She Works Hard for the Money

Day #595 Fruits Des Bois / Brasserie St. Feuillien, Le Roeulx, Belgium
Previously from this brewery: the Saison and La Blanche

Welcome to the weekend!  Keeping with the recent theme and just recapping a beer from Belgium rather than boring you with the details of my day (Hint: I'm making pickles today).

Today's beer is a Fruits Des Bois, a grisette beer from St. Feuillien, a brewery in the southern part of Belgium.  This beer is brewed with fruit, and poured a Kool-Aid sort of raspberry color with a somewhat pink fluffy head.  When you take a sip, you get a tart flavor of black cherries and raspberries, with a very, very mild salinity.  While this beer does have a clear sweetness, it's thankfully nowhere as sweet as it looks. Rather light and refreshing (only 3.5% ABV), this beer is quite tasty and comes in a fun glass, as seen in this picture below.

Thankfully, not Kool-Aid

I found this one on draft at Moeder Lambic, a superb beer bar in Brussels we hit before the biking officially commenced.  One thing I noticed was that despite Belgium being the beer capital of the world, many restaurants kept their beer lists small (perhaps due to the fact each different beer they serve gets a set of unique glasses that need to be kept somewhere) and stuck to the very well known brand names - Duvel, Leffe Blonde, etc.  That isn't to say there aren't fantastic beer bars or unique finds, but you just can't expect to walk in to any restaurant, bar, or cafe and expect to find something as unique as this grisette.

As a reminder, grisette is a style of beer that originated in France and was named for the plain clothed working women would bring beer to the miners and workers.  The name of this beer translates roughly to "fruits of the forest."  Now you know.

Things to Think About Today:
If grisettes were working class women, we leave you today with The Rolling Stones and their rollicking ode to hard working ladies, Factory Girl.  It's about as close to country as I'm ever going to get.... so enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl5dTF4rMlM

"Waiting for a girl, we get drunk on Friday nights"