What Am I Supposed To Do With These?

What am I supposed to do with these? Well, drink them is the obvious answer, but it’s not so obvious with one of the beers. At 13% ABV, and packaged in a corked 75cl, screen-printed bottle, Bush – Scaldis Prestige de Nuits is a beer which isn’t going to take any prisoners. Matured in large oak casks, which had previously contained the famous Nuits Saint Georges wine, this special beer then undergoes a further conditioning in the bottle.

I was given the bottle when I visited the Dubuisson Brewery, in the village of Pipaix, in the Belgian province of Hainaut. The visit formed part of the European Beer Bloggers Pre-Conference Excursion, and was the final stop on what proved a packed and very beery day. We had dinner at the restaurant attaché to the brewery, and afterwards (or was it before?), we were shown the cellars beneath the brewery where the beer matures in these impressive oak casks.

The cellars - Dubuisson Brewery

All well and good, and never look a gift horse in the mouth, but there is no way I am going to drink that volume of a 13% beer on my own. My family won’t help, as my wife doesn’t drink and my son is an out and out Stella-drinking “lager lout”. We are not expecting any visitors over Christmas either, so I think the beer will just have to be laid down until a suitable occasion arises.

As for the other beer; well that too was a gift, and ironically enough it was acquired on the same beery trip, but this time at our first port of call. This was a rather up-market marquee, overlooking a hop garden planted in the grounds of the Palm Brewery headquarters, in the village of Steenhuffel, to the north of Brussels. We had stopped there for lunch, plus several beer tastings, on one of the wettest August days imaginable. The marquee had been erected for an event scheduled to take place a few days later, when the hops in the adjacent fields would be picked, and then taken away to be used in the brewing of the Belgian equivalent of “green hop” beer.

The other large 75cl bottle contains a “triple-hopped” beer, called Palm Hop Select. According to the label, the beer is hopped three times, the last addition being the “home-grown, aroma rich, Hallertau Mittelfrüh hops from Palm’s own Belgian hop field, are added”. These were the lovely ripe, bright-green cones we could see, hanging in abundance, just a short distance away. I need to find my notes from the trip, but I’m pretty sure this beer was the first we sampled that day.

At a mere 6% I will probably manage this one OK, but it will still require care in pouring as it is another bottle-conditioned beer, so the final question to ask is why do some brewers fill their beer into such large bottles? There is no single correct answer, but brewers do this for reasons of exclusivity, (as in the case of these two beers), but they also do it to enable the beer to be shared amongst friends, (something essential when dealing with a 13% ABV beer!). A beer packaged in one of these large bottles, also makes a nice gift; especially at this time of year. Finally, and probably most important of all, the above reasons all mean that brewers can sell these large bottles at a premium price.