This week we are drinking a couple of Trappist Ales (we just posted on this very subject). Since we are interested in people being able to participate in the process of drinking the beers that we post, we are picking a Trappist Ale that most people are able to get. The Chimay Red, White, and Blue are the most common Trappist Ales that are available to the American consumer. As a secondary choice, we are picking Rochefort 10, which is maybe the third most common beer (Orval being the second).
Please try to drink one or both of these beers with us on Friday. It would be a shame if you never tried a Trappist Ale. We will provide some links to these breweries when we review these beers. Check it out!
What size bottle? Magnum? Jeroboam?
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Whatever size you feel like. I usually buy a single 11.2 bottle if I can. Get whatever bottle you feel would be enough to get a good taste of the beer.
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I think the bigger the better for “BIG Tex!”
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I usually get the 750 mL bottles of Chimay. Love the stuff. Once had the privilege of sampling some from one the 1.5L magnums when I lived in Austin (They had Magnums for $30 & Jeroboams for $75). Utterly delightful! I believe it had been aged about a year, and was rather smooth. It certainly mellowed. I certainly recommend acquiring one of these rather large bottles and sharing it with some good buddies. Cheers!
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I’ll search for the big bottle tomorrow! Do you have a blog by chance?
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No, I don’t blog, I just hang out in the comboxes. I’m never short on opinions, mind you, but I just haven’t found time to devote to blogging, let alone figure out what I’d write about.
Re: the “big blue” from Chimay, I had a devil of a time finding that size bottle. Plenty of stores would order it for me, but they wanted me to purchase the entire order (6) at the time. Just wasn’t in my budget. I ended up calling around to different stores and the distributor to find a place that ordinarily stocked them. Good luck on the search!
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Thanks for the heads up…the beer selection around here isn’t great, so I suppose I’ll have a more difficult time finding the magnum.
I am really glad you stopped by here…how did you end up here? Through mark Shea’s blog? Let the opinions flow! I’ll look forward to drinking some chimay with you tonight!
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Yes, it was Mark Shea’s blog that pointed me this way. I figured a blog named “Thank Heaven for Beer” has got to have something good going for it.
Incidentally, my local homebrew shop is called Homebrew Heaven.
I almost always have an opinion on beer and brewing. Some people might say I’m a bit obsessed, but I prefer to think that I am just a devoted hobbyist.
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Yes! We are “obsessed,” too. I think we should just admit it. It’s a bit like a pessimist calling him or herself a realist.
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