Every few months Little Brick Café & General Store in Riverdale hosts Home School, an evening of workshops designed to teach folks useful skills pertaining to cooking, gastronomy, and other indispensable domestic arts.  For the spring sessions I am leading a tasting of Belgian beer.

Here are some things that I love about Belgian beer.  First, no other region has spawned so many unique styles that have become classics imitated by brewers the world over.  (Witbier, dubbel, tripel, and strong golden ale are a few examples.)  Second, the Belgians do whatever they please.  While making reference to the Bavarian purity law has become a common way to market beer in North America, Belgians emphatically do not have a purity law.  In fact, they spurn the purity law, using everything from caramelized sugar to sour cherries, apples, herbs, and exotic spices, not to mention a good deal of un-malted wheat, aged hops, wild yeasts, and other microbes that are usually verboten.

At this tasting we’ll try one of Belgium’s infamous sour beers.  There are several classic styles of sour beer in Belgium: straight lambic, gueuze, faro, kriek, Flemish red… I haven’t decided which we’ll taste.  Sour beers have been a growing trend in North America over that last few years, slowing (slowly) replacing our faddish taste for stupidly bitter IPAs.  We will also taste a classic Trappist beer beside a New World copy-cat.  There will be a fourth and possibly a fifth sample to be determined.

Two of my esteemed colleagues here at the Elm group will be putting on workshops as well.  Chael MacDonald, the chef at Burrow Grab-and-Go Café, is leading a class with the enigmatic title “Secret Pantry”.  And Mike Forgie, the GM of all our cafés, is teaching folks how coffee goes from a piece of red fruit on a spindly bush to the transcendant beverage we all know and love.

Tickets are available here.  Hope to see you there.