A visit of Alkmaar

A couple of weeks ago we went to the city of Alkmaar, The Netherlands for a short visit. The ladies wanted to go shopping and I did some sightseeing, made some photographs and..... found a shop where they sold a lot of beers.
The fun part of visiting beer shops in different cities is that most of those shops sell local or regional beers that usually can't be found all over the country.
When I visited the shop I immediately spotted the shelf with the regional beers and grabbed a few of them. I drank two of them over the past weeks, so I'm reviewing those two in this blog.

Alkmaars Blondje

The first beer is Alkmaars Blondje. It is a blond beer as the name already reveals, but blondje is also a Dutch word for a blonde women. Sometimes it has the stereotypical meaning of a naive or not very intelligent woman.
The beer is from brewery Dampegheest which I never had heard of before, so I looked up some information about the brewery. Brouwerij Dampegheest was founded in 2008. It is located in the former cheese warehouse of Limmen, a small town near Alkmaar. Alkmaar is often referred to as the cheese city (just like Gouda by the way). Alkmaar is still known for its weekly cheese market.
The brewery is named after "Huize Dampegheest", from which its silhouette can be seen in the logo on the bottle.

When I looked closely at the label I noticed that this beer has won a Gold Medal in the Dutch Beer Challenge in 2022. I usually don't place much value on these awards since whether you like a beer or not is a matter of taste. I also don't remember seeing this reward before.

The tasting

When I poored the beer I noticed that the beer had a lot of carbonation; it was extremely fizzy. Only the foam disappeared as quickly as it appeared. I often find that a bit strange to have a beer without any foam.
I always find it difficult (read impossible) to determine flavours within beers, so I checked what the brewers tell about the beer. According to the brewery, it presents aromas of lightly spiced flowers combined with sweet, ripe fruits.
I wouldn't be able to determine these, but it does taste a bit fruity with a little bitterness.
The beer was OK, but I wouldn't quickly buy another one if I came across it.

Eilandkriebel

The name of this beer translates as Island Itch. It's a beer that comes from Texel, the biggest island in the North of the Netherlands. Well, big…. not really. Texel is the largest of the Dutch islands, but it’s still quite small. It’s about 20 kilometers long and 8 kilometers wide, so you can easily explore it in a day.
Despite the small size, the island has 5 breweries among them one that is quite large; Texelse Bierbrouwerij. This brewery has famous beers that are distributed throughout the entire country and I thought even to the . And I even thought abroad as well nowadays. The most famous one is Skuumkoppen (foam heads, referring to the foam on waves), which is quite a nice beer I regularly order when I'm in a restaurant.
But this beer is from a smaller brewery called Tesselaar. The brewery is quite young; it was established in 2017. One of their beers is Eilandkriebel, a 6.4% ABV blonde beer. Their website tells they crafted this beer to celebrate the island's spring season.
It's made with five different floral hop varieties, contributing to its aromatic profile. Eilandkriebel is bottom-fermented and unfiltered,

In contrast with the former beer, Eilandkriebel had foam that lasted after pooring. It wasn't that carbonated as well. I've looked up some reviews again and they describe the beer as fruity with a slight bitterness. And I can agree with that. I liked it better than the Alkmaars Blondje, but I wasn't too enthousiastic about it. It wasn't a bad beer, but it hasn't become one of my favorites.

I guess not, but if any of you had these beers as well, I'm curious what you think of them.
Thanks for reading my beer review and cheers!

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