In collaboration with Love Pittsfield, Hot Plate Brewing Co. will celebrating the 13th Anniversary of the 10×10 Upstreet Arts Festival with 10 small batches of beer, released over the span of 10 days. For each small batch release, they will be hosting a launch party inspired by the history and recipes of each of the new beers.

February 16 — Convince the Cat Belgian Table Beer

Inspired by the open-mindedness of the Belgian brewing tradition (as opposed to the more stringent German philosophy), Hot Plate will host a Night Circus, which will literally dance around some taboo performances like burlesque and belly dancing. Hosted by our friend Bella Santarella, our Night Circus is a ticketed event that will also include a dynamic magic show, snake dancing and more.

This is an 18+ event, and tickets will be available for sale online and can also be purchased at the door. Beer launch at 5 p.m. and event begins at 7:30..

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Background

Since the Middle Ages, there has been an interesting relationship between the monasteries of certain religious orders and beer brewing. To an American observer, the combination of ordained monks producing alcohol might seem like a slightly taboo mixture between the sacred and the profane—even after almost a century of Prohibition—but when one considers life in medieval Europe, this relationship between monks and beer is not so strange.

For one thing, monks were literate, which means they could both write and read recipes, and monasteries can be expensive to run, and the sale of beer could help an abbot allay some of those costs. To this day, the tradition of monastic brewing continues with thirteen Trappist monasteries still producing and selling beer.

Westmalle, a Trappist brewery in Belgium, first commercialized this lower-strength Belgian beer, which was traditionally served as a monk’s daily ration.

What’s in a Name?

At Hot Plate, we are huge fans of Belgian beers. The complexity of flavor and relative simplicity of the ingredients creates such an interesting contrast, and the range of flavors produced by the Belgian yeast strains that have been cultivated for centuries are expressive in ways unlike any other European styles and strains.

While we can use technical language to speak to the somewhat spicy and pleasantly rounded malt flavors in this table beer, the delicate balance between malts, hops, esters, and phenols is almost untranslatable, just like the Belgian idiom maak dat de kat wijs, which literally means “convince the cat of that.” It’s another way for a Belgian to say “I don’t believe you,” but the phrase makes no sense in English—just like we often try and fail to express what make Belgian beer so delicious.