The Aperol Spritz: An Old Drink Sold on a New Ratio
Everybody knows the recipe: three parts prosecco, two parts Aperol, one part soda. It is on the bottle, on the posters and in every bar in Europe. It…
Author: Flash Fry
The Estaminet: The Small Brown Room Belgian Beer Was Made For
Belgium has a word for the room where beer actually happens, and it is not brasserie. An estaminet is small, dark, furnished in brown wood, hung with things…
Grand Cru, Reserve, Vintage: What Beer Labels Are Allowed to Promise
Rodenbach Grand Cru. Chimay Grande Réserve. Somewhere on a shelf near them, a Vintage Ale and a Brewer’s Reserve. All four borrow the vocabulary of wine, and on…
Which Breweries Are Actually Trappist? The List Keeps Changing
Search for a list of Trappist breweries and you will be told there are six, or seven, or eleven, depending on which article you land on and when…
Belgian Beer Culture Is on the UNESCO Heritage List. Here Is What That Means.
In December 2016 UNESCO added Belgian beer culture to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, alongside falconry, Neapolitan pizza-making and the Argentine tango. It…
The Espresso Martini: A 1983 Order That Took Forty Years to Land
It is not a martini, it was not called one for its first decade, and the celebrity anecdote everybody repeats about its invention is disputed by the inventor’s…
Manneken Pis: The Statue Brussels Dresses Up and Plumbs Into a Keg
He is sixty-one centimetres tall, he stands on an unremarkable street corner, and the reliable reaction of first-time visitors is that he is much smaller than expected. He…
Why Belgian Beer Costs What It Does
There is a question that answers itself the moment you rephrase it. Belgian beer is not expensive; Belgian beer abroad is expensive. In a Brussels supermarket a bottle…
Barrel-Aged Beer: Two Traditions That Use Wood for Opposite Reasons
Two breweries put beer in an oak barrel. One is trying to make it taste of bourbon and vanilla; the other is trying to let wild organisms turn…
How Beer Is Made: Grain to Glass in Five Steps
Beer is four ingredients and five steps. Everything else — style, colour, strength, whether it tastes of banana or grapefruit or nothing at all — is a decision…