers for me from my perspective as a brewer because as a brewer we when we learn about beer and beer styles and for those who don’t know there’s like the bjcp is like a style guide for brewers that says this is a larger this is a pulsar this is a parallel this is a quad um and it generally links to countries so you’ll have english beers belgium beers german beers it’s like they’re real big that’s where it basically started and they kind of refined the categories and the styles and then america would go like jump onto it and like reinvent it in a lot of ways like ikea is like such a big category it’s become sort of america’s signature kind of beer ipas and stouts like heavy beers big beers massive flavor explosions and then we all know the story about reinhardt’s kapot and having no extra ingredients and that’s from the germans and they they came and said look you’re not allowed to add anything other than barley water and hops they didn’t know yeast exists back then buster only discovered it slightly later so it was the gods that fermented the beer um and but the bell the belgium was completely different in that they didn’t give it [ __ ] they just added stuff and made stuff they use sugar they use and in this case i’m coming to petrus is cherries and it’s weird this is not a creek so a very well made creek is typically a lambic style that will have a wild fermentation it will go into barrels we’ll ate up to three four plus years you can age really well you can celerit this was brutus almost like a clean beer style it wasn’t just a wild fermentation it’s 85 percent of a double uh brown beer and 15 percent of aged pale ale yeah it’s the same age it’s their beer so a food is is like a giant oak um like an oak barrel you’d use for wine but i think the definition has to be over four times the size yeah a fruit is huge so it’s all yeah it’s made out of oak and it’s it’s massive so the brewery used to be known as bavik brewery because it’s in the town of pavikra it’s not called the prabhandara and um yeah they they food a beer is a they’re called aged pale and this beer is basically a blend and it has 15 aged pale the other 85 there old brown which is another style of belgian beer and then they put cherries in and they age it for two years so it’s quite incredible so they aged on cherries for two years for tears and these food is they used to have eight and now they’ve become such a specialist at food hbo that they’ve now got 36 footers wow and some of those original foods came from the alsace region in france which was used for making white wine and then interestingly they’ve even got some that came from normandy that were old calvaros which is an apple brandy food is yeah and it’s quite incredible this because i’m also not a big fan of the sweet quick style beers yeah when i heard when i heard this had cherries i’m like i was a bit weary but exactly there’s some there’s some commercial versions that are very artificial and too sweet too sweet too artificial not balanced um yeah and i guess as a beer geek myself i tend to steer clear of those where is this petrous aged red you know that so they call petrus the sour beer range yeah and um the balance is sweet and sour is just perfect it hits the right and i find it an amazing bit it is quite strong um eight point five eight point five percent so you can’t have too many of them but it’s you would never think it’d say you’d never guess it like it’s from memory it’s white it’s less it’s less boozy than the quarre bond yeah it tastes less boozy but i think it’s masked so well because it’s so layered it is it’s it’s it’s a mild tart it’s not that it’s sour or is it acidic it’s like it’s a very slight sourness it’s very slightly taut it’s very layered it’s got a complex sweetness it’s not like a artificial sweet note and the cherries is brighter on the nose like it’s incredible upright how bright the cherries and i mean it’s like a dessert this like i would it’s in a weird way it’s funny when we first went to to belgium my wife’s not a beer lover at all and our belgian friends bought her a 750 mill flemish red very much like this one yes and she had it in the champagne because it’s sort of in the champagne style bottle with the cork and all those head and such and she she just said this is the most incredible thing i don’t even like beer yes you should this is even better than what japanese you can think of belgium beers as in what we are south africans grew up with as beer yeah like if you think casa laga that is so far removed from what this is and to to give everything like perspective that’s why the bjcp or the style guide it’s got almost close to 100 styles of beer and we just don’t know these beers if you grow up in south africa drinking just beer next to the braai probably like castle castle like black label be one of the beers you grew up with and this is so far different this you can’t even say this is close to wine because it’s not it’s just something completely um standing on its own feet developed over hundreds of years yeah and something that’s quite interesting about belgium beers is that they actually brought religion into it with the monks yeah so jesus did some wine the belgians they made beer and it’s incredible that none of these are trappist beers no no no so the tropospheres had to have certain definitions there’s i think this maybe 16 6 or 16 official trappist beers but some of the technicalities were that the monks were not allowed to dedicate more time to brewing than playing so it could never get if it became too commercial that it was all about the beer that’s not a proper traffic and so guards for that to be important like and the iconic one is obviously west veteran where i think they had a one truck that drove down and delivered the beer into the town and the head monk said you spending too much time with spare thing sell the truck and they sold the truck in like the 1950s and now you literally have to walk up to the monastery to get your case and almost show you a utility bill that you live in that time to get your case that’s that old supply and demand thing and yeah yeah so so trapper’s beer it’s got a brew under it’s got to be brewed under the supervision of monks yeah and and i think within the walls of a monastery yeah okay so then i think you can call it a trappist um i just gotta check that because some of these breweries now if you look at la trap it’s quite big they’re getting bigger they’re quite big they brew way more beer than we can brew here like it’s incredible so those monks are they crafty and uh but i think you know what praying and drinking beer can’t be too bad well i’m not sad i mean out of interest this whole food i mean certainly the broadbandera is one of the leaders of of food style beers i think there’s the extra fermentation that happens yeah in the foodo when they put the cherries in the net yeah and i mean the others like the guys who do rodenbak there are a few but are there anyone in south africa doing um you know in terms of like you is anyone doing food beers here there is actually devil speak okay so signal hill brewery or they will speak brewing the cape they’ve got food they play with it’s called the afrofunk facility okay it’s it really is a mobile like it’s like uh for us brewers it gives us a bit of excitement when we see that you know having those kind of toys it is extremely expensive and it’s a lot of care that you need to take to brew beer and that style i also think that it’s hard to find the market here in south africa yeah you can really appreciate that like do you explain to people that your beer is going to cost you 50 60 70 rand because it took three four years to make a lot can go wrong a lot can go wrong you can have the wrong organisms get into the system then it’s done if you get oxygen coming into the system then it’s done or too much oxygen so in a weird way those footers actually allow a little bit of oxygen to get through the wood but it’s like micro it’s like so controlled in a weird way um so devil speakers brought out i think vinder saizon is probably the one they’re most known for okay and i hope i remember this correctly and it’s also a blend between grapes and and beer okay so devil speaks done that as well where they take grapes and beer i know there’s been a few breweries who do it in south africa i know rory from aegir project um close to the chapman’s peak pass so he does uh once or twice a year he also does all this blend sort of takes some great must fermented with words in a barrel okay and make some limited edition beers yeah we got we got a petra’s coming in late jan called petrus pulled over okay so that’s in bordeaux yeah it’s got a bordeaux um buddha costs and uh and would we get some of that for extra fresh yes for sure yeah awesome loyal customers and then i mean obviously they’re quite sophisticated bears so it’s not for everyone but yeah i think you must see a lot of progress in the beer connoisseurs here you know advancing it’s nice to be able to offer some different stuff i think sometimes it’s about getting home and just spoiling yourself yeah and treating yourself i think that’s the one thing i’ve taken away from 2021 is we brewed a range of different beers this year we added some limited editions and i got into that one i can’t wait to get home and drink that beer yeah you know where you get so used to you know we’ve got lager and even our payload and even though they’re all good you just get used to it but it’s nice going home like would it be kwaraman today would it be petras would it be a trap would it be a vice or a doomfill or you know it’s nice having that and i can see that especially through our customers and obviously thank you so much for all the support this year and yesterday and today’s deliveries that we’re not quite a lot of these beers went out that’s going to be interesting yeah and i’m sure that the the guys who the bikes are fresh a lot of them really appreciate getting something special you know i like what you were saying about a special occasion beer because um we we’ve got one coming in called 1894 which is their flagship only in a seven fifth given year and it’s 1894 it’s just that’s that’s all that’s on the bottom that’s the year that the brewery started okay um and it’s but it’s only in the 750 and it’s super special and i was thinking of myself in saliva you know you’ve got a dinner party what do you take a bottle of wine yeah you don’t know like giving a beer is sort of too cheap but in belgium the castle very high in 750 more beards as good as a what is it’s going to be north of 130 grand yeah so it’s about wine price but super super special yeah and even even myself i’ll i’ll crack it for a big cycling race or a birthday birthday or something cool but not just it’s not every day because i guess once you pop the cork yeah you gotta have the whole 750. well but you share it at least we know how to do that in south africa um we do have one thing that we still have to achieve between the two of us or not we don’t have to achieve it we need somebody in belgium to achieve it is to win a freaking significant sighting race so that we can have our best fit and twelve yeah we’ve had a waste later in 12 and we keep bringing it up and all we said we’ll have a flemish winner we of a big race has to be one of the five monuments or the olympics or world champs yeah and wildfire has come close and he’s come second so many times and the west return goes back so i don’t know maybe we need to wait for our birthdays actually i actually had a bride at one place and i was restocking the fridge and i was just like carefully hiding at the back so nobody accidentally opens it because that’s also that is very limited and i think that beer has been voted basically in the world a couple of times yeah it was barbarater and you know it’s an old supply and demand thing they were there were stories of people paying up to 100 us dollars for for one sort of 330 yeah and there’s no label on it there’s literally just uh the the glass like the bottle’s got like a little collar yeah and then on the cat it says 310.25 and i look forward to it so hopefully next year if if what fun art can hear us out there like brew win something so we can i mean what i’d love to see i mean what’s quite interesting with the belgian culture is that you always put the right beer in the right glass so it’s true and there’s so many different styles these chalices these goblets there’s tulips um there’s even something like this juice yeah that’s the one called quack it’s yeah actually it’s held by wooden frames exactly and i know if you go to that anchor in cape town you have to give them your shoe yeah before they give you a glass because the oaks would just want to steal those so i mean glass is like this is the teku this is more american or stout style beers but i just love it and hopefully next year we as a brewer can get some glassware in it’s hard to find in south africa so we have to import it which is a challenge hopefully now that we have friends that import stuff from belgium we can get some good classroom and then we can make it available to you so thanks for joining us today you can subscribe to this channel there’s probably only four or five videos a year so if you don’t want to miss them you can subscribe we have a mixed crate of belgian beers on the site on the extra fresh. or my giant website go to extra fresh once you sign in you’ll see there is a belgium mix great so you can let you play with what you want in the crate we’ve got five beers we’ve discussed two today i’m gonna have philip timmerman and actual belgium come and speak to me next um and i think we’re the only ones in the country that do this for you and it’s only limited to extra fresh customers we’re not shipping it to cayetano anyway gotta live in joburg and you gotta be an extra fresh customer so yeah thanks again rob cheers man i always enjoy this chat