Have a drink!

A few weekends ago, on a Sunday around noon, I decided it would be nice to make pancakes for lunch. And what better way to enjoy waiting for the whiteish-yellow dough to turn yellowish-brown than by enjoying a beer on the side. So I grabbed a random one from the fridge and started lunch.

An hour later, as I was glad-wrapping the final few pancakes for dinner on Monday, I became aware of a slight tipsiness which didn't so much worry me as it confounded me. Maybe the milk had gone bad and was having an effect on my digestion / maybe this was the effect of a few nights of bad sleep? Maybe - no, surely it couldn't be the beer.

From a Belgian perspective, the initial interesting (and disturbing!) fact about beer in WV is that beer with more than 6% alcohol may not be sold. While this law is of course totally preposterous, meaningless and useless, it didn't bother me too much because a) I did not believe that any country other than Belgium can produce a good-tasting beer with high alcohol content and b) We happen to live 6 miles from Pennsylvania and a 45 minute drive from Maryland. (The law was most recently changed so that now it should be allowed, though the shops haven't caught up yet.)

The problem with Pennsylvania is (as I am told by the natives) that you can only buy beer by the case (or slab for you Australians - for everyone else: a 24-unit container), except for the really basic stuff like Budweiser (in which case you can buy 6-packs at bars, I'm told). So in order to get a taste of variety, Pennsylvania wouldn't be the right place to go. Hence, we teamed up with a couple of students and went on a "beer run" to Maryland. Hop across the border, buy an interesting-looking collection and hop back. As a consequence, my fridge has been filled with a quite intruiging (though currently dwindling) variety waiting to be tried ever since.

The random pick I drank while eating pancakes, happened to be a "Stoudts Triple". Now I know what you're thinking: Triple - that spells trouble. But really, the beer didn't taste like alchohol. In fact, it pretends to be a "Belgian Abbey-style Ale" and to my great surprise it smells, looks and tastes damn close to exactly that. Again, I feel a footnote is in place. Once you start paying attention, you'll find beers all over the world pretending to be "Belgian style" this or that. It's an easy trick to get sold: paste a label irrespective of whether you have anything to do with it or not. (On that topic: how many of you knew that the corporate headquarters of IKEA are in the Netherlands?) Anyway. Disappointment after disappointment has taught me to never expect a Belgian style beer to be Belgian style at all. I guess Stoudts finally proved me wrong. After checking the internet (for some reason that defies my logic, alcohol content is often not printed on the bottles or 6-packs), this specific brew was supposed to have 9% alcohol. On a Sunday at lunch with nothing but some pancakes. I guess that would explain some of the tipsiness. Joris - American Beer: 0 - 1.

But that's not where this ended. Oh no. If you thought getting drunk at noon was bad, hang on to your hat, worse is yet to come.

A week and a bit later - a quiet Tuesday evening I think it was - I sit down for my favourite passtime: reading a book with a nice beer as companion. Now since I was the only Belgian on the beer run, I felt morally obliged to buy just about all the Belgian beer that wasn't Leffe (since Leffe you can find anywhere). Consequentially, I happened to have a sampler pack of the (pretty much unheard of for all I know, but then I haven't lived in Belgium for nearly a decade) Petrus brewery - which is indeed, very Belgian.

My random pick that Tuesday evening left me with the "Aged Pale" of Petrus and to say the only positive comment I can devise, it was unlike any beer I've ever tried before. It was not, however, too different from the Slovenian apple vinegar my dad once bought in the vain hope of getting apple juice - the difference being that the Aged Pale tasted less of apple and more of vinegar. I never thought I'd see the day, but here it was: blunt and undeniably in front of me: the ultimate undrinkable (Belgian!) "beer". The struggle that went on in my head was terrifying in that it defied the only things I still believed in: the Belgian supremacy on the front of beer-making. If we cannot even have that, then what good can we do? (Well, I guess there's still chocolate?)

The dark side won. I chucked the vinegar down the sink after only the tiniest sip. And I took a Leinenkugel's 1888 Bock to replace it. Joris - American Beers: 0 - 2.


At this point I bluntly and openly admit defeat: Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic are not the only nations in the world to make good and varied beers (though the Czech republic doesn't necessarily do that, either). The U.S.A. knows quite a bit, too. I've had some really good wheat beers (which, again, say to be "Belgian style" and in fact they may well rival Hoegaarden, especially since this latter has now been absorbed into the Death Star called "InBev" - that's right: Hoegaarden and Budweiser are owned by the same company. Disgusting, isn't it?) I've tasted "Belgian Abbey-style beer" which actually emulates exactly what it set out to emulate. I'm really, honestly surprised by the variety - the many different brands, the different types available and the quite regularly recurring fact that these things actually taste right! And on top of that, I don't even think I've yet tried any of the beers Josh and Nick told me to look out for.

Living the good life

When I first arrived in Australia in 2004, it didn't take 12 hours before I was told of the drought and reminded to keep shower time down. In subsequent years, the concept of a filled bath tub became - slowly but surely - relegated to the realm of science fiction. And it doesn't look like this was just because of the few strange people I fell in with: after nearly four years in the country, I'm just about convinced that the nation - and especially the big cities - are obsessed with saving water.

Yet, water isn't where it ends. As the elections loomed and environmental concern reached the political agenda, televisions were struck with government-funded adds that seemed to have the single purpose of making us feel guilty of using any electricity at all: switch on lights, TVs, microwaves or alarm clocks and black balloons of doom would fill your house: the CO₂ is everywhere and it will kill you. (This purpose was of course secondary to trying to convince the electorate that Howard was good for them. As good as CO₂, if you ask me.)

Such guilt-ridden consumerism (aka the idea that anything beyond sitting in a cave is bad for the Earth and will destroy your kids and grandkids if not yourself), is of course nothing new to me: one doesn't have to live in an extremist-Calvinist community to be made aware of the dreadful things we do to our planet and how this will curse us in the end. As a point of illustration, one of the few things I remember from primary school is how we were told of the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest for the dual benefit of quick gain from tropical wood sales and opening up of cheap pastures to breed McDonalds-cows. I've been ingrained by obsessive-compulsive turning off of lights, closing of dripping taps and taking trains not cars. However, environmental concerns aren't the end of this, either: the government and lobby-groups go through quite some effort to push us into the correct straightjacket: extensive advertising campaigns have left me incapable of considering driving and drinking (however little) on the same night. It's an interesting life, which is guided by reflexes of guilt.


Down here, I haven't detected much of that. In contrast to the Australian balloons of doom, here I've seen car stickers praising the merits of coal ("coal forever!") and the secretary of the interior explains on prime-time television that limiting the consumption of coal is simply not something worth thinking about. Here, people have figured out that it's so much easier to go by car than by any other means, so why wouldn't we? And if you've had a few to drink - hey, as long as you know what you're doing and you've got a big enough 'truck' to feel safe, what could go wrong?

Don't worry about long showers or filling bath tubs - in fact, the shower knob doesn't even allow me to adjust the volume of water, so maybe a full-blown bath may be more economical after all! Also, you shouldn't feel obliged to fill your kitchen with fifteen different trash bags: just put it all in a single one, it isn't really your problem what happens to it, after all - that's why you pay bills for trash collection, right?

Another one: why would you go through the effort of buying groceries, cooking and doing dishes (or, rather, filling the dish washer) every day? Eating out is cheap, yummy and fast. Surely in a time and place where time is money, you'll just pop by Subway or KFC after work? There's no need to panick about refilling your drink during dinner, either - while in Belgium the biggest cost of eating out is often that second Coke you've ordered, in the US (or at least in Morgantown), refills are free.

In fact, to come down to the most nitty-gritty details: my age-old obsession with not choking the kitchen sink is rendered worthless by the mechanical cutter-device installed underneath. Drop anything you like down the sink, if it gets stuck you simply flick the switch and along with the whirring noise, the water level will drop again.


Of course the above is a bit of a caricature: I've seen water wasted in NSW and know plenty of Belgians who wouldn't give a light switch a second thought. On top of that, I've only lived here for 3 months so the few Americans I know and an out-of-context quote from the secretary of the interior may not really paint a convincing picture. But even so, I cannot escape the feeling that the USA isn't only pervaded with a feeling of opportunity and optimism, but also of an attitude to live the good life. And take it or leave it, there's a lot to be said in favour that.

Notes from a Tiny Country (that might become smaller yet)

Exactly a month ago, I left Australia to wither in its heat and went in search of long-lost cold and snowy winters. I'm glad to say I have been successful: it's been a long time since Belgium has seen the cold and snow we've had a few weeks ago. Having my head sufficiently protected from overheating, I even managed to continue writing my thesis - though there is of course no atmosphere to get work done like the one at work itself.

Besides the cold and the happy rediscovering of various family members and dogs, there was a fair amount of reacquainting with the homeland. From a distance of well over 10,000 km one does get some inkling about potential problems affecting the tiny suburban area wedged in between France, Germany and the Netherlands - but somehow I never expect the worst to happen; not to Belgium. After all, it's been a good 175 years now that we may have had our misunderstandings and believe we're all very different and so on, but surely in the end we'll have a beer and some fries and forget about those "troubles" until some later day. Besides, we've got Europe to worry about - and Brussels: what on Earth would we do about Brussels?

Maybe my lack of interest and confidence in the status quo were misplaced this time. Because looking at the political landscape - and talking to some of the people who cultivate that landscape - I'm starting to get the impression Flanders (i.e. the North) is simply put a mess. No one seems to trust anyone else anymore. Of the three political alliances that existed when I left four years ago, none have survived. Instead of one (I'll keep this clean) useless populist party, we now have two. Furthermore, recent polls indicate no less than five political parties would get between 10 and 20 percent of the vote in Flanders. To the best of my knowledge Flemish politics has never been as divided. (For all you statisticians: most likely this isn't just a fluke - there have been a few very similar polls.) So maybe the Flemish are -and will be- the main cause of the current Belgian ungovernability? (We haven't had a decent government since the elections in June 2007.) And maybe I'm not the only one who thinks so. Some (semi-?)official Walloon (i.e. from the South) bodies are already investigating the relative merits of becoming independent or joining France.

In all of this Machiavellian politics, it's nice to see a light rise in the West. As you all know, Obama was inaugurated yesterday. Apparently that doesn't mean the Belgian pubs suddenly change their tradition and turn on the television (a concept that has been tried and tested in the Anglo-Saxon world, but that hasn't quite taken off on Belgian soil just yet), but the continent did take notice. After years of chauvinistic Eurocentric anti-Americanism, we seem to once again place hope in our younger brother across the Atlantic.