The Story of James Robinson

Hey Hal!

I can’t vouch for water being harder, or brewing being cleaner! I can say that I tried my first Stella from a Belgium brewery about 5 years ago. That was in a glass bottle with an unusual stopper. A few years past and I tried a Stella that was a UK import, on draught. I hated it! It tasted sour and had much larger bubbles in the head than what I had been previously introduced to 5 years before. I thought that I had selected the wrong beverage. I went back to the bar that had served me the first few Stella’s and told the bartender that I had made a mistake and thought I had ordered a Stella there, but that others in years forward had not tasted the same. He brought out the bottle with the weird stopper and drew one for me. That silky, small bubbled head, that creamy finish, that beautiful carmel color! So what was I drinking at the other bar’s here in the U.S.? I asked him….

The Stella I was drinking those first few times was a Stella from Belgium. It has been traditionally been made by Monks, working in smaller batches, with more localized ingredients. The canned and Draught Stella’s from the U.K. are usually farmed out to the larger breweries (like Lowenbrau, when they have extra capacity on their line, they will run some custom stuff for brew houses that don’t have the capacity), and in an effort to keep cost low, they may end up purchasing the raw products needed from the breweries, since a hop is a hop (?).

So that’s what my bartender tells me. He says that the best way to tell is the following:

In Glass Bottles———> Yes On Tap/Draught ———–>No

More Expensive———> Yes Almost as cheap as bud–>No

I don’t know if that should be the gospel of Stella drinking, but it has worked for me!

Good Sipping!

James