Welcometo the beer tasting homepage of Chris van Aarssen and Gijs Verweij. Throughout the years we have tasted hundreds of different kinds of beer and rated all of them. I decided to put the results on the internet for people who are interested so they can compare it to their own experiences.
Of course the results of our efforts are not a hard and fast rule. Our judgement kan be influenced bij all kinds of factors. To begin with, we always taste several beers at one evening. Sometimes the taste can be slightly blurred by beers we drank before. Of course we try to avoid this as much as possible. For every beer a clean glass is a minimal measure we take. Besides that, the list came about over a period of years, otherwise we would have been dead by now. In this period our taste has changed. When we started we didn't like the taste of bitter beers. Later on we learned to appreciate beers like Christoffel and Moeder Overste too. Where necessary and possible we adjusted our judgement.
During te tasting we also registered the taste. Bitterness, sweetness, sourness, after-taste. For the sake of surveyability I didn't insert this in the lists. For details like these, look at the beer page of Peter Crombecq: http://www.dma.be/p/bier/beer.htm
After a couple of year it became different to find new beers, because we tasted 5 a week. Nowadays the frequence has went down and more and more beers are available. For the real exclusive stuff you have to visit the better specialists, where the owners know what they're talking about. In Nijmegen Daro's Bierspeciaalzaakis the best, downtown in the Lange Hezelstraat (nr. 88). In Utrecht Bert's Bierhuisl in the Voorstraat has quite a lot in stock.
The list will be extended regularly. Of course we don't strive for completeness. That is not possible because we don't taste often enough and because so many new beers are made each week. This means we have to make a choise, which has the consequence that some " ordinary" beers are not on the list. That is logical, because if we have to meke a selection we prefer the exclusive ones to regular lagers or imitations. We are sorry if you can't find the beer you were looking for in the list.
The number of the beer stands for the sequence we drank them in. Unfortunately we never took notice of the tasting date. How could we know they would become so numerous? So it be...
We rated the beers this way: Every beer gets a note from 3- to 3+. A 3+ beer is delicious. A 1+ beer is quite nice too. Beneath that it's getting less drinkable. A * behind the note implies a dispute between the two tasters. The note is in this case the average of our judgments. As earlier stated, the ratings are personal. Tastes differ! If you have comments or recommendations or you disagree with something, don't hesitate to mail it. Or you can write it down in the guest book. Your choice.
