It was on Saturday, a cold, wet, throughly miserable day, that we headed up with another teacher to the Kulminator pub in Antwerp. This is a world-class pub that needs no plugging whatsoever. If you love good beer a lot, you simply have to come here and drink for a few days. It's OK; remember that wine afficionados are held in high esteem for spending many days in the trenches of Tuscany, Bordeaux, and Napa sampling wine after wine, looking for that super bargain that they pretend will somehow make it 10-20 years in their cellars. It's no different for a beer aficionado sitting in a pub like the Kulminator. Well, I should rephrase that because there is no pub like the Kulminator that I know of anywhere else on the planet. It is a pub that sells multiple vintages of many different Belgian ales stretching all the way back to the late 70's. Vintage ales you say? It is not a hoax; beers CAN age extremely well and change perceptibly over time, acquiring flavors that nudge them over the line and into the camps of sherries and ports. Some get sweeter, some get drier, some turn sour, and others just turn off. The ability to taste a beer and know that it will improve over a decade or two is part extreme powers of evaluation, and part luck. Some of the beers I orderd left me little doubt that they would be better aged than they are fresh, but were not. Others simply made me speechless. To qualify as a vintage candidate, the beer must be reasonably high in alcohol; 8% ABV seems to be a benchmark. It must also be brewed with extreme care, be handled well ALL of its life, and must have been bottle conditioned. Even with all of these factors covered, a bottle conditioned beer is still a living ecosystem and is subject to the infinitely complex factors of such systems. The beer may not have carbonated properly, or the cap may not have been sealed well. A flat beer is worthless in most circumstances and can be likened to a "corked" wine; it must be poured out. Then the possiblity exists that an unwanted infection (yes, there are desireable infections in many Belgian ales) might have occured, leading to intolerable off-flavors that usually lead the beer directly to the drain. If an exceptional brewer has somehow managed to avoid these many pitfalls and produce a beer of sufficient constitution to last a generation or two, chances are high that you'll find it here at the Kulminator.

When we opened the menu we were initially struck by the 17 listings for Chimay Grand Reserve stretching all the way back to 1977, a year after the bar opened. The next page brought an even greater surprise with many years of Liefmans Goudenband and Kriek, though these were well out my price range. I stuck with the smaller bottles and ended up first with a Stille Nacht from 1994. Wow, what an outstanding beer this was, hints of plum wine and a light acidity on an immense background of sweet malt. I had never tasted anything quite like it and It cost me all of 6 Euros. Kumar ordered a Petrus Triple from 1996 that had acquired a nice overtone of wine without masking the wonderful complexity of the original beer. Steve ordered a 1998 gueuze from Boon, the "Marriage Parfait", that had dried out noticeably but retained a strong woodiness to it.

Our next conquest would be a 1997 Westmalle triple that arrived in its customary cradle, and sporting lime deposits and mold spots. This one didn't impress quite as much as the first with it's age, but it was still a damn fine beer. This would be a beer that I would drink fairly fresh after laying down for no more than a month. Our last couple of beers were regrettable, and served as lessons to us that all beers are not candidates for ageing, or should at least be drunk at their peak of maturity. I bought a 1983 imperial stout from Courage that had seen better days, and Steve's EKU Kulminator 28 was probably best drunk fresh since it doesn't have yeast in the bottle.

And so ended our foray to Antwerp and it's timeless bar that I will be sure to make an effort to reach again soon.