Cutest hat shop

Pretty fish at La Boqueria market

Ian and I were excited to go back to Sagrada Familia and see the progress since our last visit.  The cathedral now has a completion date (2026-2028!) and a lot has changed in the last seven years.

The most magical thing to see was the effect of the light shining through the stained glass on the interior:

A climb up one of the towers was also a great chance to peer out over the city and to see the new fruit sculptures topping some of the shorter spires.

We were extra fortunate to cross paths with one of Ian’s best friends from high school, Adam, and his wife, Alli, and all six of us had an excellent tapas meal together.  So much to be thankful for!

Port

One of our favorite spots was the Solar do Vinho do Porto, which people love to hate on the internet. Like many places with excellent product, the servers get grumpy when tourists ask “what’s good?” Answer: it’s all good, it’s Port.

I don’t usually drink port, but when I do, I prefer a 1982 Dalva Colheita

Time for a port lesson, if you don’t care skip to the next image.

Port starts its life like wine. Mash up some grapes, let the yeast go to work chowing down on grape sugars, and voila, out comes alcohol. In the case of port, this glorious process is interrupted. Partway through the fermentation, high proof alcohol (typically grape brandy) is added to the mix. This brings the ABV up to about 20%. No yeast can survive that kind of environment, so fermentation stops.  This is why port is sweeter than most wine; not all the sugars from the grapes got converted to alcohol by the yeast.

Breaking it down, there are three well known kinds of Port.

1. “Ruby” port is a fresh bottling of unaged port, which may have been stored in concrete or stainless. It will probably not get better with age.
2. “Vintage” port is port from a year that was deemed exceptional by that maker, that has spent 20 months in oak. On average there are about three vintages/decade. Vintage port is not ready to drink when it goes to the bottle. It’s bottled with sediment, and the contents will mature in an unopened bottle for decades. Once opened you’re supposed to drink the bottle within 2-3 days.
3. “Tawny” port is aged port that spent its time in wooden barrels. No age statement on the bottle usually means ~3 years. Official age statements are 10, 20, 30, and “more than 40” years. Once it’s in the bottle, it’s already done all the aging it will do.  It also keeps relatively well once opened, since it oxidized thoroughly with all that time in the wood.

Our favorites were these two beauties; a 1982 Dalva Colheita tawny, and a 2007 Late Bottle Vintage (LBV) that I forgot to write down the maker on. Neither of them quite fit into the categories above.

Tawny on the left, LBV on the right

The Colheita tawnys have a harvest date (in this case 1982) that all grapes in the bottle came from. All are aged at least 7 years in oak, though often times more. Presumably this one was at least 25 in the barrel, since the bottle was relatively new.

The Late Bottle Vintage (LBV) style is also a little bit of a hybrid. Like vintage port it’s all grapes from the same year, but unlike vintage port it spends significantly longer in oak (4-6 years). It can mature a little in the bottle as well. It’s basically a poor man’s vintage port.

As for taste? The tawny had the rich raisin/nut/vanilla flavors I love in the style. The LBV had more fresh grape taste, though maybe not as much complexity. We’re generally fans of the tawny style, which I guess makes us not very classy or something.

Lambic

Our AirBnB happened to be about a block away from Lisbon’s top beer bar. I swear we didn’t plan it that way. Portugal (like most of Europe) is still on the IPA kick in the craft scene. We stuck to the belgian stuff.

The first night we went in I tried a St. Bernardus ABT 12 and Tiara picked up an Oude Beersel gueuze. While we were drinking those, I noticed they had some bottles of De Cam Oude Lambiek. This is one of the esoteric rarities you get excited about when you go too far down the beer rabbit hole. It’s not that the beer is super popular (like, say, Cantillon), it’s just that they barely make any of it. It’s basically some dude in the Belgian country side who gets barrels of wort from Girrardin, Boon, Drie Fonteinen, and Lindemans, ages them in old barrels, then blends them together. It’s not even his full time job. De Cam turns out about 128 barrels/year. Compare that to 1,500/year for a mid-sized craft brewery like Russian River, or 640,000/year for Lagunitas and you can understand why you don’t usually see De Cam on the shelf.

We came back on a rainy day to try a bottle of the Oude Lambiek.

First impressions were mixed. The style is totally flat. It’s also very dry, so the experience is closer to drinking a crisp white wine than it is to drinking a pilsner. I’m still coming around on the idea of flat beer, and honestly I think I would have preferred it with some bubbles in it. But the flavor was great. Nice tartness, good funky aromatics, and some lemony apricot fruit flavors.

Bonus Pictures

If you made it this far, you deserve some pictures.

This first one’s a railing. Nothing unusual about it. Just a railing. If you’re seeing male anatomy all over it, that’s on you.

I think they’re little towers or something.

Here’s a piece of very thorough yarn-bombing:

And lastly, Lisbon’s worst bathroom:

Careful on that climb to the second floor

Funchal felt really different from the western side of the island.  It’s a real city with lots of hotels and tour groups, and yet it is beautiful and mellow and still very tropical.  On our first night there we walked around the waterfront promenade and enjoyed the warm evening.

Another day, we rode a skyrail up to the spectacular tropical gardens at Monte Palace.

Native fauna

Of course, our primary business in Funchal was tasting Madeira, so we made sure to make plenty of time for that.  D’Oliveiras gave us free tastings, wisely knowing we’d feel obligated to buy a small bottle.

Blandy’s Wine Lodge is one of the largest Madeira producers and makes the wine we always get at home.  We went on a nice tour of their cellars and learned about the aging process.  They also had a museum with lots of old record books, winemaking equipment, and thank you letters from dignitaries.  My favorites were the wine-stained letters from Winston Churchill, who seemed to enjoy the product:

Madeira damage. We didn’t do this all by ourselves.

For those of you who are curious, our verdict is that 5 year Madeiras are the right purchase.  The price premium for 10 year and 15 year bottles doesn’t seem worth it for a small increase in flavor complexity.  Our favorites are the medium-dry madeiras from Verdelho grapes and the medium-sweet madeiras from Boal grapes.  So, in a way we went this far just to learn that the 5-year Blandy’s madeira we buy at home is our favorite.  But now we know

Unlike most breweries in Belgium, at Cantillon you can just show up and walk around on their “self guided tour.” 7 euros gets you a booklet, entrance to the brewery floor, and three ~6oz pours of lambic and geuze.

Mash Tun

The mash tun; this is where the magic starts

The first step in brewing is extracting sugar from your grains by soaking them in hot water; you’re essentially making a big ‘ol batch of grain tea.  Some beers aim to emphasize grain character and use lots of flavorful and/or roasted grains – think stouts and porters. Cantillon brews lambics, which are all about the yeast and bacteria (henceforth “bugs”).  The grain bill is composed of mild grains (wheat and barley) that won’t compete with the flavors being produced by the bugs.

The sugary liquid that comes out at the end of this step is known as wort.

Brew Kettle

The brew kettle

After you make your sugary wort, you need to boil it to sterilize the liquid to ensure you’re only adding the yeast and bacteria you want in your fermentation.

Boiling is also where you add your “boil addition” hops. Hops do three things to beer: (1) they have antibacterial properties that inhibit certain nasties from growing in the beer (2) they make the beer bitter, and (3) they impart flavor. Again, lambic is all about the bugs, so Cantillon uses hops that have been aged for 3 years to lose most of their aromatic flavors.

Coolship

This is about half of the open inoculation vessel; it stretches right of frame

Nearly all beers are made by cooling down the wort and adding carefully selected yeast and bacteria in a sterile environment. Cantillon is not like most other beers. They employ a process known as “spontaneous fermentation.” In this case, they have a big shallow open-top copper dish in the attic that they pump the hot wort into. The high exposed surface area makes the wort cool down faster, and also lets in a bunch of yeast and bacteria from the air. These bugs will become the fermenters that turn the wort into beer.

It’s not all random chance; because Cantillon has been brewing here for over 100 years, the rafters above the vessel host colonies of yeast and bacteria friendly to the brewing process.

Fermentation

Once the inoculated with wild bacteria and yeast, the proto-beer is pumped into wooden barrels. It is in these barrels that the yeast and bacteria will convert the sugar extracted from the grain into alcohol – the miracle of fermentation! Wild bugs tend to act slower than their commercial counterparts, but they are given plenty of time to do their job (3 years, at Cantillon). While most beers have some unfermented sugars left at the end, Cantillon’s are incredibly dry, with nearly all of the sugars converted to alcohol.

Blending and Fruiting

Once the lambic is ready, it can be put into bottles and shipped out to the world. The classic beer made from lambic is gueuze, a blend of 1, 2, and 3 year old lambic.

Cantillon also bottles beer that have had fresh fruit. When we were there they had just received a bunch of wine grapes that they were destemming for addition to the lambic.

Bottling and Labeling

If you’re a Cantillon fanboy like I am, the picture of a wall of Fou’foune will make you start salivating. Otherwise I guess it just looks like a lot of bottles:

I have seen the promised land

The labeling operation has that classic old factory look. Here you can see labels waiting to be applied to those lovely ‘foone bottles.

Love the beer glass next to the bottling line. Gotta stay hydrated on the shift.

Again, limited audience that will be excited about these things, but OMG WTF FOUNE JÉROBOAM!

A jéroboam is 3 liters (twice the size of a magnum). Don’t worry, I had to look it up too.

???

They called me mad at the academy. I’ll show them!

I saw this machine in the brewery. I have no idea what it is. It looks like something operated by a man with a white lab coat and unmanageable hair.

Drinking

The most important step in any brewing process. Cantillon has a lovely little space downstairs for enjoying the wonders on sale. In addition to a nice tap selection (lambic, geuze, kriek, and st gilloise for ~2.5 EUR), they also have bottles of rare and hard to find stuff.

No, I don’t know what I’m doing.

We started with the Carignan, a beer that has only been sold at the brewery itself. It’s a 2 year old single-barrel lambic with the addition of red wine grapes. Those grapes were front and center, definitely the most “wine-y” beer I have tasted. Just lovely.

We also got a bottle of the Lou Pepe Framboise (think juicy funky raspberries), and did some sharing with other tables to sample more of the goods. We also tried:

• Zwanze 2012, a lambic with organic rhubarb (?!). Bizarre stuff, lots of vegetal flavor. Still delicious.
• Grand Cru Bruscella from 2012. This is an aged lambic that is not bottle conditioned (read: flat). The flavors were interesting, but totally flat beer is still a hard one for me.
• Iris. A dry-hopped Cantillon that would be a great every day beer if you could find it.

Buying

Also a very important step. I got a case of the good juice. Now I just need to get it home.

I still need to do a write-up on my excellent MEI Voyager pack, but the key take-away is it holds a case of Cantillon.

Verdict

There is no reason not to go here if you are in Belgium. Even if you (*gasp*) don’t like sour beer, it’s a classic brewery that’s worth the visit.

We explored the castle, climbed the bell tower, and visited the castle bears (!):

We spent our evenings enjoying drinks by the river.  We sampled Slivovitz whenever we could, and we got to try some house-distilled fruit brandies from a local restaurant.

I was also excited to find vaječný on one menu, which is an egg liquor that I had also seen in Poland.  In Warsaw I took a photo of a bottle in the supermarket – so intrigued I was with what the “chicken liquor” might be like. Turns out it’s just like egg nog, and that’s a pretty fantastic thing.

We also spent a nice day rafting on the river, though a flock of ducks stalked us most of the way.  We think they wanted our lunch – they looked hangry!

By far the best part of our visit was spending time with my family in the motherland.  Don’t they all look so great?

Does the Blue Fox succeed in rising above in the face of this adversity? Read on to find out.

Desert Swizzle

I need to get one of these

First off, I love the presentation. Taking a sip through a metal straw while raising the drink through a long wooden handle made me feel like Gandalf smoking a pipe.

The drink description sounded enticing. Saffron gin, nut coffee, cardamom.  Swizzle is usually going to describe something from the Tiki family; the Queens Park Swizzle is perhaps the most famous. The traditional swizzle stick is actually cut from a plant indigenous to the Carribean (cocktail nerds with more money than sense can even buy an authentic swizzle stick on the internet).

I came in expecting a clever concoction marrying the spices of the islands with a gin base and coffee accent. Instead I got a one-note coffee drink that was a little on the sweet side.  It wasn’t a bad drink, but it fell far short of its potential. That said, I’d still happily go drink one again to recapture that feeling of arcane wizardry.

Clover Club

Lurking in the bottom of that liquid are “pearls” made of raspberry jelly

The Blue Fox menu is divided into two sections; reinterpretations of classics, and original drinks. The classic Clover Club is gin, lemon juice, and raspberry (plus egg white for texture). The menu listed the same ingredients (sans egg white). The drink showed up with a molecular gastronomy flourish of some “caviar” made of raspberry jam in some sweet liquor. It looked nice, but the caviar was hard to drink and just tasted like sugar. The drink underneath was similarly sweet, lacking sufficient citrus to balance it out, and with raspberry flavor barely in evidence. Without Tolkeinesque barware to save it, this drink was a miss.

House Made Amaro

The origami menu is actually super cool

Before I talk about the glass of alcohol, let’s take a minute to admire the branding work. That adorable blue fox is actually a folded up drink list. After we declared our intention to pay, the bartender quickly folded the little critter out of what otherwise looked like a normal (if square) seasonal drink menu.  It was both unexpected and delightful, characteristics I wish they had applied to their drinks.

On to the little taster glass. We’d been chatting with the bartender a lot, and as with many places we’ve been, he comped us a little treat when we closed out our bill.  Apparently one of the two bartenders had a grandmother with an Amaro recipe, and they had a stock of the finished product behind the bar. This stuff was excellent. Every bit as good as any commercial bottling, better than most. Of the amari I’ve tried, it was closest in flavor to Nonino.

The Verdict

As I mentioned at the top, hotel bars have a real challenge; they need to put together drinks that look and sound impressive, while not doing too much to challenge the palates of the average guest. True to form, the presentation was great, but the cocktails we tasted were too sweet and one-note. It may be that we chose the wrong drinks – the bartender we talked with seemed knowledgable and capable, and the off-menu house-made amaro was straight up delicious.

If you do find yourself at the Blue Fox, it might be worth asking the bartender to make you something complex and not overly sweet. It might even work.

As for me, I’m not going back.

The menu was full of cool sounding drinks, but there were a mysterious four blank pages at the front. Our bartender explained the system; you have three options when you order:

1. Order something off of the “regular” menu
2. Tell the bartender what you like and have them make you something
3. Order “The Key”, a rum based aperitif that opens the door to the secret menu.

Tiara and her mom Barbara ordered off of the regular menu, and I got a key. I’m a sucker for bar gimmicks.

Muay Thai

Tiara won at ordering again. I should just get what she gets. In this case, it was a thai inspired Mai Tai, served in a Guy Fawkes mask Tiki glass (!!!).

Anonymous officially won at Tiki mugs.

This drink was perfect. Rum, thai brandy, thai spice infused falernum, coconut syrup, orange liquer, and lime. It succeeded as a Mai Tai, but also had this great thai flavor profile that is hard to describe.  Definitely some thai basil, kaffir lime leaf, and maybe lemongrass.  Add in the most amazing custom tiki mug I have seen, and you’re looking at a world class drink.

St Marry’s Virus

This drink was not our favorite in taste.  But the presentation gets 5 1/2 stars.  The bartender brought our round of drinks, save that Barbara just got an empty glass. I joked it was “the world’s dryest martini”, but it turned out the beverage was on the way:

There it is, world’s creepiest drink service

A bartender wearing a Guy Fawkes mask showed up table-side carrying a small kit with a biohazard stamp. Inside were two needles filled with green fluid. Here you can see him dispensing the first.

Sadly, the flavors didn’t hold up to the awesome presentation. It was a little bland. Ingredients were gin, aperitif wine, melon liquer, and a dash of absinthe. I tasted none of those things (save for a hint of melon). Tiara described it as “bubble gum”, I just thought it was sweet and on the bland side.  Not sure what they were using for the gin, but clearly something skewing toward vodka. Not unpalatable, but just not standing out in any way.

The Key

I forgot to take a picture of The Key. It was basically a mix of spice infused rum and aperitif wine served in a small wine glass. It was nicely done, good balance of flavors, if a little sweet. I think it would have made an excellent Falernum on its own. The important part is the little gadget that came with the drink; a small, squeeze activated blacklight flashlight. Remember the mysteriously blank menu pages? Invisible ink baby!

So of course, we had to do another round off of the secret menu, now that we could read it.

Op: Japan

This one was a good riff on the classic highball. Japanese whisky, soda water, plus plum bitters and a house made plum syrup.

Like all good haibōru, this one has perfectly clear ice

I thought they did a really nice job on this one. You got good whisky flavor, with some nice plum notes dancing around it. It was just a tad on the sweet side (it’s hard to add any kind of syrup to a highball), but not so much that I didn’t enjoy the hell out of it.

Op: Malaysia

This was Tiara’s drink; Rum, housemade tropical jam, eggwhite, and ango.

Tiara’s initial comment is that it drank a lot like a Pisco sour. The tropical jam was a little muted in the background, but present if you looked for it. Another competent and tasty tipple.

Op: Czech Prohibition

This might have been the best we tried off of the secret menu.

That cool elevated stand is actually a modified DVD.

Slivovitz has a bad reputation, but man was it good in this drink. A really nice sour with lime, gin, slivovitz, plum jam, and “bohemian cordial” (becherovka maybe?).  Everything was in excellent balance, and gave a really nice expression of a couple aspects of plum.

The Verdict

If the drinks had been crappy, I would still recommend going to Anonymous Bar for the service and presentation alone. But the drinks weren’t crappy. Several of them were outstanding. I can wholeheartedly recommend this bar as a great spot to visit in Prague’s Old Town.  I’ll leave you with an IV bag presentation I snapped from the table next to us.

In my defense, Beckett looks like he’s been through a lot

As I mentioned in my previous post, Beckett’s Kopf is owned by the same party as Lost in Grub Street. Though Lost in Grub Street went a little weird, Beckett’s Kopf has been tuning their game since opening in 2004, which is practically the epoch of the craft cocktail scene. Unsurprisingly they nail the classic speakeasy vibe.  And like any good speakeasy, it was “stumble into the wall” dark in there. So photos are on the grainy side.

Times of Cascara, served in fancy bone china.

First off, they had a good esoteric “wow” factor. One of the ingredients in the Times of Cascara is “a tea from the fruit of a coffee cherry.”  I had never had anything made with the outside of coffee, and now I want more of it. Add in some cognac and batavia arrack, and it was a complex sipper. I’ve always been a fan of Earl Grey in the morning, but Times of Cascara may well change breakfast forever.

The Knickerbocker, a “prehistoric mai tai”

I should mention that the menu was all in German, so we were shooting in the (literal and figurative) dark. Tiara went for the Knickerbocker, based on reading the words “Mai Tai” and “berries.”  It drank more like a sour than a Mai Tai, but was still well balanced and delicious.

Now that we had the bartender’s ear, we were able to get advice on our next drinks. I went with the Ford, essentially a genever martini infused with wormwood and a lemon twist. Delicious. I’m a big fan of genever, it’s got a more nuanced complexity than it’s modern juniper driven cousin, and is the main component in my second favorite long drink, the John Collins.

Side note: most modern bars make their John Collins with bourbon. This is wrong. Those of you lucky enough to live in San Francisco can go to Comstock Saloon to get one done right. 

Tiara got the Lusitanian, a mix of Portuguese brandy, tawny port and cherry liquer.  The net effect had a lot in common with a manhattan, which is probably what they’re going for with the name; Lusitania was a Roman province in what is now Portugal.

Verdict

This was our favorite cocktail spot in Berlin. Beckett’s Kopf strikes the right balance of making unique drinks with a decent atmosphere. Not having to fight for a seat was also a big plus.

It wasn’t the mind-melting perfection of Le Syndicat in Paris, but it was every bit as good as our favorite bars at home.

The theme of the bar is “big bowls and short drinks.” Being as how there are only two of us, we skipped the punch bowls.

Bonus points for the double-wide cocktail napkin to accommodate the palate cleansing water.

There was a fair amount of esotericism going on here. To start with, the bar had a “pre-American” theme. Punch predates the modern bar-with-bartender-behind-it (an American invention), so Lost in Grub Street eschews the fixed bar in favor of a roving liquor cart. Or at least that’s what the bartender told us. My guess is they couldn’t figure out a way to make a bar fit in the big narrow space.

The bartender wheeled that jalopy table-side to prepare our drinks as we watched.

The menu was also frustratingly opaque. Rather than write out the ingredients, Lost in Grub Street chooses to list flavors (in German, of course). The bartender was very accommodating, but it’s no fun needing to ask what’s in every drink on the menu.  Near as I can tell they also weren’t using fresh citrus in any of the short drinks, putting them firmly in the spiritous family of cocktails.

We settled on Mandarine–Walnuss–Nelke (Ian) and Pflaume–Port–Zimt (Tiara). My drink had cognac, a local walnut liquer, and pierre ferrand triple sec. Tiara’s was madeira, a local plum liquer, and cinnamon tincture.  They were competently prepared, and flavors were generally good. Nothing blew our mind, and we settled up after the first drink.

I did get snipped at by the bartender for asking what one of the bottles was as he was adding it to the drink; “I vill show you at ze end!” To his credit, he did line the bottles up after mixing the drink for my benefit. He also refilled our water after every sip. I guess service was in keeping with the bar’s theme; studiously observant and a little stilted.

The owners of this bar also run Beckett’s Kopf, which is in a “hip” neighborhood outside of the center. A review is forthcoming; keep an eye out for the comparison.

Drinks

Sazerac (left) and Green Beast (right)

The cafe portion (upstairs) focuses on aperitifs. They stock exclusively French spirits, and get creative with their menu. The “Sazerac” is made using cognac instead of bourbon (plus numerous other tweaks), and the Green Beast is an absinthe drink invented by a famous French bartender.

We chatted a lot with Tristan, one of the bartenders, who was super excited about the craft.  These guys are very into tradition; they even have an original Jerry Thomas Bartender’s Guide from 1862. While they share the same French-only focus as Le Syndicat, A La Française focuses on the traditional craft of cocktails, avoiding the molecular gastronomy/mad scientist style work at Le Syndicat.

Tristan shared a lot of both knowledge as well as samples of some of the ingredients they use:

Strawberry Liquor (left), and Elderflower (right). Despite appearances, these are super solid liqueurs. I strongly prefer the elderflower to the more famous Saint Germain.

Prices are incredibly reasonable; happy hour is €6-7, which makes them about half the price of other top tier drinks in the city.  There is also a downstairs lounge bar open during nights only.

There’s also a downstairs bar that I didn’t succeed in getting good pictures of. It’s more loungy and has the club lights, as you can see in this snap of an incredibly awesome rum Tristan shared with us:

Vintage single cask French rum. Yes please.

The highlight from downstairs was the house Old Fashioned, which again was an all French adaptation of the American classic. Sadly I neglected to take a photo, but I encourage you to go take one for me.

Food

We came for the drinks, and happened to be hungry on one of our return visits. Lucky us, the food was outstanding. I already posted about their epic hamburger, but here it is again:

Tastes like Freedom…. and surrender. It’s confusing.

I just can’t say enough good things about that burger. Gravy, shredded potatoes, tomatoes, perfectly cooked ground beef, and french cheese to top it off. Best burger I’ve had in any restaurant.

A friend got the fish of the day (trout) which was also delicious.

Tasty whole trout with side of veggies

Verdict

You should absolutely go here while in Paris, preferably around lunch or dinner. Get the burger. Start with the Eau Fraiche, or the Caïpi Byrrh if you want something fruity.  Then put yourself in the hands of the more than competent bartenders.

The bistro is just a 10 minute walk from Pere Lachaise Cemetery, which you are probably visiting anyway.  So really you have no excuse not to go.