Fragment: Off to the Archives
Every year or so, it comes time to shovel the collected drifts of paper, books, receipts and other detritus out of my office. During yesterday’s clean, I found these small books at the bottom of a box. I made them as I was writing the first Beer Bible, toting them with me around Europe and assorted GABFs and brewery visits. I knew I’d have to write hundreds of reviews for the book, and I needed an easy way to capture relevant information. These were purely personal, and the notes I took were relative—I was comparing beers to others of the same style. They weren’t meant to stand on their own so much as remind me of the experience so I could write about them later. I didn’t intend any one to read them and I’d honestly be mortified if they did.
Still, they evoke vivid memories. The book is open to pages documenting the last beer I had at Cantillon and the ones Sally and I had two days later, after she joined me in Belgium. I can recall Jean Van Roy disappearing into some secret cellar for this last beer that he knew was one of his best. He’d brewed that day and it was dark outside, the city mostly still. I’d flown in from Edinburgh that afternoon. We were alone in the pre-renovated brewery, with a vibe halfway between library stacks and museum. It felt conspiratorial, drinking that beer alone.
Two days later, Sally and I followed a one-lane road that led, improbably, to the monastery at St Sixtus, where the rarest and most coveted beer in the world was brewed. I remember the surprise and delight we experienced while nibbling hearty brown bread and thick slabs of monastery-made cheese. It wasn’t the beer everyone celebrated that was the special one (though it was good), but a saison-like blonde I didn’t know they made. I can taste it still.
These books are of use to no one, and they’ll go into a crate with the other full notebooks I can’t force myself to dump. But they are are powerful little time machines, able to transport me to wonderful moments as they recede inexorably into the past.