The Wild Drink Blog

I’ve been meaning to go to Belgium for years now and do a really good beer tour, but Amsterdam provided me with more than a little taster of what spending an afternoon drinking some of the worlds best beers could be like.

The first pub which we went to was called De Bekeerde Suster, which translates to ‘The Converted Sister’, this is because back in 1554 nuns started making ‘beer’ on the site of this pub so as not to let their male bretherin have all the fun.

The first thing to understand about this pub is that it is one of only two brewpubs in Amsterdam, meaning they brew their own beer out the back.

Yes, that’s right, they brew their own. Usually around five different beers at any one time but the number changes seasonally. The beer is barreled then pumped through to the bar to be served. We tried a nice dark beer called The Crippled Monk which was absolutely lovely then a white beer called Witte Ros which was nice and refreshing after the heavier first one. Then we got hold of the beer menu, which included a listing of all the bottled beers. 5/6 Trappist breweries were represented on there but we went for Hoegaarden Verboden Vrucht (forbidden fruit) since it’s pretty much impossible to buy it in a pub in UK.

Needless to say it was bloody gorgeous.

The next day we were reccommended the other brewpub in Amsterdam called Brouwerij ‘t IJ‎, again fairly unique because it looks something like this…

And whilst in there, I look something like this…

I’m not going to lie and tell you about the subtle nuances of each and every beer we tried at the windmill, i’m not even going to tell you how many we tried, I really can’t remember. But suffice to say that the brewing of the beer is in part powered by the giant windmill and to be honest it’s more like a brewery with taps than a pub which brews beers. A great afternoon!