Beer Spotlight!

Spotlight on the Van Steenberge Monk’s Grand Cru

$4.29 for the 11oz bottle
Vintage Blended Soured Tripel & Lager

For years, one of the best Belgian sours that you could get was the Brouwerij Van Steenberge Monk’s Café. Based in Ertvelde, Belgium — so far north that it’s closer to the Netherlands than it is to Ghent (its closest large city) — Van Steenberge originally brewed the beer specially for Philadelphia’s legendary Monk’s Café. Fortunately for all of us, they eventually decided to share it.

Then one day in 2017, they debuted the Monk’s Grand Cru. Where the Monk’s Café was an Oud Bruin (a Flemish sour brown ale), the Grand Cru was a different beast all together. For the Grand Cru, Van Steenberge took Tripels — from freshly brewed to three years old — and blended them together. They then aged the new blended beer for six months in oak casks. Those casks must have been infected with Lactobacillus bacteria, because Van Steenberge says that’s where the beer gets it “unique sour profile.” The final step was to blend in a high alcohol lager to get the resultant beer up to 5.5% ABV. And that’s it. That was the Monk’s Grand Cru. Or, we should say, that is the Monk’s Grand Cru …

… ‘cause we’ve still got some! We got the batch we have now at the beginning of 2020. It’s been sitting on our shelf since then, and we just tried it the other night. It’s great!! The sourness has become milder, sinking into the strong cherry notes from the malt. It tastes like a Christmas beer. It’s heavenly!

So come check out some Already-aged Van Steenberge Monk’s Grand Cru. We have a fair number of bottles left, but not a lot.