Chocolate & beer. 'Nuff said.
On Thursday, I was given the opprotunity to check out
Het Chocolade Atelier, which is over in Kinrooi (it's about 30 minutes from where I live). I missed out on the chocolate class last year since I was stateside visiting family, but luckily I didn't have to miss out on it this time! WOOT!
While we were waiting for the remainder of our group to show up, I noticed we had a one dog audience watching us from the house that was right next door to the chocolate place. Poor lil guy..I wanted to let him out of the yard and let him play since he looked so pitiful!
When we finally made our way inside, our teacher, Bart, was extremely nice! I guess you kinda have to figure if you're a chocolate maker, you have a good personality, right? I mean, you're bringing happiness and gluttony in bite size pieces! Anyway, he was awesome, ,very patient and oh so nice!
Here's Bart's shop:
Before we could get elbow deep in some amazing chocolate, we had to take off our jewelry (wedding rings, rings, watches, bracelets) since we couldn't risk getting them in the actual chocolate. Then we needed to wash our hands, dry them, then slather hand sanitizer on our hands (rubbing it almost up to our elbows) in another room and we couldnt go into the chocolate room till the sanitizer had dried. After that, then we put on some awesome and oh so sexy hair nets as well as plastic aprons, then we were ready to rock and roll! Hawtness!
*The rest of the chocolate pictures were aquired from Mrs. Barb*
It was so hard NOT to just stick my head under this thing and just consume as much chocolate as humanly possible!
Bart showed us what a coco bean looks like (inside of a cocoa shell), the process of making chocolate and all the gooey goodness that IS chocolate. I learned something pretty interesting though, which is rather enlightening considering I sell double boilers from Pampered Chef : he frowns on using double boilers to heat up chocolate. From what I gathered, the water molecules (when heated) effect the crystals in the chocolate, which in turn, makes the chocolate look different once it dries. A "good" chocolate is determined as to how shiney it is once it's dried (very noticeable in dark chocolate), but if it doesnt shine, that means the crystals didn't set properly (usually caused by water). I thought that was pretty interesting! I guess I'll just stick to warming up sauces and such with my DB from now on, hahaa
The process itself was pretty cool from the chocolate in the molds, to making filled goodies and such. It was ALOT of fun!
Once our goodies were all dry, Bart told us to go to town and pack our own lil gold boxes of gluttony so would could take 'em home. You didn't have to tell me twice! Hell's ya! All of those delicious fun for the low low price of 25 euro. I'd do it all over again in a heart beat! The class, in total, lasted for two hours, lots of laughs and good times, not to mention, awesome taste testing :)
Next!
Alrighty... now into the beer portion of this bloggy :)
Yesterday I got to go on a "Morale Trip" with Eric's Flight. Last year, we got to check out the Bosteel Brewery, which was pretty damn cool..they specialized in Triple Karmelet, Kwak as well as a beer champagne. This year, we were going to check out Westvleteren 12, which is a trappest "company" ..the beer is made by Monks.
Sadly, I was under the impression that we were actually going to go inside this place and check everything out, which in fact, that's not what happened. We actually weren't allowed in the brewery. Not to mention, I never saw any Monks...lil disappointing, not gonna lie. After the fact, I was informed as to how you actually go about getting this magical booze... and I'm not lying when I tell you this: When you're wanting this particular beer, you have to order it in advance from the brewery. You have to give them all of your information (name, license plate number) and they'll give you an appointment time to come pick it up (it could be days / weeks from the day you call as to when you can actually get it). Once it's time to pick up your beer, you ring one of the backdoors and a guy will come out, check your name and license plate number to make sure you're legit, take your Euros and hands off the beer. Off you go. No joke. LOL
Here's the outside of the West Vlederan brewery:
From there, we made our way over to a beer warehouse called "Deca"..which made me giggle a lil bit considering DECA (to us military peeps) means Defense Commissary Agency. Just thought it was amusing considering this place was jammed packed full of various different beers. I wish I took a picture of this place, but in all honesty, it wouldnt have been able to show the sheer size of the warehouse with the bazillion bottles of beer it had inside of it. ALOT of the guys ended up getting massive amounts of beer there (several cases, each), so we looked like party animals loading everything in the truck, hahaa.
From there, we made our way over to our beer class with De Struise Brouwers (a smaller Belgian beer company).
Their logo / company name is pretty unique considering (from what I gathered), they used to own an ostrich farm, lol. That's why they have ostiches on their glasses and beer labels.
All the different types of beer they make (they all had really unique labels!)
The guy that did the class was very nice and even had visuals up on a chalk board while he was talking. Although it was really informative, it was hard for me to understand him considering the room echo'd alot in addition to his thick Belgian accent. We got to try out four different beers: Strusse Witte (loved it), some other beer that was bitter, another one that was like a Guiness then Black Damnation III (made my face feel like it was going to invert itself).
Here's our classroom:
Here's some of the goodies we ended up with..you could get the wood rack and pick out whatever beers you wanted (that'd fit in the rack, of course). In addition to those, we got the official De Struise Brouwers glass as well as the collectors set for Westvleteren 12:
^^^^^^^^^^
Yes, if you look at the beers on the end, those are skulls. In fact, the name of the beer is called, "Black Damnation". It's a seriously stout beer that made me wanna choke. I figured I could always use it to make manly beer bread for the guys or something, but to be quite tourist-y, I wanted it merely for the bottle. True story.
Our official Trappist beer set:
I WILL say though, I had a fantastic time with everyone because the Maintence guys are pretty damn funny and alot of fun to be around. They definitely made the trip enjoyable between the mariachi music they were blaring first thing in the morning, to our GPS going insane and taking us everywhere under the sun BUT our destination, and wanting to go play in kiddy pools while we were waiting for our lunches to arrive at a small farm house that we bombarded.
This is the farmhouse I'm talking about:
In the midst of us trying to find this place (it's in the middle of the corn fields in bum-eff-no where), we gave up on trying to say the name correctly... so we renamed it "Slobber Knocker".
Sadly, you're not allowed to take ANY pictures inside. I started having flashbacks of Saint Pauls Cathedral all over again!! Luckily, the prices were reasonable (around 9.50 euro a piece) and we also received information guides to listen to while we were walking around. Poor Dad was crawling the walls because he wanted to take pictures SOOOO bad due to all the historical stuff that was in there (a lot of it is similar to stuff he actually owns), so he was rather bitter about the camera rule, despite the educational experience that it was. 
