Bruges is a city made for wandering. The old town centre of this small city in West Flanders is arrayed in a rough circle, hooped by a ring canal and staved by a medieval belfry tower dating to the thirteenth century. Its streets and alleys encourage meandering, rootbound as they are by the encircling canal, ensuring the perambulator can never stray too far off course.

Whatever serpentine pedestrian tributary you find yourself on, they all connect in one way or another to a handful of thoroughfares. These all find their way, eventually, to the heart of the city, the Markt square, where the towering Belfry stands like a cenotaph to the role the town once played within European trade in centuries past.

Bruges is for wandering, and it’s also for drinking beer, and one often leads to the other here. This doesn’t mean the city’s numerous great beer bars are necessarily easy to find. Some, such as the renowned ‘t Brugs Beertje, are tucked away on side streets; others, like Le Trappist, require descending low and foreboding cellar stairs, and one in particular is named for the very elusiveness of its location.

De Garre means “the alley” in Dutch, though that’s being generous to the walkway leading to the bar by this name. An opening the width of a doorway off a busy pedestrian street begins a narrow passage between two buildings, leading to a set of stairs ascending to an unmarked brick doorway. Inside waits one of the rarest and most whispered-about Tripels—a strong, spicy style of Belgian ale—in the world.

Tripel van de Garre is the house beer of de Garre. Until a few years ago, it could be found nowhere else in the world but inside this tiny, crooked space with a spiral staircase climbing to yet more uneven floors. At 11.5% ABV, it stretches the limits of the style while staying devilishly drinkable (there’s a house-enforced three-round limit on the beer, and for good reason).

Beer may or may not have terroir, but it can certainly belong to a place, and de Garre’s formidable house Tripel, brewed by Brouwerij Van Steenberge about 25 miles to the east, is indelibly linked to this bar and this city.

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Van Steenberge was founded in 1874 under the name De Peer in the town of Ervelde near Ghent, a small city about 50 miles southwest of Bruges. It’s gone through name and ownership changes over the past century and a half, but the brewery’s reputation has grown steadily thanks to brands like Piraat, Gulden Draak, Augustijn, and Monk’s Cafe. CEO Jef Versele is the sixth generation of his family to run the brewery, and displays both an appropriate reverence for what he’s been entrusted with and a necessary practicality with how he fulfils that trust.

The de Garre bar is quite a bit younger—it opened its doors on April 21st, 1984—and current owner Carl Ascoop, who took over in 1997, says the bar approached Van Steenberge to brew their house beer in 1986. They wanted a beer somewhat like Westmalle Tripel to help make their bar memorable. Jef tells me it was a Van Steenberge sales rep named Andre van de Velde who formed the relationship that led to the creation of this beer. As far as he is aware, the recipe has never changed. Aside from the influence of possible ingredient drift over the years, what is served in de Garre today was the beer first created nearly 40 years ago.

Like most Tripels, de Garre’s is relatively simple from an ingredient standpoint. Pilsner, pale, and Munich malt form the grist, while Saaz and Aurora hops provide gentle bitterness and mild floral aroma. The wort begins fermentation at a hefty 23° Plato and will eventually finish between 3.5 and 4°. After primary fermentation, the beer is cold conditioned for up to a month before being transferred into 50-litre kegs, where it will undergo an extended secondary fermentation with the help of added sugar. After three to four months resting at or above 16° C (61° F), the beer is finally ready to head to the bar, six to eight months after its process began.

Of course, managing these relatively straightforward steps is the tricky part, especially when it comes to keeping the yeast happy in the beer’s unwelcoming environment.

“The biggest problem we have is the amount of sugar present,” says Jef. “During the first sixteen hours of refermentation, the yeast really suffocate from the amount of sugar and alcohol created. It’s very important to look after the vitality and viability of the yeast.”

For this reason, the brewery propagates fresh yeast for every batch of the beer, rather than harvesting and reusing from previous batches. Two yeast strains are used—to handle the higher alcohol content of the conditioning beer, a wine yeast is used for secondary fermentation. Jef says this helps balance out the character of the higher alcohols created from the burly fermentation. The same strain gets used in Gulden Draak and other high gravity beers in the brewery’s portfolio.

““If you’re sitting at a table in a bar, and the next table gets that glass, you’re going to ask your server what they ordered.””

— Michael Roper, Hopleaf

These, of course, are steps the drinker will never see and most will never know about; the magic begins when the beer arrives at the clothed table in its bulbous footed glassware—known as a fjord—inside the small corner bar in Bruges.

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Melinda and I took our first trip to Bruges in fall of 2014. She’s from Chicago and wouldn’t actually be moving to Ohio—where we live now—till a month later. We married shortly thereafter. I had just started a new job, and my new boss didn’t know what to make of me. When I told her I was going to Belgium with the woman I was soon marrying, she asked me, somewhat sheepishly, “Are you going there to, you know…bring her back?”

I stared for a couple seconds before I realised what she meant and briefly considered running with the ruse to see how far we could take the joke, but decided against it and explained that no, I was not going to Belgium to bring back a mail-order bride.

That first trip was one of discovery, tasting some of our now-favourite Belgian beers for the first time and deepening our love for others. By far the most memorable beer of the trip was Tripel Van De Garre. We went again in 2016 to escape the nightmare circus of the US election and drowned our sorrows at de Garre the day the results came in. It’s safe to say we hit the house limit.

While the overwhelming majority of Tripel Van De Garre is poured at the eponymous bar, the beer has occasionally been offered to select accounts in the United States, including Ashley’s in Ann Arbor and The Beer Temple in Chicago. Perhaps the most fitting home for it on these shores is a sanctuary of Belgian beer in Chicago’s Andersonville neighbourhood by the name of Hopleaf.

Husband and wife team Michael Roper and Louise Molnar opened Hopleaf in 1992 in the location of a former neighbourhood bar called Clark Foster Liquors (“Hans’” to the regulars who knew the owner at that time, Hans Gotling). Since then, it’s become a must-visit destination for Belgian beer lovers in the US, pouring esteemed Belgian beers in their correct branded glassware and often featuring hard-to-find brands. It even serves moules frites, so you can enjoy your beer with a traditional accompaniment. Michael had never been to the iconic Bruges bar when its house Tripel became available to him in the 2010s (he’s not sure of the exact year). He had heard about it from customers and knew it would sell.

This past spring, Melinda and I found ourselves in Chicago with an open Saturday ahead of us. We hadn’t been back to Hopleaf since before the pandemic. She grew up south of the city, so reaching the hip little neighbourhood takes a Metra ride downtown, a jaunt farther north on the Red Line, and a bit of a walk. It was hot, but after close to two hours of travel, we settled into a worn wooden booth in the corner of Hopleaf. Eyeing the beer list, we both saw de Garre, obviating our selection process.

The beer was set before us on the table and we both stared at our glasses for a minute, lost in memories. It pours with a thick, moussy foam (it’s carbonated to 3.8-3.9 volumes of CO2), and the eggshell white of the head highlights the brown, scripted “Garre” on the glass’s side. It felt right to have had to journey for a bit to get to this glass, this moment.

We talk often in beer about how aromas and flavours can trigger memories, and we usually mean this in a molecular sense, like the cinnamon in a Christmas Ale reminding us of baking holiday cookies as children. Love beer for long enough though, and this can become an ouroboros of sensory evocations; the totality of a beer in one time and place standing in for tasting that same beer in another time and place. Chicago could not be more different from Bruges, but if we closed our eyes, it was like being back in that medieval old town of cobblestones and canals.

“If you’re sitting at a table in a bar, and the next table gets that glass, you’re going to ask your server what they ordered,” Michael tells me. “It’s an interesting serving vessel. It’s a really good beer, and it helps that it’s a forbidden fruit. We have been able to get it sporadically over the last few years, and every time, people get very excited about it.”

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Despite the mystique of de Garre, Belgian beer as a whole has been slipping in popularity in American craft beer over the last half decade or more. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the mounting domination of a handful of distinctly American beer styles, while some might be due to the sheer volume of American craft brands available to consumers today. Some of it might be that Belgian beer—time-honoured, traditional—just isn’t cool anymore.

““There is no de Garre Tripel without that bar. It’s one of those beer bars that have changed beer consumption in Belgium.””

— Jef Versele, Brouwerij Van Steenberge

“In today’s market, imports are struggling against the locavore movement,” says Michael, noting the plethora of local options. “We have 97 breweries in the city limits [of Chicago].”

Sara Levin, the package beer buyer for The Barrel House, a beloved beer bar and bottle shop in Dayton, Ohio, has been a professional beer buyer for close to a decade and says the current attitude toward Belgian beer among many American craft devotees had already begun to take shape when she started in the industry in 2014.

“Before me it was a little different, but in my time I feel like Belgian beer has always been the old money craft beer,” Sara says. “It’s been the OG beer geeks who really respect the old school styles.”

“The people who know it and respect it, respect it. I always have to have some amount of Belgians [on our shelves] because I know there’s some customers who only want those, and there’s certain people who only drink whatever Belgian beer we have on tap.”

Even though Belgian beer was slipping from the mainstream when she got started, she has seen that dynamic further develop over the years.

“Eight years ago when you went to bottle shares, there were plenty of Belgian beers there,” Sara says. “Now if you go to one, it’s about dick-swinging, so you’ve got to only bring stuff you can’t get anywhere.”

While this fetishisation of rarity has hurt sales of Belgian beer in the U.S. overall, it has likely bolstered the aura around de Garre Tripel.

“There’s an advantage to being a forbidden fruit,” says Michael. “When something is only available in one bar or one town, it becomes that much more desired.”

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When Jef started at the family business in 1999, visits to de Garre were part of a weekly ritual.

“My grandfather always required me to drop him off there on Friday afternoons,” he recalls. “He could see the whole world pass through that bar. There I feel like a rock star. They know you’re the brewer, and it’s like the pope himself is walking into the bar. I know all my beers are good here and I feel safe.”

He, like just about everyone else who has spent time here, has bumped up against that house limit from time to time (“of course, who doesn’t.”), a feat that’s dangerously easy. De Garre Tripel is creamy and smooth, overused beer words that find their meaning when applied to the real thing. It’s surprisingly light on the tongue, not at all hot despite its strength, and, to use another overused but meaningful term, remarkably balanced.

“It’s maybe a Tripel in inspiration, but it’s its own thing,” says Michael. “It’s diabolical.”

The three-beer house limit at de Garre wasn’t a corrective to loutish behaviour; it was a statement of purpose of sorts, an indication of philosophical intent. Owner Carl Ascoop says they’ve never really had problems with drunkenness because it’s not really the type of bar for doing that in the first place. Classical music plays in the background, and beer is served on small silver trays covered in a doily and presented with a ramekin of cheese cubes. Times passes differently here.

“There is no de Garre Tripel without that bar,” says Jef. “It’s one of those beer bars that have changed beer consumption in Belgium.”

In an American craft beer scene still struggling out from under the weight of misguided masculinity, notions of sentiment and romance around our favourite drink often get hushed or shamed. Beer’s blue collar bonafides can lead some to baulk at the idea of beer having a sense of place, of our experience with it being influenced by anything beyond “what’s in the glass.”

What’s in the glass is a captured moment; the sensory distillation of the entire holistic experience going on around it. Where and when we drink a beer matters. The hours Melinda and I have whiled away staring out the open window of de Garre’s second floor, shadows blanketing the tile rooftops and foam lacing tattoos onto the inside of our glasses one sip at a time, matter. This is a beer from a place, and that place is a little bar in a small alley in Bruges, Belgium. It’s worth wandering to find.