Like every person born in the 70s and 80s in the Netherlands I grew up in the beer wastelands. It was a time where pils/lager was synonym to beer. Needless to say I, and probably most teenagers then with me, began my alcoholic adventures not with beer, but with mix drinks and liquor. It were different times back then, the drinking of soft alcoholic drinks was already legal at the age of 16, and it was still quite easy to buy other alcoholic drinks at that age as well.
Fast forward, life happened. After some alcoholic adventures at high school, I didn’t drink as much during my university years and stopped drinking altogether the years during one unmentionable unhealthy relationship. I got out.
I found my love for life again and I found a new love for beer. Not the pilsners though, still most common around, but all those other beers that were finding there way (back) into the Netherlands again! I probably started with Belgian beers, but the first beer to impress me back then was Guinness at the Trafalgar pub in Eindhoven. I never had something like it, but it was much better than Bavaria (I grew up in Eindhoven, so that was almost as synonym to beer as pils was as well) and I didn’t want to go back to what I now know to be pilsner again if I could help it.
A few years later I met my now husband. He is also a big fan of beers and together we went for a tour in the Hertog Jan brewery in Arcen. That tour was for me the start of my quest for knowledge about beer. There I found out what a pilsner actually was, that it wasn’t a synonym for beer. I found out about the difference between so-called bottom-fermented and top-fermented beers and I wanted to know more! I subscribed to Beer in a Box and I looked for options to educate myself in beer and came across StiBON. After a false start in Amsterdam (life got in the way again; I became ill again, they found my first tumor, I had surgery, I switched jobs, I moved town) I began anew in Eindhoven in 2017 and kickstarted my beer life.
March 2019 I became Diplom Biersommelière and now I’m really ready to dive into the world of beer. In this blog I want to take you with me on that journey. I still don’t know much yet, there are so many things to research, so many books to read, so many beers to taste. I’ll probably come back to certain subjects better educated then than in these first blogs of mine that will come online the next couple of months. I certainly want to explore and research some specific subjects that are important to me personally like beer and health and beer and history. But first I want to tell you more about how I came here: about Doemens and StiBON, about my Germany and Austria trips and of course about Eindhoven.
And for those who are still with me, what was it that fired your interest in beer?
You. 😉
I look forward to your adventures in beer – and will be asking for advice.
Awesome! Reminds me I could do a beer-board game pairing as well some day 😉
I don’t drink a lot of beer (the U.S. brands taste… yecck!), but rather late in life (about two years ago) I discovered Guinness, and have been enjoying it very much. Guinness was the first beer to impress me, too (the extra stout).
I look forward to learning about beer from you.