Christmas comes this time each year // A glass of Gordon Xmas at the Saint Nicolas café
“Well way up North where the air gets cold
There's a tale about Christmas
That you've all been told
And a real famous cat all dressed up in red
And he spends the whole year workin' out on his sled…”*
The leatherbound menu at the café Le Saint Nicolas says in scrawled-in biro that they’ve a special Christmas beer on tap. What it actually says is that the beer changes every year so you’ve to ask which one it is. Only, when I do go and ask the elderly man shuffling around behind the bar, he doesn’t pull a glass under one of the tap fonts but turns away and pulls out a bottle of Gordon Xmas from a fridge behind him.
Just up the road I could be sitting in the back bar of the Mokcafé drinking a freshly tapped chalice of rich, beautiful, russet Bush de Noël. But instead I’m here, assenting to the offer of a treacly bottle of the original Belgian Christmas beer, my first of the holiday season, at the most Christmassy bar in Brussels. What has this country - this city - done to me? I used to hate Christmas.
I must have walked past Le Saint Nicolas, on the narrow Little Butter Street just downhill from Brussels’ Grand Place, innumerable times and never noticed it. The café is opposite the compact St Nicolas church, and its entrance is overshadowed by the large rainbow flag hanging outside a neighbouring LGBT bar. Whether it was named for the church or the Greek saint who delivers pepernoten and mandarins to good Low Countries children in early December is immaterial, because the owners have leaned fully into the latter as Le Saint Nicolas’ overriding leitmotif. A sign hanging over the entrance has Sinterklaas in white beard and red mitre painted on it, and the rest of the bar takes its cue from there.
There’s a plush foot-high Sint statue behind the bar, and alongside the enamel signs advertising Chimay and Brugse Zot on the walls are engravings, sketches, and watercolours depicting Saint Nicolas in various festive tableaux. Faded Orthodox icons hang alongside felt nutcracker figurines and at the back of the bar, opposite a bleached tapestry, is a triptych of glass cabinets - a bible in one, a mitre with matching white gloves in another, and a the wooden mould of a speculaas Sint in the third. A small blackboard on the mantelpiece near my table has the wifi code written on it in white chalk: ZWARTEPIET.
The café’s geometry - long and narrow, with raised tables opposite the bar and small four-seater booths down the back - feels out of place with its more squat, boxy neighbours. It feels out of time too, somewhere that was forgotten in Brussels’ rush to blandify the city centre for out-of-towners. It isn’t quiet - the radio balring Lana Del Ray sees to that - but there is a subduedness to the place that belies its location barely 50 metres from the wooden shacks of the city’s Christmas market. The combination of pulsing red-and-green disco lights and glitterball scattering a stereoscopic yuletide lightshow across the bar only adds to the off-kilter atmosphere.
Being out of space and time, the tourists have left Le Saint Nicolas largely to the locals, and from my vantage point at a table near the toilets, everyone else looks like a regular. Two men arrive in, swaddled in scarves and thick coats, sharing a hug and an easy camaraderie with the boss. A huddle of Dutch-speaking lads at the bar engage them in a bit of back and forth, but the two groups, and the Romanian family sat nearby, keep largely to themselves. I am, judging by the cups of coffee and the Jupilers, the only one drinking with the season.
Before I moved to Belgium, I’d have scoffed at the idea of going to a Chrtistmas-themed pub like Le Saint Nicolas for a Christmas-themed beer like Gordon Xmas, even as some kind of expression of annoying millennial irony. I used to hate Christmas. I used to hate having to remember whether this was the year I was spending Christmas with my dad in Kerry and New Year’s with my mum in Cork, or vice versa. I hated that, either way, I’d miss out on crucial events in the social calendar of small-town Irish teenagers - illicit drinking pre-midnight mass, or the wren boys and a day in the pub on Stephens’ Day, or New Year’s Eve roaming the town aimlessly until someone set off fireworks at midnight. When we stayed at my mother’s we’d often be joined by my Dublin grandad, and him being a lifelong teetotaler booze didn’t feature prominently in the festivities - save for the ceremonial dousing and lighting of the Chrtistmas pudding. Later, when I was older and of the age when hating things was a creative substitute for a personality, I kept on hating Christmas even after the familiar toing and froing had ended. I was also, as my mother would attest if she was still alive, a terrible person to buy gifts for, and a terrible person at receiving them.
But in the years since I moved to Belgium my views on Christmas have mellowed, and I’ve managed to slough off some of those childhood neuroses. I’ve been able to make a new kind of Christmas for myself, keeping the parts of an Irish Christmas I liked (the films, the real tree, stocking fillers), dropping the bits I didn’t (the christmas cake, visiting relatives, strained family conversations, and embracing some Belgian ones too. Traditions like the arrival of the Sint on December 6, dinner on Christmas Eve, and Belgian Christmas beers.
Are they the pinnacle of Belgium’s brewing tradition? Probably not. Are they less a style than a philosophy of beer? Probably. Belgian Christmas beers may be a disparate, idiosyncratic collective, but at their best they are among my favourite Belgian beers tout court. They have so much going for them. Lots of alcohol. Lots of sugar. A colour palette ranging anywhere from the burnt amber of a Bush de Noël or a Stille Nacht to the obsidian of a Gouden Carolus Christmas. These are rich, dense, absorbing beers honed for warming a cold winter night. The best of them aren’t doused in yuletide, but instead are redolent of chewy overripe stone fruits, Haribo banana foams, melted liquorice, the deep forest forest fruit flavours of a boozy plum pudding without the unpleasant texture of a boiled dessert.
Gordon Xmas may have been the progenitor of the tradition in Belgium, but it is not its best representative. Gordon’s is one-dimensional, but what a dimension. It looks as it tastes: liquid bastaardsuiker, like the charred edges of sugary crème brulée. But it has what other Christmas beers have, a deceptive drinkability. One is enough to set you up for the night, two and your legs will begin to wobble. Three, with the disco lights and the loud music and the cranked up central heating, and you’d be verging on an out-of-body psychedelic experience.
I’m only halfway down my glass and already I can feel its Christmas mischief at work, the muscles in my legs unclenching, the tendons and ligaments loosening just a little. In my belly is tingling warmth.
But it is still only the afternoon, and I’ve still got to go to the football and make dinner at home. So it’ll only be the one for me this time. I know that by the time I get to the bottom of the thistle-shaped glass, I’ll be heavy legged but jolly. I won’t stand up too quickly for fear my legs are wobblier than they appear. I’ll wave off the old barman with a smile and a festive “Merci!”, pass under the beneficent gaze of the Sint, and wait for my ruddy face to be hit with the pungent whiff of hot wine and fatty wurst as I cross the threshold.
*With apologies to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys
As it’s Christmas, and as I haven’t posted much on the blog in recent months, here’s a little present below: an article I wrote for Ferment magazine a few years back on the origins and history of the Belgian Christmas beer tradition. Enjoy it, and see you all in the new year.
Rockin' Around the Christmas Beer
The enduring pleasures - and pitfalls - of Belgium’s Christmas beer tradition
Originally published at Ferment Magazine
It was the train shuffling away from the platform at Brussel Central that jolted me out of my nap, altering me to the fact that I had only one station left ahead of me if I was to get off the train in the correct city, Belgium’s capital and the place I’ve called home for a decade. In my defence, it’s a long journey down from the Belgian-Dutch border town of Essen, and falling asleep on public transport is an occupational hazard for beer festival attendees.
Because, as well as being the last Belgian station on railway to The Netherlands, Essen is also home to what could be the most idiosyncratic, rambunctious, and festive beer festival in the country - the Kerstbierfestival. Every December, thousands of people make their way to Essen’s Heuvelhal for two days of celebrating Belgium’s rich Christmas beer tradition. It’s a festival at which the average ABV of the beers on offer teeters somewhere around 10%, so what other option was there for a post-festival like myself than to sink slowly into a yule-inspired fugue state as I rumbled home towards Brussels.
Yuletide traditions
Belgium’s beer reputation is almost defined by its odd edges, unconventional brewers and their unconventional beers, and the curious traditions that have emerged from the country’s brewing culture. This is after all the country that maintained a monastic brewing tradition long after others had abandoned it. It is a country possessing a formal Knighthood of the Brewers’ Paddle, a modern descendent of the medieval brewers guilds and one which bestows gold medals to the country’s brewing worthies.
Christmas beers - Kerstbieren in Dutch, and Bières de Noël in French - and Essen’s Kerstbierfestival are just one more thread in Belgium’s rich brewing tapestry. Belgium is not alone in having a tradition of strong, dark, often spiced, beers brewed for the yuletide festivities; Scandinavians have their Juleøl, Germany its Weihnachtsbier, and England has its Winter Warmers. In fact, the Belgian Christmas beer tradition as we know it today owes its origins not to any indigenous Christmas brewing heritage from the Low Countries, but to their English (or, more often, Scottish) brewing counterparts across the Channel.
Scotch Ales become Christmas Ales
In the early 1900s, English beers were hugely popular with a Belgian drinking class that desired bright, clear, fresh, and modern beers that local brewers were not in the business of brewing. Already advertised in local papers before World War I, after Armistice in 1918 the Belgian obsession with British beers grew exponentially. And alongside adverts for Whitbread Stouts and Pale Ales, you could find notices for Mac Ewans Scotch, Double Scotch Ale and - depending on the time of year - Old Scotch Christmas Ale.
By the 1930s and into the 1940s Belgian brewers had begun brewing domestic rivals to these foreign imports, or were commissioning breweries in Scotland to brew something specifically for the Belgian market. Drinkers found themselves in a situation where they could drink a glass of Navy’s Christmas Ale, brewed in Brussels, or Gordon’s X-mas brewed in Edinburgh for the beer importer John Martin. A century later, Gordon’s survives, although it is now brewed in Belgium, and is what could be accepted as standard example of the Christmas Ale style: dark and strong, intensely sweet with muted hop character, often (but not always) spiced, and malt-forward with a very light roast. Perhaps the most famous Belgian Christmas Ale to emerge in the post-war period proved so popular that it escaped its seasonal release to become a year-round blockbuster for the monks responsible for its production. Chimay Bleue, the darkly enticing flagship of the Chimay Trappist brewery, started its life as a seasonal Bière de Noël in 1948, before it was released year-round in 1954.
In and out of style
It’s not hard to see the familial connection between the Double Scotch Ales of John Martin and Chimay. But curious drinkers thinking a template for Belgian Christmas beers was set in the first half of the 20th century and stuck to dogmatically ever since are failing to consider the eccentricities of Belgium's brewers. Belgian brewers by their nature are averse to rigid categorisation; ask them in what category they might place this or that beer of theirs and they may create a style all their own, or more likely say they brew to no style specification but instead brew what they like and it is up to others to categorise the beer. It’s no coincidence that it took a foreigner - beer writer Michael Jackson - to coral the country’s cornucopia of beers into still-fluid style designations. Christmas beers are no exception. Qualifying a beer as a Christmas ale is less a process of ticking of certain characteristics than it is a question of identity (Yuletide iconography and/or name) and availability (the period running up to and through Christmas and the New Year). This is why beers as diverse as Brouwerij De Ranke’s Père Noël, amber, bitter, and 7% ABV, and the dark, boozy, fruity St. Bernardus Christmas Ale can sit side by side on the tap list of the Essen Kerstbierfestival.
Silent Night, Holy Beer
There is perhaps no better example of the fluidity around the Belgian Christmas beer categorisation than perhaps the most-garlanded and obsessed-over of all Belgium’s festive brews: Stille Nacht from Flemish brewery De Dolle Brouwers. Ostensibly a Strong Belgian Pale Ale at 12% ABV, the beer is instantly recognisable for its label with the rotund brewery (whose name means “The Mad Brewers”) mascot Oerbier man in a snowy, Christmas landscape. The beer is brewed every year for the holiday season, and no two editions are exactly alike. It’s complexity, strength and fruity aromatics have ensured the beer has been crowned “best Christmas beer” on multiple occasions at the Kerstbierfestival’s annual awards, and the beer rarely drops out of the top ten. The beer - the name of which is Dutch for “Silent Night” - has garnered an obsessive online following, stimulated both by the quality of the beer, but also the variety of each yearly edition and the evolution of those beers as they age over time in their bottles.
There are few people better placed to rhapsodise about the merits of Stille Nacht than Jezza G (who goes by the twitter handle @BonsVoeux1, and prefers to speak anonymously to keep his beer and professional lives separate). “Nothing else comes close,” he says of Stille Nacht’s reputation relative to the country’s other Christmas beers. He first came across it on a trip to Bruges in 1998 and was, he says, “blown away” by it. “[My] first impressions [were], this is different. This is strong. This is amazing! [It] needs to be treated with respect. Who are these Mad Brewers anyway?…So Christmas beers are a thing then?”
Supercharged Tripels from crazy brewers
He is fascinated by how the beer has morphed over time from the slightly sour-ish 8% dark ale that he first discovered to what he describes now as a 12% blond-ish “super charged Tripel on steroids”. And it is the anticipation of how each new vintage will differ (or not) from the previous one that keeps him coming back. “I am expecting 2020 Stille Nacht to be up there with the 2017 [edition],” Jezza says. “[I] Can’t wait to try it, and this anticipation of what might appear this year is one of those great features of the beer. While it’s not that different a recipe, I think, with relatively few actual tweaks, whether they’ve nailed it each year has a major impact on its quality. And that adds to its appeal.”
Jezza is (or was, until Covid-19 intervened) a regular attendee at Essen’s Kerstbierfestival, where he gets to indulge his passion in both draught and bottled format. To get in alongside Stille Nacht, the only qualifying criteria are that entries are described by their breweries as Christmas beers, and they are brewed in Belgium. A 230-strong at the 2019 edition is evidence enough that interest in Christmas beers has risen alongside Belgium’s brewing revival in the past decade, in a category that received little coverage in Jackson’s totemic Great Beers of Belgium. It’s also a list with some curious entries. In an interesting synthesis of Belgian and Scandinavian yuletide traditions, Danish breweries To Øl and Mikkeller are well-represented, given their beers are made an hour’s drive from Essen at the De Proefbrouwerij contract brewery outside Ghent.
It is a weekend of raucous crowds sat at long rows of communal tables, gathered under the banners of local and international breweries, Santa hats and reindeer antlers well-represented. “It’s a great event,” Jezza says. “Friendly, extremely well organised, [with an] amazing range of big, dark winter beers…And when it snows, as it did - heavily, in 2010 - it provides the perfect Christmas event!” He’s been to 15 of the last 18 festivals, and 2020 would have been his 16 if Covid-19 had not intervened and the festival was cancelled. He describes it as an annual end-of-year reunion, a chance to meet with old friends from around the world and indulge in a shared passion for strong, characterful Belgian beers.
It’s a passion - shared by brewers and drinkers alike - that the current uncertainty is likely only to postpone rather than extinguish altogether, and the festival’s organisers are already putting plans together to bring everyone back to Essen for two days of the best of Belgium’s Christmas brewing tradition in 2021. Ready again to send merry attendees off into the chilly December night with a wobble in their step, and a heaviness in their head, primed for a well-earned festive snooze as their train winds its way through the frosty Belgian countryside.