Month: September 2020

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined it possible, but here I am, drinking a beer with Michael Jackson.

Yes, the Michael Jackson.

Not the late pop singer, of course, but the world’s foremost expert on Belgian beer.

[Author’s Note: Jackson died in 2007, 4 years after I wrote this piece.]

Michael Jackson was well-known in the beer world as a pioneer in studying and writing about beer, long before the craft beer era. He wrote 16 books, translated into 21 languages, the most famous being The Great Beers of Belgium, first published in 1991. He received honors in Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Finland, the United States, and Belgium, where he has been honored by the Royal Family and the Belgian Confederation of Brewers. 

In case you are not aware, beer is big in Belgium.  This small country is a hotbed of beer brewing with over 200 breweries, which produce around 800 different beers in 50 to 60 styles.  Since the 12^th century brewers throughout Belgium have created beers that run the gamut from the more “usual” types of beer to many that are sweet, spicy, sour, nutty, fruity, chocolaty, wine-like, strong, or flowery.  Where else but Belgium can you taste a peach or raspberry beer or some that contain 12% alcohol?  You might say that the high regard given to fine wines in many countries is bestowed upon beers in Belgium.  And to add to each beer’s individuality, each is served in its own unique glass, with the brand imprinted on it and shaped to accentuate the beer’s characteristics. Some are shaped like brandy snifters, some are flutes, and others are wineglass-shaped.  (When presented at the table, the server scrupulously turns the beer logo on the glass to face the drinker.)  You never see anyone drinking a beer from the bottle – except perhaps at a trendy bar for twenty-somethings, featuring the latest craze from the U.S., like Corona or Coors Light.

In Belgium, beer and religion are often intertwined – Belgium has a saint of Brewing, Saint Arnold of Soissons.  Belgian brewers pay homage to St. Arnold each year in a worship service in Brussels, culminated by a processional to the Grand Place, in which the brewers are robed as the Chevalerie du Fourquet – the Knights of the Mashing Fork.  A number of beers are brewed by monasteries and religious orders.  In fact, there are five Trappist monasteries in Belgium that have commercial breweries, run by monks, and protected by a Belgian official designation as “Trappist” breweries.  Others associated with religious orders are called “abbey” breweries.  In addition to the dozens of beers named after saints and religious orders, there are some named from the darker side of religion, such as the brands Satan, Lucifer, Judas, and Duvel (Devil).  Some have otherwise interesting names like Deliriens Tremens and Mort Subite(Sudden Death).

Summary:  Belgians take their beer very seriously. This is more so in terms of quality than quantity – They rank fifth in per capita consumption, behind Germany, Ireland, Denmark and Austria.

Another feature of this beer-saturated culture are the numerous annual beer festivals held across the country.  A typical festival features booths by many of the breweries, where their regular brews and the occasional new offering are showcased.  Some festivals are open-air events and others are held inside, but all have tables spread around the area, where crowds of patrons gather to sample beers and chat with others.  As the festival progresses, the crowd expands (in number and girth), and the mood becomes, shall we say, more convivial, as the sampling continues.  Ruddy-cheeked brewery representatives mill around, singing, drinking and greeting people.  Mostly middle- aged men, they parade around in a variety of costumes and robes, some resembling university professors at a graduation ceremony, if professors at graduation were to carry around gigantic goblets or bottles of beer. 

There are sometimes small brass bands that wander around playing.  Many sound as if their musicians started their musical careers only recently.  They stop in front of selected booths to play a few spirited numbers, after which the musicians quaff a beer from that brewery.  My presumption is that these are “beer bribes” that the breweries are happy to provide in exchange for the attention it brings in their direction.  The bands move around frequently to maximize their exposure (and alcohol intake).

But back to Michael Jackson…

Cheryl and I have driven to the Wallonian city of Tournai for the night to experience their annual beer festival.  It is June, a cool and rainy Friday night opening at the festival, with only a smattering of patrons milling around the high-ceilinged community hall on the town square.  Quite frankly, I am disappointed and a little underwhelmed with the turnout and the energy level in the place.  While standing at a book table perusing a copy of the book Michael Jackson’s Great Beers of Belgium, I glance across the large room and see a distinctive-looking gentleman, dressed in rumpled sport coat, baggy khakis, beer motif tie and sporting a frizzy head of hair.  My eyes move back and forth several times from the back cover photo to this man before I realize that it is indeed the author in the flesh! 

Remarkably, this celebrity of sorts is standing alone in a corner, and I cannot resist walking over to introduce myself.  We strike up a conversation, and he is polite and personable. (Probably thinking to himself, “Oh, no – another beer festival groupie.”)  But then he asks where I am grew up, and I mention Plano, Texas, and he says, “Oh, yes, Plano.  Let’s see, several years ago, I was on an island in Scotland on a tour of whisky distilleries but was simultaneously the guest on a call-in radio show in Dallas (by mobile phone), and a caller asked where in the area he could find [a certain obscure Belgian beer].  I told him he could definitely find it at [obscure Plano, Texas beer store].”  I am really impressed by his photographic memory and flattered that he knows of my hometown 5000 miles away.

After a few minutes, he says, “Well, it’s time for me to go to work – Join me if you’d like.”  “Work”, I figure out, is to do research for the next edition of his Belgian Beer Bible.  So he consults a little spiral-bound notebook, scans the brewers’ booths, finds his target and heads off in that direction.  What the heck, I think, and follow him across the room.

We walk up to the selected booth, where the brewer, a man of around fifty, introduces himself and places two small glasses of his beer on the counter in front of us.  I gulp mine, stifling a belch, which should have immediately blown my cover as a beer connoisseur.  By contrast, Mr. Jackson takes tiny sips, swirling, slurping, smacking and smelling and generally savoring that little six ounces of unique Belgian beer.  He pauses to ask questions on the type of hops, fermentation specifics, and grain mixtures, jotting notes in his little notebook.  The brewer watches nervously for any signs of approval or disapproval, scanning Mr. Jackson’s face and discreetly trying to see what he is writing in that little notebook.  After all, a favorable mention in his book could mean greatly increased sales and notoriety for a local or regional brewery.

The brewer turns away and returns with two more small glasses of a second variety of beer. (He has three or four in his repertoire.)  He places them before us, eyes darting between the two of us, and it now dawns on me that he thinks I am with Michael Jackson (assistant, agent, partner, fashion coach — whatever).  And for the life of me, I can think of no compelling reason to disabuse him of the notion.  So I go through an instant persona shift.  I begin to sip slowly, hold my glass up to the light, nodding thoughtfully with furrowed brow.  This continues at another booth, until some festival dignitaries come to whisk the celebrity away to a dinner and press conference.  So, left standing before the brewer, I smile, nod, give a hearty thumbs up and stride off authoritatively. 

I decide that I’ve had my peak experience for the night, so I wander off to locate my longsuffering spouse, who is happily reading a book at a table in the corner, sipping a cherry beer, and we head down the street to our hotel.

My chance meeting with Michael Jackson was a memorable serendipitous experience.  In spite of my brush with Belgian beer fame, though, I’m not really motivated to become more of an expert on the subject.  Like art, I know what I like, and that’s enough for me.  Over my first four years here I’ve sampled perhaps 70 different Belgian beers, some great and some mediocre.  That leaves around 730 to go.  I would write some more, but I’ve got work to do!

It’s January in western Europe, when the daylight hours are short, and the daylight hours are usually short on daylight, come to think of it.  It’s cold and dark this morning, and inertia kicks in when the alarm jars us from our mini-hibernation…

Can it be possible that we’ve completed a full year living in Belgium?  It seems like only last week that we arrived, all giddy and starry-eyed, on the honeymoon of our overseas assignment.  I had carried Cheryl over the threshold of our new apartment.  Okay, I made that up.  (Darn, why didn’t I think to actually do that?)

But here we are at the end of Year One.  Rather than giving you a general and abstract report, I thought it would be fun to describe a typical day in the life of an ex-pat.  (Remember, it could be worse – I could be sitting in your den right now with a slide projector…)

I’m up and out the door at 8:00 am, already shifting into second gear, but the world around me is just deciding to start the engine.  This morning person is out of sync with a culture where the office workday starts at 9:00 and most cafes aren’t open early.  It’s a challenge to find a convenient place to indulge my decades-long habit of beginning the day with an early morning coffee in a cafe before heading to the office. 

As I close the front door behind me, I return Marc’s wave as he opens his locksmith/shoe repair shop across the street.  (This is a common combination in Belgium.) The sign says “Serrurerie”, a sadistic French word with an “r” to pronounce in every syllable.)   Marc is in his forties and seems to be a neighborhood unofficial official who knows everybody and, at least in warm weather, spends as much time in sidewalk conversations as in his shop.  He is a friend of our landlord, who advised us to get to know him because he “keeps an eye on the place.”  (I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a key to our building.)

I look to the right when I hear the clatter of the metal doors being rolled up at The Shoppy.  (Yes, “spell check”, that’s correct: The Shoppy.)  Jean greets me with a hearty “Bon jour!” and one of his irrepressible smiles.  The Shoppy is a typical Belgian convenience store that doesn’t feel like one because of its fresh produce, cheeses, meats and wines.  Jean is from India (I suspect that “Jean” is his nom de l’ èpicier.)  He is owner, buyer, stocker, cashier, and everything else.  He is open thirteen hours a day, not counting buying and stocking and inventory, and he is the sole person there.  And he is always smiling!  It seems like there are never many patrons there, so I’ll often stop by after work to buy a tomato or two, just for the cause.  (He probably wonders what the American guy does with all those tomatoes!)

Our apartment is almost perfect.  We occupy the middle floor of a three-story building on a corner.  We have a garage and an elevator, rarely used.  Our two bedrooms face a shady wooded lot on the side.  We look out our front windows in two directions onto this lively neighborhood, with residential streets behind us and commercial in front.  We can walk to numerous cafes, restaurants, bars, and shops.  Public transport is a three-minute walk, a nice park is nearby, and work is 3 kilometers away.  The apartment is cosy and light.  Double the toilets to two and it’s perfect.

I walk around the corner to our patisserie, passing Dominoes and Pizza Hut on the way.  Thankfully, my table is free.  I take my seat in the Non-Smoking section, which consists of one table with a “non-fumeur” sign taped to the wall above it.  I get a café, which costs around 1.75USD, which at 44 cents per sip, is worth every penny.

I arrive at the office and greet my co-workers.  Talk about an international staff:  Surnames such as Sarzedas, Virilis, Benozzi, Plettinx, Pham, Eilers, Mallon, and Bruno, along with the Foxes and Kosslers and Olmsteads, reveal the rich diversity of this team who must work closely together across cultural and linguistic barriers.  We work through the morning, sending e-mails to our US colleagues, some of whom have just arrived at REM sleep.

At lunch I stop by the bank to pay our utility bill, which like most bills here, is paid electronically from the bank.  Personal checks do not exist here – Your bill has the payee’s bank account number on it, and your bank transfers money directly into their account.  Of course, we have just made the transition to the Euro now, and things are still a little confused around the continent.  It’s a welcome switch to us U.S. Americans, since the Euro is close in value to the US dollar, making mental conversion simple.  But imagine the stress and grief for people who have grown up with a national currency and now have had to give it up and recalibrate their lives.  I notice an older woman as she leaves the bank line, pauses, and stares blankly at the strange new coins in her hand.  In every store, clerks are slowly and cautiously handing back change, counting out loud as they examine each unfamiliar coin.  (It doesn’t help that there are 8 different coins.)

We have received a notice from La Poste that a package is waiting for us to be picked up, not at our post office around the corner but one in a distant inner city locale.  I am making the hour roundtrip there for the second time.  I tried yesterday, but as I approached the area, I encountered roadblocks, police in riot gear, armoured personnel carriers and water cannons.  No, it had nothing to do with our package but rather with the protests surrounding the European Union Summit taking place several miles away.  I turned back and drove home, realizing how many things I’ve often taken for granted, such as running to the post office to pick up a package.

So here I go again, searching in an unfamiliar area with only a street name to go by.  The street appears on the map to be only 4 blocks long, so I figure it can’t be too hard to spot a post office.  I park my car and start walking.  I walk from one end to the other and see nothing resembling a post office.  I retrace my steps but still find nothing.  By my map, I’ve walked the entire street. I am one of the lightest skinned people on this predominately Middle Eastern bustling street.  I am not nervous but rather self-conscious.  I decide to ask the first person I pass for directions.  As I approach a middle age man, I ask if he knows where the post office is.  He thinks for a minute, brightens, and tries to tell me where it is.  Finally, he pantomimes “Walk with me.”  We walk in silence the three blocks to the end of the street.  He points around the corner and down a hidden extension of the street to the familiar red post office sign.  I thank him profusely; he smiles a faint smile, shrugs, and walks on.  I feel the familiar feeling of warmth and gratitude that I have experienced so often in the past year as strangers have gone out of their ways to be helpful and kind.

I finally retrieve my package and start the drive back to the office.  By the time I am finished, I will have spent two hours on this errand.  The quality of life here is wonderful, but sometimes the logistics are a real pain.

I arrive home around six.  Cheryl and I decide to go out for a drink and hop on the tram to ride to a bar called L’Atelier (The Workshop”).  It is near the university and serves over 200 different beers.  Cheryl, not historically a beer drinker, has discovered one she likes, and L’Atelier has it on tap.  It is a cherry beer, which seems like an oxymoron to most beer drinkers, but not to the Belgians.  I am not a fan – It tastes like a mixture of Robitussin and cherry Kool-Aid, but I’m glad Cheryl has found her beer.  We feel a little self-conscious at this place, because we stand out.  Being near the university, the average age of the patrons is around 19.  We feel the stares as we walk in, imagining what some of them are thinking: “Whose parents are here checking up on them?”

We return home and prepare a simple dinner.  Afterwards we turn on the TV to check out the evening’s offerings.  After the reflexive check of CNN, we surf the channels looking for English programming, but as usual, the pickin’s are slim.  There are two Dutch language stations that sporadically offer English shows, but they are usually not current ones.  Tonight it may be “The Rockford Files” or “Quincy”.  And they are heavy on U.S. made-for-TV movies, all of which seem to star Patti Duke or Farah Fawcett and have titles like “They Stole My Baby!”  Luckily, we also get BBC.

So that’s about it.  We feel that we are at the appropriate level of adjustment for the one-year mark.  Milton J. Bennett has a cultural adjustment model that moves through stages from “Ethnocentrism” to “Ethnorelativism”, the latter ending with complete integration into the new culture.  We are obviously not there, if for no other reason than our lack of language facility, but we are moving in the right direction.

As I read back through this account, I may have given the false picture that life here is more idyllic and carefree than in reality.  There are headaches and hassles every day.  The weather gets depressing when there are weeks of overcast skies.  I’ve shared some of the good, so here’s an example of the bad and the ugly.  I have just gotten into a verbal dispute with an elderly neighbor, when I happen to step out onto our small front balcony to see her small dog squat and poop in the middle of our driveway 20 feet away.  I wait to see how she will respond.  I can reasonably predict her reaction, having spent the last year hopscotching down innumerable sidewalks, dodging hazardous wastes every few feet, as is typical in Brussels.  True to form, she and poochie shuffle on down the sidewalk.

I feel compelled to speak out, but the language fails me.  Although I can confidently order my Vol au Vent in French, I am ill-equipped to create the impact necessary to convince this woman to see the error of her ways.  So I revert to my mother tongue and shout, “Madame, please clean up your dog’s poop!”  This unleashes a torrent of indignation, accompanied by dramatic facial expressions and shoulder shrugs.  This is not the first time I’ve encountered this indignation/resignation defense.  I once nicely but firmly confronted a woman who had blocked our driveway while she ran errands in the neighborhood.  “But Monsieur”, she whined emotionally as she shrugged her shoulders, “there was no other place!” (Case closed.)

So my neighbor and I reach an impasse, with her walking away muttering and shaking her head in disbelief at this strange, rude foreigner. And me, well, I watch her until she turns off the sidewalk, carefully noting which apartment is hers, plotting, just in case there is a next time…

                                                                                    January, 2002