A Trip to the Desert
[A trip to a fairly dry corner of the world causes me to reflect on the fact that time away from craft beer helps me remember how satisfying beer can be.]
Even in Dubai, I can have a Duvel, at the proper temperature, in a tulip glass, before my flight home. Granted, both Dubai and the more financially-apt Abu Dhabi are fairly cosmopolitan cities that have been considerably westernized and occupied by numerous European expatriates. Yet, they are still places with no open liquor stores, most restaurants don’t serve alcohol, and there certainly aren’t any brewing operations.
This apparent isolation can be initially disconcerting. When you’re in Abu Dhabi and you’re tired of mixing duty-free gin cocktails in your hotel room or paying 30 dirhams for a shitty cocktail at an expensive hotel bar that’s a 20 minute taxi ride from where you’re staying, you’re tempted not to follow the maxim of “when in Rome…,” you go find whatever the hell you can. In Abu Dhabi, these days, there are two good choices: the relatively venerable Brauhaus for a select few German beers or the newly minted extension of the Dubai-first Belgian Cafe, which to me is the winner (based partially on style preference). This new establishment offers a surprising selection for someplace so far from good beer. The bottles are deeper than the drafts, the prices are reasonable for the amounts you get, and the food is sub-par (who puts a whole mess of celery in Mussels a Provence?). Bottom line: a nice place that serves Belgian Beer in a part of the world where you’re not going to find it anywhere else. For a beer geek in the Emirates, it’s a dream come true.
When you’ve been out in the desert (either real or zymugically metaphorical), some beverages are quenching and some are not. Abu Dhabi offers plenty of non-alcohol thirst slakers, such as deliciously fresh juices and crisp minted lemonade. In terms of more potent quaffables, it took a week of sipping gin and bitter lemon cocktails for me to truly realize how unsatisfying a mixed drink can be. The flip side is that beer (and beer with food) becomes this deeply refreshing and satisfying experience. The trip to the Belgian Cafe at the end of my first of two weeks became a special moment of appreciating something I take so incredibly for-granted in the states. Of the course of the meal, it became apparent that, to me, beer offers a deeper level of satiation than any other alcoholic beverage I know. While it doesn’t necessarily take a trip half-way across the world to realize this, it did take some time away from the craft beer world to remember how lucky I am to be a craft beer drinker in a place where the tap flows freely.
