I promise not every blog I do will involve Belgian beer, but I just saw this when I walked into my brewery this morning and it got me excited.  It’s the Cannibal in a very active fermentation.  It got me thinking about how I’ll soon have a bottle of the Cannibal signed by the Cannibal himself.

For those of you who don’t know, this beer has a story behind it.  I’m a bike nut and I’ve always wanted to name a beer after the Cannibal, partly because I think it’s a cool name for a beer and partly because he’s one of my heroes.  The Cannibal by the way is Eddy Merckx, a Belgian who raced in the 60s and 70s and whom many consider the greatest cyclist in history.  He’s kind of the the Pele or Babe Ruth of cycling.  He was called the Cannibal because he was said to devour his opponents.  Basically if you were in a race and Eddy Merckx showed up you were now racing for second place.

So we made this strong Belgian beer in tribute to a strong Belgian rider.  We also brewed it in celebration of the Tour De France and the bike club Iron Hill founded.  This beer always goes on tap on the first day of the Tour and stays on tap through the Champs de L’elysee.  We also save a keg that we break out every year at our thank you party for the organizers of the Iron Hill Twilight Criterium.  So this beer is pretty steeped in cycling culture.

Anyhow I’m excited to say that by now Merckx has probably enjoyed a couple of his namesake beers!  A couple of years ago I made a friend in Denver who runs a cycling clothing company.  After several discussions about beer and bikes and how well they go together I came to learn that Brian works with Eddy Merckx.  A couple of weeks after having seen him at the Great American Beer Fest he e-mailed me to let me know that he’d told Eddy about the beer and that he thought it was cool.  Brian asked if he could bring some bottles to him next time he went to Belgium.  Of course! I was excited enough to know that Eddy would be drinking the Cannibal but was even more thrilled when Brian asked if I had anything I wanted autographed.  So I sent a couple of Cannibal labels along with him to get signed!

Anyhow the latest batch of the Cannibal is bubbling away right now.  What we don’t bottle in early April will be going on tap in the restaurant.  I hope to see you at the bar so we can toast a legend!

Oh and the beer itself?  It’s golden and light bodied, but complex and 7.2% alcohol.  It uses the Duvel yeast which gives it a bright tropical fruit nose and dry spicy finish.  It also won us a gold medal at the Great American Beer Fest and a silver at the World Beer Cup.

Cheers,

Chris

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for making this year’s BCTWC a huge success.  All in all we drank 150 gallons of beer from 18 different breweries and 6 Iron Hill locations.  I want to thank everyone who showed up including all of the beer writers and bloggers. 

I also owe a ton to all of the brewer’s who participated and really went out of their way to make this event special.  A lot of these breweries sent beers that they made just for this event.  Plus they show up!  That’s one of the things that makes this event special is looking around the room and seeing how much talent there is in this area.  If the roof caved in in the middle of it Philadelphia would no longer be America’s best beer drinking city!

And most of all thanks to the Iron Hill staff for all of their hard work and cool heads in the face of hundreds of thirsty beer fans.  I’ve never seen our back bar this busy and our crew didn’t even flinch!  True pros. 

If you missed it this year put it on your calander for next year.  As always it will be on the Saturday before Superbowl weekend.  I’m pretty excited for next year because instead of running around and changing kegs all night I’ll be here as a guest drinking the beer.  More about the reason for that later!

Thanks again everyone.

Cheers,

Chris

It’s that time of year again!  This Saturday at 1 pm we’ll kick off our third anual “Belgium Comes to West Chester” celebration of locally made Belgian style beers.  As always this is the biggest one yet.  This year we’ll be featuring more than 27 American-made Belgian style beers from 17 guest breweries and six Iron Hill locations.

I love this event because it’s completely unique.  Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got a lot of great fests in the Philadelphia area and of course we have a ton of great beer bars and brewpubs serving a variety of beer.  When I say unique I mean I can’t think of any event where you can get 22 Belgian style beers that were all made in different locations within a 30 mile radius.  The only beers we’ll be serving that aren’t from the tri-state area are east coast breweries that I have friends working at.  In other words I don’t just pick up the phone and call the distributor for this event.

We’ll have one-offs (Harpoon’s Wild Hibernian, PBC’s Walt Whitever, Yard’s Belgian IPA), world premiers (Flying Fish Imperial Belgian Mild) and stuff that doesn’t often leave its brewpub of origin (General Lafayette, Nodding Head, McKenzie’s, Stewart’s etc).  Can you tell I’m excited? If you’re not, read up on some of last year’s reviews of the event.

So hope to see you there.  Shoot me an e-mail if you have any questions about the event.  I hope to have a PDF of the menu up on this blog by the end of the day. In the meantime there’s a list of the beers we’ll be serving on Saturday below my signature.

Cheers!

Chris