An Irish pub in Camden with one of the best Belgian lists in London, and the monks are the reason
Quinns on Kentish Town Road holds a 4.3 from five hundred and ninety people, is listed at one to twenty pounds, and it is an Irish pub with an extraordinary Belgian beer list.
Which sounds like a mistake and is not.
The Trappists
Who make some of the best beer in the world and who are monks.
And the rules for a beer to be certified Authentic Trappist are strict and genuinely unusual.
It must be brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastery. It must be brewed by, or under the supervision of, the monks. And the brewery must not be run for profit – the income must cover the community’s needs, with the surplus going to charity or social work.
There are only a handful of breweries in the world that qualify.
Why monks brewed
Because of water, and because of fasting.
The water argument we have made in seven postcodes: it would kill you, and beer would not, because the wort is boiled.
And the fasting argument is better.
During Lent, the monks were permitted no solid food – and beer is liquid, and beer is nutritious, and a strong dark beer is very substantially a meal in a glass.
The Trappist doubles and quadruples that are now sold at nine and eleven per cent were originally, in part, food.
They are called liquid bread and it is not a slogan. It is a description of what they were for.
The bottle conditioning
Which is the technical thing that makes them what they are.
Live yeast is left in the bottle, with a small amount of residual sugar – and it continues to ferment, slowly, in the glass, for months or years.
Which means a Trappist beer is not a finished product when it is sold. It is still working.
And a bottle laid down for five years is a genuinely different drink from the same bottle drunk fresh – it darkens, it deepens, and the sharpness goes.
It is one of the very few beers in the world that improves with age, and it does so because there is something alive in it.
The pour
Which they will do for you and which matters.
Leave the last centimetre in the bottle. That is the yeast, and it is cloudy, and it will make the beer taste of bread rather than of the beer.
Some people want it. Most do not. Ask.
Verdict
Excellent pub, superb list, cheap.
Go, ask what is good, and let them pour it.
The glass
Which every Belgian brewery has its own of, and which is not marketing.
A Trappist beer is highly carbonated and heavily aromatic – and the glass is shaped to manage both: a wide bowl to release the aroma, a narrowing to hold the head, and frequently a stem so your hand does not warm it.
And a great many Belgian bars will refuse to serve you a beer if they do not have the correct glass for it.
Which sounds absurd and is not, and the Prat has come round to it entirely across seven postcodes.
The champagne flute is the wrong glass and the producers have been saying so for years. The Belgians simply got there first and made it a rule.
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