Lovin' in Leuven

Today we took a train to Leuven. Leuven is the home of the Stella Artois Brewery which is part of the largest brewing company in the world but we had decided not to go there, and to go to Den Domas instead. Den Domas is a small brewery in a college town—they don’t bottle any of their beers, they only go to the tap in the bar. They also use a mechanism that uses carbon dioxide to pump the beer from where it is stored inside a giant plastic bag of sorts into the tap—sort of similar to wine in a box. The tour guide told us that they have two primary beers and a holiday beer. One of their primary beers is a student beer (since they are in a college town) called Con Domas. I really wished that they sold merchandise because I wanted something that said “practice safe drinking” on one side and “Con Domas” on the other.

After the tour and tasting, we had two hours to wander around Leuven. None of us really seemed to know what there was in Leuven to do, so we ate some food, and then just wandered. Jenna, Emma, and I just walked around until we found coffee in a place with a bathroom. The girl at the counter spoke really good English and when we asked her about it, she explained that tv and movies in English don’t get voiced-over into Flemish since it’s not a common language and instead they watch their English shows in English with Flemish subtitles! I never thought about that before but I bet if all of our tv shows were in a different language we would be multi-lingual as well! After our coffee (or my hot chocolate) and our new bit of information, we just wandered through shops until it was time to meet again. I had some fun wandering around an entertainment sort of shop—basically movies and cds and books—and seeing what was translated into Flemish and what was left in English. I thought about buying something but I figured I would wait until we were back in Brussels when I could get something in French—at least then I’d have a fighting chance of understanding. When we got back to Brussels, Michael and I worked on our beer recipe (for part of the class). We struggled a bit trying to come up with some inspiration, but originally decided on a different take on a wheat beer like the one we had brewed when we first started the class. We settled on using some light malt extract for the base, along with some caramel Munich malt and some Belgian wheat. We also switched it up a bit and went with Czech Saaz hops for bittering and Cascade hops for aroma. Our original wheat beer had coriander seed and orange peel which we used, but we also wanted to add a tiny bit of lemon peel since many wheat beers, like hefeweizen, come with a lemon slice! The final ingredient was, of course, Belgian Ale yeast. The hardest part of making our own beer style was coming up with a name. We kept playing around with different ingredients and styles as part of the name, and since it is a blond ale of sorts, we decided on the name “The Busty Blonde”. I’m sure if it was a real beer it would have a heck of a label.

After our beer recipe was complete, I settled in to finally finish the book that I had started on the plane, “One for the Money”. My mom has read through the eighteenth book in the series so I had finally decided to start on the first one and I’m so glad I did. What a great book! I’m so ready to read the next one. Anyway, back to Europe… we went out to dinner at the same Italian restaurant we were at the other night for pizza again and it was still as delicious as before. Now I’ve settled in for the night while others are taking advantage of the last few nights in Europe. Tomorrow we go to Bruges for the day which is our tour guide’s hometown so I’m sure we will get to see the best stuff that most tourists are unaware of! Á bientôt!