IMoL Brasserie de Blaugies (the beers at Whole Foods I never bought)

I've walked in and out of the Whole Foods cooler in Plymouth Meeting a few times.  Maybe that's an understatement.  I'll never tell.  I feel like every time I've walked out, I've seen bottles from de Blaugies on a high shelf in a corner, and have only given them the slightest of glances.  While searching to procure beers available both in the Greater Philadelphia market, as well as in Paris, France, eventually, Basserie de Blaugies came up.  I think mostly because of their collaboration with Hill Farmstead (which I haven't been able to find locally, but apparently is falling off of the shelves in Belgium.)  On a recent trip to Belgium, Party Number 2 was able to grab a few bottles from de Blaugies, and I took it upon myself to dust off some of those on the high shelf at the Whole Foods.  We're starting with La Moneuse.  And here we are...

International Men of Leisure; the one with the different label

This month, and boy did we ever cut it close, we take a look at a beer brewed by Brouwerij De Molen out of the Netherlands.  In an extremely roundabout way, we finally tripped into a great story about the way a beer gets marketed/sold in Europe, and how differently it has to be sold in the US.

De Molen is fairly prevalent in Europe, and brew a quantity of beers that rival any brewery in the States (side note: Untappd lists 58 different beers.)  In the US, they are imported by Shelton Brothers.  Always on the lookout for a brand that is sold in France as well as the US for IMOL, De Molen has come up on several occasions.  You can sometimes spot them at Whole Foods, I've seen a bunch in Delaware at Total Wine, and they had a killer selection at State Line in Elkton MD.  But for the longest time, when I was comparing pictures of the De Molen beers on Parisian shelves to what was available here, I was just not finding a match.  Enter a podcast from Good Beer Hunting (GBH,) and it started to make sense.  Most of the hoppy beers that De Molen brews don't make their way to the states.  For obvious reasons, they are much better beers without the miles, and consumed closer to the brewery.  And one brand, their Russian Imperial Stout Rasputin, had to be renamed here.  So every time I perused a shelf of De Molen beers, looking for Rasputin, I could never find it.  Until it was pointed out to me that the beer's named Cease & Desist in the States.  Thanks a lot North Coast Brewing.  So Entry Three in the IMOL blog is an identical beer, with two completely different names.

IMOL Double Dips in Episode Three...

International Men of Leisure inexplicably were not able to make a January date work for our monthly conference call.  Apologies.  All of them.   But in the end, that means you get two reviews of beers that range from somewhat interesting to extremely interesting.  First up, we drinking the same IPA, brewed by the same company, in two different breweries, neither of which is their flagship brewery in California.  That's a lot of commas, but you'll get the idea, I promise.  Also, we visit a Swedish beer that was developed around the dream of a 12 year old to become a pastry chef.  You're interested now, aren't you?

Before we get into the beer, a reminder that this exercise is for me, and my good handsome friend in Paris, to find identical beers and then discuss them.  Where are they from?  How did they get there?  Did travel have an effect on them?  Are they marketed differently?  Are we tasting the same things?  Stuff like that.  Let's get to the beers...

Things J Glenn Gave Me...

I have pretty good friends.  I have really great friends.  My friends are ridiculous.  So because of a New Years Eve takeaway, and one of said friends swimming in a bounty of Badgerland goodies, I'm currently staring at a champagne flute filled with New Glarus Raspberry Tart.

New Glarus has always been kind of an enigma to me.  My first experience with them was at the Great American Beer Fest, sipping amazingly rare, tart, weird beers out of a 1 ounce tasting glass.  It's one of few lines at a festival with hundreds and hundreds (last I was there over 600, in 2017 over 700) of breweries that you may try to get back in to two or three times.  Their beers are amazing.  And different, which is probably more important.  If you want a great pilsner, and live in the Philly area, you're swimming in quality PA choices.  Same with a nice pale ale.  With IPA, there's still some pretty fantastic local ones, as well as a treasure chest of world class imports.  There also a brewery in Ardmore that's setting the bar for NE IPA.  But there's nothing close to Serendipity, or Raspberry Tart in the area, and unless you have a friend who's sister moved to Wisconsin, or are regularly trading the Tired Hands beers I mentioned previously with someone in that area, you're out of luck.