Month: June 2020

Special beer blend

A while ago we talked about combining Westmalle double and triple. Combining these beers is very tasty and is also known as the Trip Trap. We got a lot of response on that article, apparently there are loads of well-known beer blends that were send to us by other beerlovers. We would like to take a closer look at one of these reactions with you today and that is the “Sjoes”.

The recipe

The Sjoes recipe is very simple. Open a bottle of Oud Bruin (Old Brown), fill your glass for 25% with ‘Oud Bruin’, walk to the tap and then add 75% lager. There you go, the Sjoes is ready!

Oud Bruin?

You don’t see that on the menu very often and not all liquor stores will have it in-house. Oud Bruin belongs to the realm of disappeared beers that Roel Mulder writes about in his book ‘Vanished Beers of the Netherlands’. The sweet, brown beer is no longer popular.
Oud Bruin has its origins in Limburg, where Maastricht’s most successful breweries were located around 1850. Later, other large breweries also started making the sweetened lager. It is therefore not surprising that you can order a Sjoes in a good bar in Limburg, but probably not in the North.
This well-known blend is also sold by Limburger brewery Gulpener, in bottle form.

Do you want to visit an authentic café in the south of the Netherlands and feel like a sweet thirst quencher? Look no further than the Sjoes. You can even tell you grandchildren that you drank a Sjoes before it went extinct.

‘De sjoes’ in Roosendaal.

p.s. in Roosendaal you can go to café de Sjoes. The owner? You guessed it, his roots are in Limburg. Cheers!

Special beer: ’t IJ van de Duvel (2020)

We like to write about special beers, we also drink them, but that is part of the job. Most of the time we have written about special beers from lesser known names. Until this time. Now we are going to talk about a special beer from the well-known brewers Duvel and ‘t IJ.

Among beerlovers it is no secret that Duvel bought an interest in brewery ‘t IJ in 2015. Shortly after (in 2017), a first collaboration arose in the form of a Black Rye IPA called ‘t Ei van de Duvel. A very well-found name that very clearly brought together the best of 2 worlds in terms of name and design.

‘t EI van de Duvel.

The beer with the sinister alcohol percentage of 6.66 percent was an immediate success and sold out in no time. There was still a lot of requests to start production, but it has not been brewed since.

Until now, or not?

The collaboration and the smooth sales apparently tasted like more because out of the blue there was suddenly… ‘t IJ van de Duvel. And as it befits the name; the devil is in the detail.

‘t EI has become ‘t IJ and instead of the Black Rye IPA they have turned it into a Hazy IPA and the color of the label has been adjusted. It is still a very good quality beer, the dark alcohol percentage has remained the same and these beers are also sold like hot cakes.

A little close up

With warm and sunny days ahead, this is a beer that we recommend in any case.

P.S. And if it starts to rain all summer long.