Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, September 21, 2009
Inspired in part by a couple of excellent Belgian beers (Duvel–also the name of our doughty little Schipperkee), I was thinking about the Gueuze, my favorite beer bar in Paris. So fond am I of this place, in fact, that it figures prominently in my novel The Adorations as a rendezvous place for Stefanie, my Austrian heroine, and her SS contact, during the (obviously) German occupation. The fact that the bar was founded in 1976 is neither here nor there; indeed, it makes it easier for me to claim such a place existed in the '40s. The name, after all, is no trademark, being simply a style of Belgian brewing, a double lambic, since you ask, in which the fermentation takes place au naturel, exposed to the wild hops of the Senne valley, rather than according to a precise recipe and industrial process indoors... or something. You could always look it up, as Will Rogers wa wont to say.