Biere Des Moines - Chimay Grande Reserve

I present you oh most appreciated reader with a second installment of my Bieres Des Moines series where we take a peek at beers made under the control of Monks that are available to us here in our fair city.

Known the world over by it's nickname Chimay Blue (or Bleue in it's home country) is perhaps the best known of the Trappist beers. The Abbey of Notre-Dame de Scourmont is one of the most well established Trappist breweries in the United States and has been for quite some time. The brewery produces four beers Chimay Red, Chimay Triple, Chimay Doree which like the Petit Orval is basically reserved for the Monk's themselves, and finally the beer we are looking at today Chimay Grande Reserve. Along with these beers the community makes cheeses as well. One of these I'll get the chance to pair with my Chimay Blue today!

The beer it's self is easy enough to find, a trip to stores like Beer Crazy, Ingersoll Wine and Spirits, Sbrocco, and Cyclone Liquors will land you a bottle, and if you're picking up groceries as well, most Hy-Vee locations have it too.

The beer it's self always surprises me. It's one of those old faithful beers I've had time and time again. Now I hardly drink it but a few times a year, and I always kind of wonder why I don't drink it more often. The aroma is fruity and very driven by Chimay's proprietary yeast strain first propagated from the wild from a single cell by Brother Theodore in the 1960's. Other aromas include dark fruit, milk chocolate, a nice nuttiness, and some apple. The aroma shows that at 9% abv this is a strong beer however the alcohol notes in the aroma work well with the rest of the beers olfactory character. The flavor follows with that nice nuttiness, but the fruit is more intense and the chocolaty and almost roasty notes of the aroma are all but forgotten. The beer plays with flavors like Plum, raisin, brown sugar, and some nice floral and alcohol notes. Again showing it's strength my bottle is a fairly fresh one and the alcohol (which fades slightly with cellaring) is strong but in no way unbalanced.

The Cheese is Chimay's Grand Classique which I picked up from Gateway Market is as it has many times been described a very nice match for the beer. The rind of this cheese (I have been told) is washed in Chimay Grande Reserve which of course is a damned elegant touch. The cheese is nutty and creamy with a light earthiness and sweetness. The flavors of the beer and the cheese indeed work well together.

Now go to the store and find some. In all likelihood it's right down the block.

Peace Tree Double IPA

For us in Des Moines and indeed Iowa in general we're just not accustomed to beer hype.

No, we usually leave that sort of business safely some three hundred miles to the east of us. We might have gotten our first taste of beer hype this weekend. I couldn't help but get choked up watching our little city growing up when it was announced that Peace Tree Brewing would be holding an official release of their new Double IPA at Beer Crazy this Saturday. Well that's not exactaly true, I heard that the release would be at 1 o'clock, so of course I showed up an hour early to stand alone with my wife in front of the Jeroboam of Chimay proudly displayed as you walk into Beer Crazy, taunting us in all it's glory.

After resisting the charm of a comically large beer bottle, we went out to lunch to return at 2. After a quick sampling, a short talk with the owners of the brewery, and a purchase of four bottles I was on my way. No big lines, no hassle, just a few Des Moines beer lovers making the best of it buying $2.50 bottles of limited release beer. I quietly slipped away using my upmost restraint with four lovely bottles.

How was the beer?

It was wonderful, thank you for asking.

I'm not one to care more about a big beer (by this I mean high abv) than say a more standard strenth beer, but this is easily among the best I've had from this brewery. The aroma on the beer is fruity, sweet, & seems more dominated by the belgian yeast used than the hops which is weird because that's kind of the opposite with Hop

Wrangler (The IPA upon which this beer is loosely based), either way it smells good. The aroma has a distinct sweet almost floral character that works really well alongside that fruity yeasty thing I was talking about as well as the piney and citrusy hoppiness. Furthermore I like the flavor, I actually like everything I taste in this beer. It is indeed a lot like an intensified Hop Wrangler, so all the oddities of that beer are amplified here. Now when I say oddities you must understand, I mean this in the best way possible. This and the Wrangler are beers that don't jump through a hoop for you and do exactly what you want them to, but as the glass progresses everything sort of weaves it's self together. This is, I believe the concept behind these two beers and I think it's executed very well in both cases. That said I'll say a little more about what's going on here. We've got a fruitiness and a citrus character that is unmistakably from west coast American hops sort of melding along with a fruity belgian yeast strain, which I might add seems to be becoming more and more dominant with each batch this brewery uses it in. The pineapple flavor is pretty nice in this beer, now lots of times you get pineapple from a yeast or a hop and sometimes it tastes like a pineapple flavoring, or a pineapple candy if you will. This beer tastes like genuine fresh pineapple. So what, you've got a West Coast Belgian IPA on your hands? But that's not the case, I think when I first had Hop Wrangler I wished it were the case. Again with this one, these guys are going to make you think a little harder than that. Beyond all the fruitiness the beer is very bitter in a sort of herbal old world hoppy kind of way. Think of something like the biting bitterness of a good Classic German Pilsner. Then add to this all a sort of musty dank character. Theres lots going on, but everything is balanced out to where it doesn't seem messy at all.

For a 9% abv beer the alcohol is perfectly concealed and this is frighteningly easy to drink.

Cheers to Peace Tree, keep up the great work, you are exciting Iowans about beer, which is no small task!