Who is this Sofie Van Rafelghem I was talking about in my blogpost? Well Sofie is a young lady who has done law school and decided to start studying for Wine sommelier, but in the end ended up becoming Beer sommelier. I’m not sure anymore how it exactly happened, but she got in contact with beer and it was love at first sight… so she changed and became a beer sommelier instead of a wine sommelier and now even has her own beer that she initially started to make in her own kitchen 🙂

What is Sofie’s goal? Well she wants to get rid of the macho image around beer and also encourage women to drink more beer as beer can be as elegant as beer (maybe just by serving it in a wine glass or so …)

As this event was at Duvel Moortgat, there was of course also some beer to try 🙂 and boy did we try some beer. On top of that they also asked Ilse Dupocheel to do some food matching with the beers.

During our walk through the Moortgat assortment we started with a nice glass of Cuvée (not to start cliché) which for me was a perfect way to open your taste buds. This glass got served with some nice fresh oysters (you can’t go wrong with oysters).The cuvée is a beer cherry beer that gets fermented between 18 months and 3 year and only gets made 1 time per year.  This got followed by some Vedett Extra white with some marinated mackerel, string bean, lemon and wasabi (with the last to give it that little touch of spiciness).  Did you know that the Vedett beer gets made (besides with the regular ingredients for beer) with ingredients like dried orange peels and coriander? (I was as surprised as you are now!!)

Who says Moortgat, says Duvel so the next beer on the list was the one and only Duvel  The Duvel got matched with another typical Belgian product, mussels, prepared with chicory, chorizo and a butter sauce (so all typical belgian besides the chorizo). I did miss some fries (but that might have been the greedy person in me that wanted them).

No, it didn’t stop there! FYI, it were all smaller glasses in which we got our beers served (No, not a good enough excuse?) The next to taste was a Dark Maredsous , a beer that the gets made by the Benedictines whoalready started making around the year 768… so you can imagine how much tradition there and knowhow there is put in the making of the beer… This beer has a soft aftertaste with some notions of chocolate and caramel (just try the beer (and drink slow) and I’m sure you’ll agree). This aftertaste is a perfect match with some Tuna and some puffed paprika .

The next beer on the menu is not really my personal favorite (because it is to bitter), but it seems that is a beer that is liked by most women…. the beer I’m talking about is that Houblon Chouffe. This beer is also known as the La Chouffe Triple. This is a beer that doesn’t get filtered). This beer is in good balance with a dish with pork (which has a sweet sugary/fatty taste) with some celeriac crème and a sojasauce (the salty part).

And our last beer for the night (we did indeed eventually stop drinking) was the Liefmans Goudenband (yes indeed, made by the first or one of the first Belgian Female head brewers was Rosa Merckx-Blanquaert) . This is a more complex kind of beer and is even unique brown beer that gets fermented between 4 and 12 months  in the cellars at Liefmans and has a very strong aroma. When I think of strong aroma’s I also think of goat or sheep cheeses… which was also what Ilse matched it with. She had foreseen a gingerbread toast with some apple jam and sheep cheese.

I’m really happy that I got the try all these beers and being surrounded by so many wonderful women made this experience even more unforgettable (that’s another reason why women should start drinking more beer). I also think and hope that more women will start drinking and appreciating beer …

If you would want more inspiration regarding beer/food matching, checking the Beer Bits book might be a good start. In case you want to know more about beers you can check the beer consumers’ organization website Zythos

What better way to end than with a quote from Kaiser Welhelm:

“Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the world.”