HoppySlosh gets a taste of ye olden dayes!

It's a funny world.

Well...maybe nog haha-funny, but still.
Pretty funny.

One day you're happily slurping beer and blabbing about it on some beergeek forum or other (*), and the next you're sipping a 50-year old beer with a complete unknown.

*) Another manifestation of the funniness of the world is that, if you can possibly conceive of an interest, however obscure or far-fetched, there'll be a forum (^) about it on the Yinterwebs, populated with people (°) with an encyclopedic knowledge about it. 

^) and porn. But I digress...

°) and trolls. Trolls are everywhere (%).

%) except under bridges. But I digress...

Anyway, following a post I made about my interest in old beer and a specific brew called Goudenband, I received a PM one day from a new member who seemed to've registered with the singular purpose of PM-ing me.

A PM made especially for me?
Why, thank you, Google!

For the elderly, the recently-returned-from-a-trip-around-Saturn, and the otherwise illiterate: a PM is a private message (hence the acronym) sent between members of an otherwise public messageing board.

No kittens were harmed in the process of writing this blog post.

Anyway.

A PM.

If I was interested in obtaining two bottles of very old Goudenband.
Very, in this case, meaning "dating back the first days of the country of Zaire.

Let me explain (°).

Belgium, like every civilised country in the world, got rich by ruthlessly exploiting her colonies. In Belgium's case, we're talking about Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.

Collectively known as Belgian Congo.

More accurately, Congo was the private property of the king of Belgium. His back yard so to speak. Belgium, as a nation, started shopping (*) for colonies almost as soon as it became an indepent nation, and almost landed a deal on Hawai, Crete, Cuba, Chihuahua and fucking Fiji.

Behold, the Belgian Mastiff

*) yes. Literally shopping. As in "Honey, I'm going out for groceries, do we need any more colonies to keep up with the Joneses?"

With colonisation cames expatriation, which brought my generous new friend's ancestors to Africa.
Time passed, and by the mid-1950's, the local people had had enough of the white opressor. Decolonisation was accelerated by the (often not very voluntary) repatriation of the white Congolese populace, and by 1960, it became unfashionable to even call the country Congo any longer.

The rest, they say, is pop history.

Whatever she was doing here (and all jest aside, many people living in Congo around the 1960's quite simple just lived there and were only peripherally involved in its colonial nature), my generous new friend's grandmother found herself evicted to a strange and cold new country, called Belgium. Mercifully, someone decided she could use a pick-me-up and gave her a couple of fancy bottles. Two of them being, you guessed it, Goudenband.

°) Seriously, whenever I explain to people who make fun of my passion for beer that I've learned more about world history by studying beer than anything anyone ever taught me about anything at any one time, I need only mention that single bottle of Goudenband.

Which brings us back to the bottle.

Ye Olde Bottle

Back in the sixties (and until I get more conclusive data on this specific bottle I'm going to ballpark it

to back in the sixties), standardisation wasn't a big thing yet. We've long since mended our ways, which is why we have things like GPS and the metric system.

Oh.
Wait.

But back in the sixties, beer apparently came in oddball denominations, like this 80cl bottle, which, even back in the sixties, was uncommon enough to not even merit a name.

Let's call it a plus-qu'un-demi-Magnum then.

As long as we can tell, the Liefmans brewery (or its proprietors) have (hand-)wrapped the bottles of their Goudenband (*) and Kriek (^) in stencilled silk paper, and this bottle is no exception.

*) another historic clue is that the beer is already labeled as Goudenband instead of the older (and less noble name Ijzeren Band")

^) now called Cuvée Brut which is neither a cuvée, nor a brut. 

The bottle is stoppered with an actual (natural) cork, synthetic corks being very much science fiction back in the sixties. Liefmans started using champagne corks at some point but this is an ordinary wine cork, and it's supposedly stamped with the bottle date (or at least the vintage), but the one bottle we opened had a cork so brittle it disintegrated to the point of illegibility.

Final clue is the price tag, which puts this bottle down at 35 Belgian Franks (*).

These were notes when I was young.

A rough calculation involving inflation and Frank-to-Euro transition translates this to about 60 euros per bottle now, which makes these quite facy gifts back in their heyday.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the same holds true for beer. Only you drink it, because eating it would be stupid. And messy.

Apologies for the lack of actual pictures from the tasting soirée but my battery died on me.

Poor battery.
May you rest in aaaaaand he's back again.

When we got the cork out (which meant in pieces), we were able to pour a classic-looking Oud Bruin, minus the head. After more than 60 years, it should come as no big surprise the beer was utterly flat.

Apart from a waft of cork (again no surprise there), we got a good whiff of oak and mild lactic sourness. No cardboard, no wet paper, just wholesome, if somewhat corky Old Bruin.

Remarkably, the beer tasted about as fresh as a well-conserved younger bottle would: the vinous character of the beer apparently is very forgiving on Father Time, and while it wasn't a stellar pour, the beer was still quite enjoyable, if perhaps a bit worn out. If it weren't for the complete loss of carbonation and the notable presence of cork both in the nose and on the palate, you would not have been able to guess or even approximate the age of this bottle. 

Which, I guess, is a bit underwhelming, perhaps. I mean, don't get me wrong here, I'm happy the beer was still drinkable at all, and hadn't turned to horrid cardboard-infused goop as the decades went by, but perhaps I'd expected it to have gained much more complexity. Then again, I really need to find out more about the brewing and bottling process of Goudenband. I've heard tell that it was (and still is) bottle-conditioned (*) which may partly explain how it has kept so well throughout the years. 

*) for the uninitiated: bottle-conditioned means the beer has undergone a (limited but important) final fermentation in the bottle, where the remaining yeast in suspension converts what little sugars it can find to CO2, thus carbonating the beer. An alterntative would be force carbonation, where a (typically pasteurised) beer is saturated with CO2 during the bottling process. The presence of live yeast in bottle conditioned beer is reportedly beneficial to its preservative qualities. 

There's more(°) to this beer, and I assure you all that one day, you'll read more about that final bottle on these very pages.

°) Cor blimey! I haven't even properly walked y'all through the utterly riveting history of the Liefmans brewery, or of the beer nor even of the glorious and almost-extinct beer style we call Oud Bruin and how utterly incomparable it is what the Dutch claim an Oud Bruin should be, but that'll have to wait until another time.

Until then

Greetz,

Jo

PS: a warm and beery hug of gratitude to Stefaan for getting in touch and for sharing this treasure with me. May good things happen to you, wherever you go!