Travel : A Return to Kaffee de Planck, Ghent - Poor Poes...

My last visit here probably tells you all you need to know about one of my favourite bars in Ghent - and beyond it - but this return visit was worthy of note too as a poignant if soppy tribute to Poes, the wonderful cat who lazily watched us on our previous visit - checking us out with vague interest as we entered, and perhaps a hint of deserved disdain when we left.

Unfortunately Poes passed on in 2015 at the ripe old age of 20 and if the small shrine with postcards of him/her and the lit candles are anything to go by that cat is very sadly missed in the De Planck. I missed it too and I only met Poes once, but that cat was part of our original experience and received a special mention in that original post.

Ellezelloise Hercule Stout (Apologies for Photo Quality)

I toasted Poes with a a couple of really great beers. First up was one of my favourite Belgian stouts - Hercule from Brasserie des Légendes - presented to me in a wonderful branded tankard. It's all about the chocolate flavour with a vanilla hint and a spicy quality I can never quite place. (Perhaps liquorice?) For a 9% beer it's incredibly easy to drink, especially in such surroundings, but I paced myself and savoured its richness.

De Leite Cuvée Soeur’ise

Next up was a new one for me - Cuvée Soeur’ise from De Leite, which was really superb. The brewery adds cherries to their tripel, Enfant Terriple, and lets it all sit in oak wine casks for 5 months, which produces a beer that tastes of cherry bubblegum mixed with sour cider - a wonderful smooth bitter-sweet flavour with a little heat from its 8.5% abv. It was probably my favourite beer of that trip, and I had some excellent beers in Ghent.

Myself and my companions sat drinking a chatting for a while, enjoying the ambience, music and really good toasted ham and cheese sandwiches. The service was excellent as ever and the beer list and food menu perfectly sized, big enough to be interesting but not too large as to intimidate.

That krieked tripel was a fitting tribute, and I raised my glass to the seat where I'd last seen Poes.

Somehow I think that cat will always live on here...

It was obviously​ a part of this place.

Poor Poes...

Kaffee De Planck, Ter Platen (opposite Kinepolis), 9000 Ghent

Visited December 2016

Travel: Notes from Ghent - Back at the Trollekelder ... Where the Wild Things Really Are...

There are places I'll always go back to...

And the Trollekelder is one of those, so I was eager to return on this visit to Ghent, not only for the beer but also for the crazy-hot mustard and celery salt that's served with the platter of cheese and a salami-esque substance. The place hadn't changed much since my last visit but it was certainly busier, so we were relegated to sitting at the back, split from the noisy weekend crowd.

Scanning through the beer list I spotted Troubadour Magma. A beer I've had before from Brouwerij The Musketeers, who appear to do all of their brewing at De Proefbrouwerij in nearby Lochristi ... but this was a triple spiked Brett version. I have a fondness for Brett beers, probably stemming from my unseemly adoration of Orval, so I closed the menu, attracted someones attention by waving like a madman and ordered it along with a platter of cheese and meat of course.

It was superb...

It probably had a lot to do with where I was, who I was with, and my general elated mood caused by being back in Belgium and in Ghent, but there is no doubt that it ticked all my boxes at that moment in time.

One of my notes reads 'Orval on overdrive!' and I think that's a fair statement given that it's a 9.8% abv so-called imperial IPA with added Brett. It was also well over a year old which presumably helped its character.

I got citrus at first, like an under ripe orange, even down to that tartness. This was chased by a clean-but-wet labrador smell somehow converted into a taste, and some ripe fruit like plums or damsons. There was a lovely cleansing carbonation and then you were left with citrus again but perhaps more like that squishy, funky mandarin that sits in it bottom of the fruit bowl until you feel sorry for it and tentatively polish it off - with a slight grimace.

When I finished it I sat back with a sigh...

Was it really better than Orval? At that time and place, yes it was...

Would it still be now, sitting here at home ... in a side-by-side blind tasting?

Who knows?

... and that's hardly the point.

Liam

Travel: Notes from Ghent - Blue Birds

If you stand on St. Michael's Bridge in Ghent when it's dark - carefully avoiding getting poleaxed with a selfie-stick or boom mic from the tourists and film crews that seem to a permanent feature of the structure - and gaze to your left past St Michael's Never-Open-Church and Ghent Universities' Het Pand you will see one of the most striking artistic light installations I have ever seen...

View looking towards St. Michael's Bridge

By taking the steps down from the bridge and walking along Predikherenlei you can get a closer look at this master-piece, indeed the view (above) from the bridge on Jakobijnenstraat is probably the best place to appreciate it from, as it takes in St. Michael's Bridge and the beautiful old buildings on Graslei in the background.

It's unimaginatively but accurately called the Blue Birds but its full title is 'Les Oiseaux de Mr Maeterlinck' by the French creative studio Pitaya. It references a story called 'The Blue Bird' by Maurice Maeterlinck - who was born in the city - to commemorate his Nobel Prize for Literature. It was originally a part of Gent's 2012 Light Festival but was then bought by the municipality and is now a permanent installation.

The origami-like birds seem to be frozen in startled flight from their tree, and their reflection in the canal - enhanced by the odd ripple - adds another dimension of movement and depth to the work. They are mesmerising, elegant and vibrant, and perhaps worthy of a trip to Ghent in themselves.

It is stunning ... and I could have looked at it for ages...

But the thoughts of food and imbibing in what is surely Belgium's best city eventually dragged me away...

View from Predikherenlei

Liam

Trollekelder - Ghent

You know the mustard is hot when it causes your eyes to stream and your nose hairs to drop off one by one and fall in to your beer. Expletives arrive unbidden on your tongue and are driven out by their inability to tolerate the heat. A gulp of beer helps but time is the only healer, and you wait patiently for your breath to return.

But let's go back a few hours or so...

Trollekelder (For some reason I want to call it Trolle-n-kelder and I don't know why?) sits in the shadow of Saint Jacob's church. And when I say shadow I mean in the descriptive shadow before some pedant tells me it is south of the church.

The neon sign on the building seems at odds with the medieval looking trolls that stand guard in the window, grinning and gurning manically at the passersby. The theme continues inside with more trolls, bottles and beer paraphernalia decorating the timber and brick clad interior, which instantly makes you feel at home and content. The split levels, that include the cellar - kelder - where the trolls presumably live(!), give the place a suitably disjointed feel and at the time of our visit there is some extension work going on in the upper level.

We sat at a table on a raised area just inside the door with a view of the street and the church. Service is quick - mind you it is quiet - and we are presented with the most attractive beer menu I've ever seen. It's more of a magazine or a work of art than a menu and is full of beers I'd promised myself I'd try to source on this trip including some from Troubadour and Struise - but no Black Albert unfortunately.

We went for Troubadour Westkust which had a sharp, dry stoutlike flavour backed up with bitter hops and a dash of cocoa, Verhaeghe Barbe Noire a sweetish, strong stout and the Kasteel Hoppy, which had some bitterness and was OK but didn't suit my palate as much as the other two.

We were joined by a young couple we had spied through the window who had been drinking copious amounts of Westvleteren at a table outside on the street. She was Canadian and he was from London. They were over on a wine excursion to France and had detoured to Belgium to stock up on some beer and visit some breweries. They were pretty merry and in good form so we chatted about the beer scene in London, French wine and Belgian brewers. My only issues was that our new Canadian friend had a slightly unnerving habit of touching your arm every time she spoke and was somewhat obsessed with our Irish accents...

We were in our stride by now and while chatting I had a superb Struise XXXX (Not what I ordered, which was the barrel aged Tripel, but I had it anyway!) that tasted of rich honey with plums and prunes followed by an equally excellent Struise Tsjeeses Reserva PBA, a big 10% beer that tasted of spicy sultana and Christmas pudding.

We all left at the same time, the couple we met stocking up on more Westvleteren - carried out of the bar in an undignified manner in white plastic carrier bags - and we headed back to the hotel to freshen up.

A few hours later after getting food and touring the city at night we ended up back in Trollekelder again for a nightcap. I ordered another Troubadour, Obscura this time, which tasted like milky treacle but in a good way and we decided we were still a little peckish. The bar man suggested the staple fare of every Belgian bar, a platter of cheese and salami, which arrived with a small bowl of brown mustard and a shaker of celery salt. The salt with the cheese was a revelation in itself and as for the mustard, well that's back to where I started isn't it?

Trollekelder is a great bar with great service, beer and atmosphere. It was our favourite of those we visited in the city centre and only narrowly beaten as the best we visited in all of Ghent by De Planck. Having said that we didn't get to all the bars but we did get to most of those rated on websites or listed on beer tours of the city.

It's definitely high on our list for next time we visit.

We might take it easy on the mustard though...

(Visited 11th September 2014)

(Apologies for the lack of pictures.)

Kaffee de Planck - Ghent

Poor Ghent.

As well as needing three spellings to keep everyone happy - or two at least - it suffers from from being seen as the ugly sister of picturesque Bruges, being thought of as less cosmopolitan than Brussels and as not being the shopping capital that Antwerp is perceived to be.

It was my first time in the city so I didn't really know what to expect.

We arrived in the city via Gent-Sint-Pieters station, and it seemed that so did the rest of the known world. The easy thing to do would have been to follow the crowds to the tram and then head in to the city centre but I had another plan, and coerced my two cronies to follow me with a promise that after a short walk we could get a beer on a barge! Luckily enough this was intriguing enough for them to follow me on a shortish slog through Citadelpark and over to Ter Platen on a truncated canal called the Muinkshelde, in the southeast of the city.

I had done a little research on Ghent and had come across an interesting looking bar on a barge about 20 mins walk out from the city centre and also 20 mins from the station. The pictures on the website looked pretty interesting so I thought it would be worth the diversion on the way to our hotel just east of the city centre.

Citadelpark is not quite as interesting as it sounds, mostly because it seems to be missing an actual citadel. Having said that it does have loads of statues, a scary grotto, a faded bandstand, some interesting trees and lots of tinkling cyclists. It does have a large anonymous building in its centre but I have no idea what it was. If this was the citadel then it was less Tolkien-esque than I had expected. (I can only assume that the Citadel was demolished and only the name remains.) At the northeast end of the park we passed the museum of classical art and after wandering over a dual carriageway we ended up on a bridge from where we could see our goal, moored discreetly by the side of the canal.

The barge itself seems pretty ordinary from the outside and even the deck, split by a bar and service area, didn't seem too exciting. But it was nicely laid out with simple tables and chairs. Timber seating on one end and pastel painted metal on the other. A couple of chalk sandwich boards on the footpath outside the entrance told of food and beer, so we walked the plank on to the deck. We were greeted by a friendly barman and told we could sit up top or go downstairs to the bar. Inviting steps led the way so down we went into the innards of the barge itself. A left turn at the end of the stairs lead us in to one of the most attractive looking bars I've ever been in.

We were standing below water level and could see out in to the canal through the open portholes. Ducks and the occasional pretty canoeist floated by on the murky water. The walls and ceiling were crowded with enamel beer signs, old movie poster, radios, musical instruments and the odd piece of carrion. A gorgeous cat lounged on a chair and eyed us warily as we sat down at the next table. The music was 80s and 90s but with a fair sprinkling of every genre and the odd tune form other ages too. ( It was played through a sophisticated looking system that gave perfect acoustics. You could hear every note and word but still speak to your friends, a rarity in any bar.) We grinned manically and instantly felt at home and relaxed. This was our kind of bar, and we hadn't looked at the beer or food list yet.

We spied the menu, enveloped in timber naturally given the place's name, and began to study it. Over 100 beers greeted us, many familiar but most not, in the end I settled for a Saison Voisin which turned out to be lovely refreshing offering with a funky, lemon bitterness. My comrades had the house beer called Plankse, which the both enjoyed as we decided what to eat. We went for rolls (broodje?) stuffed with salad, cheese, ham and a weird-wonderful anonymous paste, which were both fresh and tasty. While deciding what to drink next, my mind flittered back to some beer specials that we glimpsed on the chalkboard outside the entrance.

The barman told us that these specials were Brasserie Le Fort, which turned out to be a fantastic strong smelling beer that tasted of fizzy treacle with added musty raisins, and Zundert from a new Dutch Trappist brewery. This was also gorgeous and tasted like a Tripelised Orval with a lovely funky sweetness.

The (19 year old we found out!) cat was still eyeing us suspiciously as we at last decided that we would have to leave and go to find our hotel. We paid our bill and left vowing to come back again...

And we did, much later that night when we had a Hanssens Oudbeitje, Hanssens Oude Geueze and 3 Fonteinin Oude Geuze. All excellent sour beers that I can not do justice to the description of, although I will say that the Oudbeitje, tasting of farmyard and cider vinegar with a hint of strawberries, was an unique but far from unpleasant taste!

We returned again the following day on the way back to the train when I had a De Ranke Guldenberg and toasted our good fortune in finding this place.

De Planck's prices appeared much better than elsewhere in Ghent, probably because of its location, and the service was efficient and friendly. I can safely say it goes into my top 5 bars in Europe. It goes to show that a great bar is not just about the beer or the bar or the location or the staff or the music, or the company you are with for that matter, it's a combination of all of these things.

Kaffee de Planck hits all the right notes.

As for Ghent? Well it was also a big hit with us too.

Less saccharine than Bruges with even finer architecture and a more lived in feel, it is certainly my favourite city or town in Belgium so far. I could happily spend many a weekend there, and we only barely scratched the surface of things to see and do. We visited churches, the belfry and more than one or two bars. We walked the city at night marveling at the lit up buildings and bridges, we went on the boat trip and even spied some turtles in the canals!

Poor Ghent? I don't think so!

We'll be back.

(Visited on the 11th and 12th September 2014)