Beer Reviews #9

                                            The French know theirs is the best...

Olivier’s Hamburger.

This is how the French make a burger.  They are exquisite.  Had one in the Le Sauret Bistro on our recent trip to Paris.  Olivier has made these twice for our Sunday BBQ.

It is in with the beers because, along with Beer, Hamburger is one of the 5 major food groups that everyone needs to have a balanced diet, the others being Pizza, Chocolate and Ice Cream

Hamburger.  Use good meat, and make the pattie thick to stay juicy

Dice red onions, cornichon pickles, capers and lettuce and mix with some good quality mayonnaise.

Grill the meat and the inside only of the buns.

Spread Dijon mustard and ketchup or tomato sauce on the insides of both parts of the buns

Add some slices of tomatoes and crumble some blue cheese on the meat (will melt a bit).

Layer the bun with tomatoes, the pickles, mix and complete.

Beers in Paris

Affligem. 

http://www.affligembeer.be/

 One of the Abbey beers from Belgium.  Very nice, full of flavor with a smooth finish.  This is everywhere on tap in Paris and in the supermarkets in bottles also, very cheap.

 

Pelforth.

http://www.morgenrot.co/pelforth.shtml

Brown. Sweet. Caramel, maybe a bit of Peach. Owned by Heineken but French.  Used to be called Pelican but now “Pel” remains and "fort" added as it is strong in hops plus "h" to make it sound British for some reason.  Very nice indeed.

 

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/case-study-the-pull-of-pelforth/

This is an in-depth review of the Brown (“Give a Pelforth Brown to thirsty men” was the slogan).

It even mentions a French hamburger!

Pelforth Blonde.  A bit lightish.  Not a lot of point in drinking it really.  Tastes a lot like Heineken, which I can’t stand.  At least it didn’t give me a headache like Heineken does.

 

L'Abbaye de Leffe. 

http://www.abbaye-de-leffe.be/-The-Beer-

Excellent.  Tried the Blonde, which is reportedly “light” but it’s still 6.6%! 

St Feuillien Blonde

http://www.st-feuillien.com/St-feuillienENG.html

 

Had this at the Academy of Beer ( http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/4482 ) which has been open since about 1960.  This was the best beer I had in Paris and in my top 10 beers of the world.  Wonderful stuff.

 

Delirium Tremens

http://www.delirium.be/en

http://www.delirium.be/delirium_tremens

 

I’ve had this before but I can’t remember where.  Maybe in Ft Lauderdale?  It’s a very powerful beer, running to 8.5%.  Nice, but the St Feuillien is better in my view.

Update on two German beers.

Becks.

I was a late convert to Becks, thinking (incorrectly) that it was a young person’s response to Corona i.e. something of a “trend” type beer.  I’ve had a lot of this here in Tunisia and it firms up as a great beer and one to be included when it is available.  We went to pick up a wine delivery in Tunis the other day, into a sort of a Bonded Warehouse, although it was actually a very very large yard.  There were 3 semi trailers loaded with cans of Becks.  While I was waiting I tried to calculate just how many there were on those three.  Don’t know – thousands and thousands.?  Tens of thousands? 

Heineken.

When I was young, this was one of the first real beers that you could get in WA apart from the rubbish that came out of the Swan Brewery (who had pulled the usual trick of buying a good brewery, Hannans, and promptly closing it down.  Must have made them look bad.)

 

At some point along the line, Heineken started putting some sort of preservative in the beer and I immediately began getting headaches from it.  It’s the only beer that does it to me and I now despise the stuff.  I took a bottle or two over to one of our neighbour’s boats, Renee.  He is a French connoisseur and is the one who organizes the wine here.  I offered him the Heineken, assuming it was only me who hated the stuff.  He apologized and said he couldn’t drink Heineken.  Full stop.  He just can’t stand it because gives him a headache.  I am now emboldened to state that it is just rubbish and belongs with Swan, VB, 4X etc.

Golden Brau

4.32%

Romanian.  Brewed there by Heineken Romania.  Brewed in Tunisia also by Heineken, which some readers may recall is not on my list of favourites. Nor is this.  It is golden and it is fizzy.  It is only mildly palatable because I’ve already paid for it.  I doubt I’ll be making that mistake again.

 

Creative Cruisers

Sometimes I think living aboard must be a bit like fighting a battle, but hopefully with less chance of coming to serious harm. A lot of time is spent in planning and preparation, followed by brief periods of action and excitement, and quite a bit of doing nothing much at all. As a recovered workaholic, I’ve found the ‘doing nothing much’ part the hardest to handle. Of course busy people dream of lounging about on deck in the sun, novel in one hand and cold chardonnay in the other. Nice, but even I can’t do that for hours on end – and, believe it or not, sometimes it is cold, windy and raining!

Besides the constant boat projects, most of the cruisers we’ve met have interesting and creative ways of using this time. Many people write, of course, whether it’s keeping a log or a blog of their journey, scribbling poetry and stories or the full deal – published novels and non-fiction. Along the way we’ve met John Otterbacher  in Deltaville and read his book Sailing Grace, Christine Kling in Fort Lauderdale with her Seychelle Sullivan series and now fellow Aussie Dave Elliot whose novel Time Sailors I’m currently enjoying on Kindle.

                                          Lauren and Olivier

                                          Natalie

Wander down Ponton 2 and you are likely to see Natalie making furniture, Christine embroidering, Rene studying wine or a classic from his film collection, Lauren painting and writing whimsical children’s books, Olivier cooking, Florence crafting beautiful jewellery... Meanwhile as Jill of all trades and master of none, I write a bit, paint a bit, sew a bit and attempt to play the harmonica!

                                                    Christine

This should be our last week in Monastir. Our final job is to attach a new VHF antenna to the top of the mast, then it’s provisioning, packing up, negotiating visas/customs etc and off we go! The plan is to head to the small Italian island of Lampedusa (about 80 miles away) then on to Malta for a couple of weeks.

El Jem and Dougga

This week we hired a car for a couple of days and set off to do a bit of exploring with our friends Lauren and Olivier from Hephaistos, along with Olivier’s mum Marielle who was visiting from Paris. On Tuesday we headed south to the town of El Jem, famous for its Roman amphitheatre, the largest in Africa and third largest in the world. On either side of the road, vast groves of gnarled old olive trees stretched for miles; and it was olives that provided the original source of the wealth of this region, known as Thysdrus in Roman times.

The amphitheatre is quite astonishing, its gold sandstone arches rising suddenly out of the flat plain and dwarfing the ramshackle white buildings of the town. Its origins are uncertain, but tradition has it that one Gordien I, Proconsul of Ifriqiya was responsible for the construction of the colosseum. Apparently he was an ostentatious character, devoted to the arts and the games. The building was supposed to raise his political status, but it was considered a bit of a white elephant back in the day.

The colosseum was partly demolished by canon fire in 1850, finally ending its long history as a refuge for insurgents and rebels. Most memorable was the Berber heroine, "La Kahena" who used the amphitheatre as a fortress during the Muslim invasion.

The mosaics collected from Roman villas and housed in the museums in Sousse, Tunis and here in El Jem show the kinds of spectacles the crowds enjoyed 2000 years ago: fights by professional gladiators (the equivalent of WWF but with hideous weapons); combat between wild animals captured throughout Africa; and most popular of all, the feeding of Christians and prisoners of war to lions, tigers and leopards. Standing in the middle of the arena, I suddenly felt a new appreciation for TV and computer games as forms of popular entertainment.

After a tour of the excellent museum (included in the price of admission but about 500 meters away through the town) we relaxed over a lunch of chicken kebabs and brik a l’oeuf at the Café Elhana opposite the amphitheatre. The genial proprietor (who appeared to speak at least eight languages with some fluency) entertained us with his insights into the characteristics of tourists from different countries. The approaching tour group, he claimed, were Spanish: the men had thick wavy hair and the woman were small but not as hairy as the Portuguese (he was right, they were Spanish.) Germans always wear big expensive hiking shoes or sandals; Americans are nervous, always looking around; if someone has a gold tooth, he’s Russian. Australians? Apparently we have orangish skin and carry enormous backpacks (which Terry did!)

 

On the way back, we stopped briefly at the site of a pair of even older ruined amphitheatres, one built on top of the other. Some excavation work had been done here, but sadly the site was unprotected and covered in litter.

 

Wednesday saw an early start for the long drive to Dougga, which is up towards the north-western part of Tunisia. More olive groves, and frequent stops for small flocks of brown-faced sheep to be herded across the road by shepherds in hooded cloaks. Then suddenly, the ancient Roman city appears on a hilltop ahead, the columns of the Temple of Saturn silhouetted against the sky and the paved roads, still showing the grooves worn by chariot wheels, curving up the slope.

This is the best-preserved Roman site in Africa, probably because it is in the middle of nowhere and hasn’t been looted for building materials as elsewhere. Despite a bit of rain and wind, we had a fascinating wander around the town: villas complete with some of their mosaic floors, the impressive temples to Saturn and Juno, a Punic mausoleum and an awesome theatre. Apparently the acoustics were so good that my feeble rendition of Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar (Friends, Romans, countrymen etc) was clearly audible in the cheap seats up the back.

 

It was incredible to be able to wander freely through the streets, imagining life 2000+ years ago. I even sat at the communal latrine and tried to picture what it would have been like to sit and have a friendly gossip with your neighbours while having a collective crap. Dougga isn’t widely publicised and it’s completely free of all the trappings of tourism, but don’t miss it if you’re ever in this part of the world.

                                                   communal latrine

Finally the rain and cold got the better of us and we headed back to a warm car and a long trip back to Monastir through pretty countryside and rundown towns. Apparently you don’t have to pay tax on homes and buildings until they are completed, so guess what? The country is filled with half-built structures. Typically people build a ground floor to live in, and have an incomplete second story. The result is profoundly unattractive – raw brick and concrete, piles of rubble everywhere – but that’s what you get. We had a quick stop for hot crepes with fresh cheese and harissa (yum) for 42c each, then back to the boat to rest and reflect on an amazing day.

 

Terry eats and drinks his way around Paris

 

Fantastic food shops (providores? Epiceries?)  Most of them will cook or heat something up for you if they can.  Wine shops where you go in and select your bottle, with excellent stuff around €12-€15 and then you can stay there for the plat du jour of something good.  Or you can select from the a la carte menu if you want.  Food, wine, cakes, biscuits, macarons....  Cheese shops with hundreds of cheeses, charcuteries with terrines, pates, roast this and that, fishmongers, flower shops, it just goes on and on.  We walked down one section of the Rue Royal and passed Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Villeroy & Boch, Gucci, Ralph Lauren and I forget what else except that Maxims was at the end of the street and Rolex and Breitling were on the opposite side and all within say two hundred yards.  Security guards on each doorway to check that your card is Platinum and not just one of those Gold things.

               Even the burgers were better - with blue cheese and delicious bread

 

We are honorary Parisians now because we went and bought our Metro passes on the Monday (they are weekly passes).  You have to give the Metro attendant a photo to get inserted in it and it's good for 10 years.  You just reload it and swipe as you go through the gates.  Buggered if I know why every Australian city that's tried an electronic card doesn't just use this one.  Probably not enough corrupt dollars to cream off in the contracts.  Millions of people use this every day and it is faultless.

Rude Parisians were nowhere to be found.  Everyone was amusing and helpful.  The lady in the Metro closed her window and came out to the vending machines to walk us through not one but both of our Navigo Metro passes.  Then she went back in to her booth and made up the cards for us. Then she came out again and showed us how to put money on them.

We went to Academie de la Biere on Carol's birthday. http://www.academie-biere.com/

There were two young guys at the next table (i.e. one foot away) and we struck up a conversation about the beers we had ordered.  They were childhood friends from Amiens working in Paris.  One of them is an archivist who is interested in the WW1 battlefields, as they were around Amiens.  He's going to give Carol some private maps of where her grandfather fought, as his grandfather did also.

Maybe in summer with an onslaught of tourists (the most visited city in the world) their patience wears a bit thin but the waiters were cheeky and helpful, the street vendors were happy and charming. 

A great place to spend some time.  Even to stay for a while.  Wine is magnificent, beer is good and if you don't like French 303 or Pelforth Brown, Belgian is everywhere. Chimay is €2.50 in the grocery store!

Be careful when you read the menu on the blackboard.  What you might think is a veal cutlet could well turn out to be tete du veau, which may or may not be to your liking.  I will agree that ours was well cooked and well presented and leave it at that.

http://www.linternaute.com/restaurant/restaurant/115931/bistrot-d-i-d.shtml

In 9 days, there were many others as well, each with its own special charm.

We went to the cemetery, Pere Lachaise, the most visited cemetery in the western world.  You can even get an app for it now.  Visited Jim Morrison's grave, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Simone Signoret/Yves Montand buried together, Modigliani, Baron Rothschild.....  When they wanted people to stop using the cemetery in Paris, nobody would, so they dug up all the celebrities they had there and moved them out to the new one. This was a hundred or so years ago.  All of a sudden, everybody wanted to go to the new cemetery!  Now even people from overseas want to be buried there.

                                             Jim Morrison's grave has become a shrine

 

It was very cold every day but the sun was out and days were pleasant.  It began snowing on our second last day and continued onto the Sunday, but only lightly.  We wandered down to the Eiffel Tower in the a.m. with some hours to kill and then headed off out to the airport.

 

A great city.

I’ve shown some people a set of noise-cancelling headphones that I got in Vegas in '07.  They didn't cost much and they were ok for drowning out screaming children on planes.  For years I've "wanted" a pair of those high-quality BOSE noise-cancellers, the latest version of which are the BOSE QC15. I could never justify buying them, though.

Well, I was wandering around Orly Sud Sunday evening, as you do when you're waiting for a plane, and there was a FNAC store in the airport.  They had a BOSE demonstration board set up, with movie clips, sound clips etc where you could select and listen through the QC15 headphones.  I happened to have my noise-cancellers hanging around my neck connected to my mp3 Player at the time so I could actually compare the two.

NO COMPARISON!!!  I listened.  Stood there.  Listened to some more.  Turned to the lady on the counter, who was watching me, and said "I'll have a pair of them please".  Cost me €300 but OMG   are they not the absolute best ever. They are already banned from wearing at the helm because it would be impossible to hear anything else but the music.

Paris Interlude 2

Winter is a good time to visit museums in Paris: the queues are not so long and, once inside, you actually have space to view the works. Our first stop was the famous Musee d’Orsay on the Left Bank, home to the world’s largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. The Musee itself is a former railway station, built in the Beaux Arts style for the grand Exposition Universelle in 1900. In its new incarnation, the ‘Md’O’ is a beautiful exhibition space filled with natural light. Every important name in French art of the 19^th and early 20^th Century is represented, including Manet’s two revolutionary works, “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” and “Olympia”. Gazing at these and other so-familiar paintings, it’s a hard to imagine the passions they incited back in the day, not just for their subject matter, but for a style described as crude, slapdash, unfinished – impressionistic, in fact.

Renoir’s “Bal du Moulin de la Gallette” is here – and we’d had the chance to visit the setting of the painting the day before. Van Gogh’s ‘other’ Starry Night  “Over the Rhone” , Cezanne’s lovely small studies of fruit and flowers, Gaugin’s Polynesian paintings … My favourite moment: a little boy of about seven, comes to a dead stop in front of a glorious Monet waterlilies painting, stares at it for a couple of minutes and turns earnestly to his father, “C’est tres jolie, Papa!”

Some people say that the d’Orsay collection is a bit second rate, and I guess it’s true that the master works of the great Impressionists are elsewhere, but as a tour of an era, it is brilliant. It’s also doable: you can actually get around and enjoy the whole museum within the day without feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.

 

The previous day we had taken a long and fascinating walk up to Montmartre, the high point on the northern outskirts of old Paris that used to be a village of artisans, revolutionaries and bohemians. On the way we passed the once notorious Moulin Rouge, the Moulin de la Gallette, and the ‘man in the wall’ sculpture which commemorates writer Marcel Ayme and his story about a man who could walk through walls. Somehow, despite we tourists flocking to the area, Montmartre manages to retain something of that village feeling still, though I don’t think I’d like to be here at the height of summer. The shops are still small and unique, the old buildings beautiful and the restaurants serve hearty French food rather than generic takeaway. The lovely church of Sacre Coeur dominates from the top of the hill. Inside, I was fortunate enough to hear the choir of nuns singing for the Sunday mass – hauntingly beautiful voices filling the great vault, illuminated by hundreds of candles and soft light through the stained glass.

After some searching we found the Espace Dali, a collection of Dali’s works mainly comprising sculptures and preliminary drawings. Several were interesting, but overall there was a much greater sense of Dali the showman than Dali the artist. Lunch on a freezing cold day? What could be better than boeuf Bourguignon and authentic soupe a l’oignon?

 

Paris Interlude 1

It’s a little intimidating trying to write a blog about Paris. So many great writers have described its every season, aspect and mood. All a humble tourist can do is to try to put together a set of impressions that communicate something about our personal experience of this beautiful city. Like New York, Paris is one of those places you somehow ‘know’ as part of your cultural capital, even if you’ve never been there. Expectations are inevitable – the grand monuments and promenades, the charming stores and street markets, the museums, the stylish Parisians (also described by many as rude, arrogant and hostile to foreigners) – and the first of these expectations to be challenged was the one about grandeur. Yes, it’s all there – the cathedrals, the tower, the Louvre, the Arc – but the really lovely thing is the human scale of the city. Thanks to Napoleon III and his town planner, Baron Haussman, very few buildings rise above six to eight storeys. The bottom floors are typically devoted to small (often tiny) shops, restaurants and businesses of incredible variety, with apartments above. This means that there is no dead commercial zone, and it also means a constant lively social life on the streets as people shop, chat in bars and cafes, seek and provide entertainment, protest (‘manifs’ are an everyday occurrence) and generally engage with one another on the streets, even in the depths of winter. I really enjoyed seeing so many family restaurants, tiny studios, quirky gift shops and boutiques, music stores, real tailors and bootmakers, florists, bookanistes, and specialists in every imaginable type of food. The front of each bakery, butcher, fish shop, grocery, fromagerie and patisserie is a work of art and it seems no self-respecting Parisian shopkeeper would settle for anything less. We even saw a combined laundromat/art gallery.

 

The big international chains are all here, it’s just that they don’t get to dominate. In keeping with the ‘small is beautiful’ theme, we stayed in the Hotel du Theatre, a pretty little boutique hotel in the 17^th Arondissement, just off the Rue des Batignoles. Decorated in the classic crimson and gold of traditional French theatre, the hotel had small but comfortable rooms – with immaculate new bathrooms – and friendly, helpful staff who all spoke excellent English but played along with my lame French. Which brings me to the next challenge – where were all those arrogant Parisians? Almost without exception, everyone we met was charming, friendly and helpful. I think making an effort to speak in French helped, or maybe it was being there in the off season, but the people were a delight. I wonder if that myth stems from the French insistence on remaining French, despite all the pressures of globalisation? From a very early age they learn to value their culture (witness groups of six year olds in colourful tunics, painting copies of Monets in the Louvre) and they don’t cave in to every customer demand for bigger, blander rooms or fries with that. I think the Gallic Shrug is an appropriate response to visitors’ efforts to make this place like everywhere else.

 

So, Parisians were far from rude, but they definitely were stylish. A smattering of high fashion along the expensive shopping avenues, but mostly people dressed in jeans, boots and well cut jackets. Caps, bags and scarves for colour and individual style – voila! It looks so simple, but somehow they just do it better. Our daggy boat clothes certainly didn’t win any awards, but we were an appreciative audience for the passing parade. I was amazed at how many of the women and children, with their dark eyes and creamy skin, could have posed for Renoir paintings (perhaps their great grandparents did?)

Just walking around, looking and listening, was great fun, but if you needed to get somewhere, the Metro is a terrific transport system – fast, simple and comprehensive. We bought Navigo cards that covered the week from Monday to Sunday (5E for the card, 19E for a week of heavy usage!) A bonus was the on-board entertainment, with talented buskers hopping aboard between stops to sing or play for a handful of coins.

On our first day, we rugged up in a few layers and took a long walk down to towards the river, via the Place de la Concorde. It was magical to see the Seine for the first time (with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, of course). With all the recent snow and meltwater from the mountains, it was flowing fast and cold. Water craft were clearly struggling against the current, though there were plenty of canal boats tied up along the banks, many of them with gardens, clotheslines and garden furniture that suggested they had thoroughly settled in. Highlights along the way: classy shops along the Rue Haussmann, and the accompanying classy shoppers; a whole shop featuring sculptures in chocolate; a delicious apricot crepe from a street stall; flower shops; the Luxor Obelisk; the massive square of Concorde, surrounded by beautiful buildings and statues; formerly this was the Place de la Revolution where the guillotine was erected and Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed in 1793. It’s weird to imagine the crowds of happy tourists replaced with cheering crowds as the heads rolled and the cobbles ran with blood.

 

Well, I might break at this reflective moment and publish Part 1 – Paris deux in a day or two. A bientot!

Unrest

It was a strange day on Wednesday. When we walked into town, there seemed to be a few more police around than usual, and the main supermarket was closed for no apparent reason. We bought a couple of things in the other store, then found ourselves hustled out through the back door, along with all the other shoppers. On the way back to the marina, we could see a crowd gathering in the main square. Even the weather seemed ominous, the pleasant evening suddenly swept away by a vicious cold, gritty wind. Something was clearly going on, and it didn't look good.

Back at the dock, one of the French cruisers told us that a leader of one of Tunisia's small opposition parties had been assassinated, apparently by a Muslim extremist. In several parts of the country there were spontaneous protests by groups who felt that their new, hard-won freedoms were under threat, and others critical of an Islamist government that they felt had not done enough to control violent extremists. Chokri Belaid is to be buried tomorrow (Friday) and there will be a general strike. We plan to lay low - an easier decision because that terrible wind is still blowing out there. I just feel for the Tunisian people who are already struggling with poverty and unemployment - tourism and trade are way down already and this can only worsen the situation for them. Our own plans to see some of the rest of the country are on hold, of course; the last thing anyone needs is a couple of silly tourists mixed up in any unrest.

So, we are safe here for the moment; and being on a boat means we can leave pretty much instantly should the need arise, which is unlikely. The island of Lampedusa, which belongs to Italy, is only 80 miles away, and Malta is 160 - easy as long as that wind isn't on the nose.