The Duality of Duvel

White Duvel? Black Duvel? What is this?

Not a contest of good versus evil or order and chaos. This alternative bottle of Duvel was not the gift of a bearded Spock, nor was the other cast out of heaven. The white labeled bottle came to me in a box from Belgium.

A while back a visitor to this site wrote me concerning the purchase of Duvel through www.belgianshop.com. Odd, I thought, to be buying such a well distributed beer through such an expensive channel. But I guess this person did not have good access to the devil beer so direct from Belgium made sense. After all, why accept life without Duvel?

What didn't make sense to me was his comment that he could never drink imported Duvel again. He perceived strong superiority from the one that had not endured the import process. I have heard - and in some cases experienced directly - similar things with other beers. I wondered if this could possibly apply to the world-class beer I enjoy here, so I had to test this for myself.

A while back I conducted my first comparative tasting, sampling oud bruins with Bart Springer of Chateaux Selections. An evening of drinking 9 oud bruins and a couple of other beers (that snuck their way in) has the same effect on your tastebuds that running 10 miles has on your legs (at least at my age!). Regardless, I did a blind sampling at the end, managing about 70% accuracy. I was fresh for this mini line-up, thus I felt I was in good shape to compare two Duvels.

As I first sampled them I did sense a difference, I thought the white one (the non-import from www.belgianshop.com) was a bit dryer, but I wasn't sure. As I indulged in several sips, I became pretty confident I could distingish them blindfolded. Eyes covered, I had the missus hand me the two glasses in random order. After 5 tastes I misidentified - in order - which mouthfulls were the import and which were not. How embarrassing. It was clear by my dismal performance that the taste method of identifying one from the other was no more accurate for me than eeny-meeny-miney-moe.

In what may be considered the final word, I had a rare opportunity to bounce this off of a beer hunter by the name of Jackson at a recent Belgian beer dinner. I ended up in the seat directly in front of the great one as he spoke. In fact, during his presentation I was pouring him Duvels! When he had a chance to sit down and enjoy the marvelous cuisine of Tim Schafer I popped the question of Duvels duality. He glanced over and responed to the notion of the the export and domestic being different with a simple "I wouldn't agree with that".

Good enough for me! Buy Duvel with confidence in its authenticity.

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