And here we have it: the third in a mini-series of cupboard beers from before I moved house.

It’s also the third Westvleteren beer to be featured here, after the Blond from 2014, and the much more recent Extra from last month.

This is kind of the big one: a double-figures Belgian quad weighing in at 10.2% ABV, and one many consider to be the finest beer in the world. I was saving it for number 300, but practicality won out. Really, there’s no guarantee we’ll even make it that far, and it needed using.

I won’t bore you with the mythology, and the hoops that you—in theory—have to jump through to0 find this beer, because I just bought it at De Biertempel in Brussels back in 2014. I did try a relatively fresh one at the time, so I guess I do have something to compare this veteran one with, if only I can remember it.

Even a decade beyond its best before data, there’s a healthy, controlled “pssst” on opening, which is reassuring. I’ll pour this one a bit more carefully than the Extra, not least because the hefty puddle of dark yeast sediment is again present. It’s darker and less fizzy than that one, with perhaps a tiny bit more head retention. Well, perhaps not a head, but a ring of foam, at least.

It’s chocolatey on the nose, and there’s definitely booze in there. Of course, any real hop character has long gone, leaving this one perhaps a little too sweet for my tastes. In fact the body is a little syrupy, and it’s sticky on the lips too, which I don’t remember from the fresher one.

There’s more body than the Extra and toffee or caramel notes, rather than dried fruit. It’s nice enough, but is it the best beer in the world? When I had the fresh one I asked myself that question and I kind of concluded that if it wasn’t, then I don’t know what you’d have to do to make it better.

In this case, drinking it sooner would probably have helped. People do age these for decades, but at that point you just have to admit you’re more interested in owning it and pointing at it occasionally than actually drinking it.

Still, I wouldn’t call this a disappointment: it was still a nice bottle of beer to have as a break from the chaos of the last couple of days before a big move.

Facts and Figures

After sampling the Westvleteren Blond for beer number 100, I was planning to save this one for when we reach 200 and, well, you’ll see where I was going with this.

But reality got in the way and this was the second of three beers left in the cupboard before a long-distance move. Also there’s a Belgium World Cup game on at the moment. Any excuse, right?

This was another one sourced from De Biertempel in Brussels, seemingly in February 2014. I make that over 12 years it has been sat around “maturing” so it’ll be interesting to see how it has fared. Sadly I don’t have a fresher one to compare it to.

In fact I’ve talked about the scarcity of Westvleteren beers before, and you can read all about it on the internet, so I won’t labour it again here. Suffice to say, this is the first chance I’ve had to try the 8% Westvleteren Extra, often know as the “8”.

In the book this is listed as a Trappist Ale, which seems to be a bit of a catch-all term, style-wise. I believe this is pretty close to a Dubbel, which is a much darker, maltier syle than the Blond, or something like the Westmalle Tripel.

It pours an almost copper colour, with a surprising amount of fizz. There’s no head retention and not a great deal of body after so long. There’s a hefty amount of very dark, almost black, yeasty sediment, and of course I’ve poured it like an idiot so quite a bit of that makes it into the glass.

There isn’t much in the way of aroma, and certainly no hop character has survived the passage of time. To taste though, it’s full of black treacle, dates, raisins and toffee. It’s really quite sticky on the lips, which perhaps surprised me.

Hopefully one day I’ll get a chance to try a fresher one, as I suspected it would be quite different. This one was in no way unpleasant, but I wouldn’t say the lengthy period of ageing has worked magic.

Facts and Figures