Het Anker, Mechelen Belguim (Independent)
Blonde Ale 8.0% ABV Brown Glass Bottle 330ml
$3.10 (Canadian) At LCBO.
Well first off. I must apologise for the delay in the new post. Many things have been happening here at Pint Jockey Headquarters. Last week I took down Pint Jockey's central computer "Prometheus" and installed a new hard drive. Just over a year old and I have discovered that 500 Gig... is not nearly enough space. (Who said the average home computer user would never need more than 64kb?) My shiny new energy efficient 2 Terrabyte drive arrived and I blissfully set about ripping out the old one and installing all my programmes again. Well not exactly. Two solid nights of no sleep, a lot of tinkering and a lot of watching little progress bars later, I finally managed to restore order and glory to old Prometheus. Throw in a couple of long shifts at work and you have a groggy and grumpy Pint Jockey instead of the happy-go-lucky one. But now I can revel in the fact that I have a computer with more disk space than ALL of the other computers I have owned (including expansions and rebuilds) put together. And yes I am including my much beloved and dearly departed Commodore VIC-20 in there. Poor sad creature of the PC world that got left behind. I calculated that it would take 697,739.3 VIC-20s to add up to the amount of hard drive space in Prometheus right now. That would be around half of all the VIC-20s ever made and sold.
Enough reminiscing, let's drink some beer.
Het Anker means "the Anchor" in Flemish, and the brewery traces it's origins, in one form or another to 1369 but the beer we are tasting tonight was not brewed until 1960. The Anchor Brewery's Beer making traditions com from the Beguine sisters a group of nuns that adopted a lifestyle of self sufficiency growing all of their own vegetables and wheat, and making their own bread cheese and beer (because one works up a mighty thirst...). in 1471 four years after touring the town of Mechelen and visiting with the Beguine Sisters, Duke of Burgundy Charles the Bold decreed that the sisters would not have to pay excise on the beer they made and consumed for themselves.
So the brewery flourished and grew over the years until the First World War. When the Germans seized Flanders it was determined that only one brewery in the area would remain open. The brewery owners drew lots and Het Anker lost. Chevalier Marin remained open and Het Anker and the others had their copper kettles dismantled, melted down and used for the Kaiser's war machine. After the war Het Anker began to rebuild, and when war struck again they survived by producing a beer called Zero-huit. A low alcohol (0.8%) beer, which is all that the Nazis would allow to be produced. Charles Van Breedham the president of the brewery surreptitiously employed far more workers than was ever necessary to keep local townspeople from being rounded up and taken to Nazi labour camps. After the war the brewery was rejuvenated again. New Kettles were built and installed in 1947 and are still in use today.
Onto tonight's beer:
Dusty gold in colour with an ample long lasting, fluffy white head made up of medium bubbles. Beer is cloudy with white sediment. Orange, clove and coriander on the nose. Bright wheat notes lots of clove herbal, bitter hops. Dusty, woody notes from the yeast. Light clover honey mixed with a bite of astringency on the finish.
Impressions: Fail, So-so, Pass, Exceptional
Cost: 5/6 PASS
Colour: 5/6 PASS
Beer Style: 6/6 EXEPTIONAL
Re-Order: 5/6 PASS
Experience: 5/6 PASS
Final Thoughts:
This is a solid Belgian blonde ale which I enjoyed drinking. The alcohol does go straight to the head though... and for it's relatively cheap price it is a beer one can easily come back to.
Cheers
CJT
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