…No, really.
Here in Belgium, beer is kind of a big deal. Beer shops are everywhere, filled with selections of hundreds of different beers. It seems impossible that one of the hundreds could actually claim the title of being the BEST, and that people could actually agree.
But people do. The Trappist Westvleteren 12 is continually ranked #1 on almost every beer rating metric or website in existence. If it were up to the Trappist monks of the Saint Sixtus abbey, there wouldn’t be so much fuss about their beer. It is brewed just to keep the monastery going, and isn’t marketed or sold publicly. There is a pub across the street where you can drink it on tap, which happens to be the only place where that is possible. In order to get a case of 24 bottles, you must call the beer hotline, hope to get through, then register your license plate number and show up on the correct date and time. You are allowed to do this 1 time each month. That’s it. The monks had to start doing this because people were buying up cases to sell to the general public. I guess that’s what happens when you “accidently” make the best beer around.
How did i manage to get my hands on a bottle you ask? Without a car? Without a reservation? Well, I went shopping on the Bruges Black Market of course! Before I knew the difficulty of getting a hold of the beer, I asked in a beer shop if they had it.
“No, it’s illegal to sell”
-“Wait, really?”
“Yes, you won’t find it, it’s illegal”
Conversation over.
So this was going to be a little bit more difficult than I thought. The next beer shop that I went into was a small Mom and Pop store by the hostel. The owner was a little nicer about the whole situation, but unfortunately he had run out of his supply and was hoping to get back up to the abbey on Monday. 0 for 2. The third try, however, was the charm. Just outside the city center was another beer shop that had what I was looking for. He had to go into the back to get it, but there it was: a label-less brown bottle with a cap bearing the Westvleteren 12 name and the Monk’s logo. Of course, I also bought the special goblet meant for drinking the beer. I figured I might as well go all out, it’s not every day you drink the best beer in the world, right?
So the mission was accomplished, I had finally found what I was looking for and all that was left between me and the beer was a day of sightseeing and 30 minutes of refrigeration. The nearly foamless, opaque brown nectar filled the glass perfectly, and went down as smooth as butter.
I’m not sure what was more enjoyable, the beer itself or the chase, but in the end, does it really matter?