Oproer: Rising from the Ashes

For several years the CAB building next to the Zuilen trainstation in Utrecht was a destination for (vegan) beer lovers. It was here that Oproer had their brewpub and vegan restaurant, doubling as a brewery in the first two years. A quick history lesson for those who don’t know: Oproer started as the combination of breweries Rooie Dop and Ruig. Since this fusion it has steadily been building a name for itself. The vegan restaurant won an award for best vegan restaurant in the country. When they started sending in beers to competitions, the beers also started winning prizes. Since a few years they started a sour program as well with great success. A kriek winning awards twice in a row at the Dutch Beer Challenge for example. But their Session IPA and Double Oatmeal Stout won as well, showing the wide range of what they can make.

Things were going fine until the disasters.

First that one disaster that affected all of us. Oproer, like all bars and restaurants, had to close its doors after corona hit. They frantically set up a webshop to try and sell at least some bottles. And with great success, sales were better than expected. Over the summer the bar could open again. But with the regulations they could never be at full capacity.

Then the number of covid cases rose rapidly and they had to close. Again. And this time this also meant letting go of the entire staff.

And then another disaster hit.

On a Monday night in January a fire broke out in a wooden floor storage at the other side of the building. The fire was huge and the smoke went under the roof and ended up in the Oproer brewpub. Though nothing was burned or broken the smoke damage was so extensive that everything was useless, covered under a layer of poisonous soot. It was clear that it would be a very long time before anything could start here again.

But having their own place to serve these beers to the public is what they wanted the most. So the search commenced to find a new place. And they found one on the ground floor of a completely new structure in Utrecht Overvecht.

The new space is going to be vast, twice the size of the old pub and that was already roomy. Beer is supposed to flow out of 20 taps. Above them are hundreds of apartments are planned. Downtown Utrecht is only about 10/15 minutes away. The Overvecht Trainstation is also relatively close.

They have been socially and environmentally conscious from the start. This will come back in the beercafé. Most of the construction materials inside will be from recycled materials. And because the room has several areas different designers can make something.

It has to be more of a beercafé than the old place ever was. A big bar in the middle of the room and a lot of sitting and standing places to enjoy a cool Refuse/Resist or sour Kriek. Different sections will have different looks, as to not make it too much of a colossal space but with things to explore.

It is a completely new and bare structure. Even the electricity cables and watermains have to be installed. Because they don’t have a few hundred thousand euros lying around and insurance only covers a small part after the fire, they opted to try the often used method of crowdfunding. On October 6th the reached the goal of € 300.000 for the new bar. They are now looking for an additional € 75.000 to improve and expand the brewery. So if you want to help out with the Oproer resurrection go to their page at CrowdAboutNow.

The plan now is that they will get the key to the new place in October. With any luck the bar can open around February 2022.

Oproer needs to continue being the presence that they were in the Utrecht beer scene, and the new beercafé is just that. I myself can’t wait to see what it will be like in 2022.

Leeuwarden Beer Festival: Back To Normal

It is one of the things to most look forward to on the beer calendar: festivals. And in the last two years that calendar has been eerily empty. The only festivals that were held were of the sit-down kind where you order at your table and they bring it to you. Not exactly how they were meant to be.

August and September is supposed to be the month of Van Mollfest, Brewda and Borefts but they were all, logically so, cancelled. The only ‘real’ festival that was still on, was the Leeuwarden Beerfestival. This festival had gone through the same phases as most with it being postponed a number of times. The last scheduled date was on September 25 and that luckily turned out to be the day that many of the corona rules were relaxed or completely given up. Gone is the 1,5 meter distance between each other for example. But you can only get into a bar or restaurant with a QR code. This code has let to a lot of resistance with bar and restaurant owners, but for this festival it worked fine.

My first beer festival in two years however was not as a visitor, but as part of the Oproer team that was invited to pour that day. It had been a while since I had done something like this but it was a good to do something again where corona was not the first thing on your mind.

The festival was held at De Eenhoorn, an entertainment venue that is big enough to hold all the brewers and the over 800 people attending, without ever feeling too crowded. There were three seperate rooms for the brewers. The attending breweries were a mix of good local and national brewers like De Moersleutel, Grutte Pier, De Natte Gijt and Duits & Lauret, with some international ones like Lupulus, Dochter van de Korenaar and Lagunitas. At the same time two tap takeover were held at the adjacent café De Markies by De Ranke and Wild Beer. This also meant a nice variety of different beer styles. De Markies was also the organizer and subject of an earlier piece I wrote about Leeuwarden. Besides being a great café they show to be able to organize a great festival as well.

As a ‘brewer’ you usually don’t have a lot of time to walk around the other stands and talk and sample their beers. Especially not at this festival, it was busy all the time. I feel bad for the brewers who were there alone. But a busy festival means a successful one!

I for one was happy to be back into the action without any hassle and rules to strictly adhere too. I would not mind returning next year as a guest and sample all the fine beers on offer.

With all the complaining by some that all our freedoms are being taken away it was good to be at a festival that for the most part was back to normal. It’s good to be back, and thanks De Markies en Leeuwarden for making that possible.

Untappd Top 10 City: Utrecht!

Of the many end-of-year lists there was one that especially caught my eye. Untappd released a list of the Top 10 cities with the most checkins.

I’m not going to try and find an explanation why New York, Chicago and Philadelphia are on the list and great beer towns like Portland, Seattle and San Diego are not. And why are the rest, apart from London, all Scandinavian cities? Sure, all are hotbeds of this century’s craft beer revolution and in the case of Scandinavia combined with high tech savviness. But a deeper explanation is more for the sociologists and demographers to provide us.

What caught my eye specifically are the two cities in the Netherlands that made the list. That Amsterdam is on there should not be that surprising. The city is small, smaller than you’d think with only about 750,000 people living here. It does attract people from all over the world and has a great beer scene. It has the perfect beer trifecta with great bars (e. g. Arendsnest, Beer Temple, In De Wildeman), shops (Sterck, Bierkoning) and breweries (‘t IJ, Walhalla, Oedipus and many more). Even in a year with far fewer tourists because of corona this can be explained, also with the high usage of Untappd and tech savviness in general. Our society is in many ways structured like a Scandinavian country and when they pop up in ‘best living in the world for this and this reason’ lists we often are on it as well.

The second city on the list is Utrecht, a city of little over 300,000 people. This is not as surprising as it seems. It is the fourth city in the country after Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague but the latter two cities have a small craft beer scene, nothing compared to Utrecht.

In the last decade I have often compared Utrecht to Portland on this blog, they are sister cities for a reason! When the beer revolution also enveloped the Netherlands this city and the surrounding eponymous province already had a great number of breweries. Now it can boast six breweries alone that rank among the country’s best: Van De Streek, Kromme Haring, Eleven, Oproer, Maximus and De Leckere all brew in the city and have their beers in bars and stores not only in the Netherlands but in other countries as well.

The beer bar scene is equally impressive with the legendary DeRat, België, Ledig Erf, Drie Dorstige Herten and that is just a small part of what’s available. You can have a perfect night out drinking very special beers without setting foot in any of these bars. Stores like De Bierverteller, Zuylen and Little Beer Shop offer a wide variety of great beer to buy. Most cities are lucky to have just one great store, Utrecht has many.

And because tourism does not play that big a part in checking in beers you know that the number of beer fans with good beer knowledge in the city is high.

Untappd only proved in numbers what we have known for a decade, Utrecht is the Netherlands’ #1 beer city, with Amsterdam a very close second.

*** UPDATE ***

I was just about to publish this when I saw that the big six of Utrecht brewing decided to have a 24 hour festival in the last weekend of January. For more information visit the Facebook page.

The Bars are Open Again!

Monday June 1^st, the day a large part of the country was looking forward to. The day the bars and restaurants were allowed to open again. They were in luck. Monday was a holiday and the weather turned out to be great for sitting outside.

I decided to go to Oproer whose doors opened at noon sharp. Because public transport is still only meant for people in important jobs I took my bike. Something I will forced to do more in the coming weeks.

Bars had been working hard the days before to get things ready. Heavy use of rulers and tape was needed to divide the inside part and outside terrace to make sure there would be distance between seats and to make sure that when you walk you don’t run into each other thanks to the assigned walking routes.

City officials had come by a day earlier to see if everything was correct. In Oproer’s case it was. The police won’t actively patrol to see if everyone follows the 1,5 meter rule. Only when they get a credible call that something is not ok will they come. This has happened a few times in the Netherlands on Monday. Maybe having a conga line through your restaurant is not the best idea, as the owner of a restaurant in the south had to admit.

The 1,5 meter rule is a hard one to adhere to but people are at least trying. If it was not 1,5 it was not very close together. Although I don’t know how it would be after several people had a big glass of double stout. Staff also has to ask visitors if they had symptoms in the last 24 hours. A weird question to be honest. People will either not go out when they are sick or when they have been sick won’t answer truthfully. There was cleaning stuff all over the place to wash your hands. Staff was wearing gloves and dirty glasses had to be deposited in blue boxes.

From what I heard downtown Utrecht took a little longer to fill up. People might still be somewhat cautious. But it is great to see people laughing while drinking a beer. Hopefully this will last for the time being and the second wave of corona won’t hit it so hard and that the bars can stay open.

The weather turned out to be beautiful, I even got a sunburn sitting outside. This was needed because even though the bars are open again the owners still need the income to recover some of the losses of the last three months. Oproer turned out to have a good day, indoors there were reserved signs on most of the tables, which is good. You did not need a reservation to sit outside but that got fuller as well by the time I left.

It is still a situation everyone is getting used to and bars will have run into problems they had not thought of. In good Dutch ways the government won’t immediately start. Let’s hope for more good days like this to restart the Dutch brewing world.

Utrecht Beer Fest 2.0

My initial plan was for this article to be about the renewed Utrecht Beer Festival and how it is to visit a festival again as a visitor. But my former colleagues at Oproer roped me into standing behind the taps instead of in front of them so I spent a significant number of hours serving beer instead of sampling them. So I cannot give you a subjective overview of the state of brewing in Utrecht. This will come in separate articles over the coming months.

The festival was not the same as the UBBF I have written about so many times before. From humble beginnings next to a windmill in the center of Utrecht city it grew into a colossus that the last three years was held at a large event center at the northern edge of the city. And it was a festival with brewers from the entire province, and Utrecht has many of them.

The organizers however this year decided not to organize it and take the year off to think about how to continue. We wish them good luck, it would be sad to see this festival go but it was a big festival to organize and it might have grown out if its seams. May be great for the beerlover, for the breweries it was not always worth it because all the coins had to be spread out over 40 or more brewers.

This year the Van De Streek brothers decided to organize their own little Utrecht Beer Brewers festival with just 6 breweries, all from Utrecht City and all with their own brewing installation. 6 is still an impressive number of breweries. From the top of my head only Amsterdam has more now. Utrecht still is a main hub for great brewing. The six were De Leckere, Maximus, VanDeStreek, Oproer, Kromme Haring and newcomer Eleven.

The types of visitors

Standing behind the taps gives you a good insight in the type of visitors to a festival like this. Keep in mind that this festival attracted mostly locals. The weekend was also the start of the Dutch beer week so the beerlover had many opportunities all over the country to do something beer related.

The Newbie

The festival was held at the Vrijhaven Utrecht

There are always people who are at a beerfestival for the first time. They will stand before you not knowing anything. A sour and a stout are all just beer to them. These are the best ones to have because you can introduce them to something they have never tried before. Best beer to give in most cases is actually a Double IPA because it is both sweet, full of flavor and has good beer bitterness. Literally every book written about musicians in the 50’s and 60’s mention that special time they heard a song that was so special they had to pull over to the side of the road to listen to the song. Yes, I said literally every book. Look it up. No, don’t look it up, just believe me. Here you are hoping for someone who tries the sour and says ‘I have never tasted anything like this before’. The best would be for this person to sit down on a bench to softly cry thinking about how good this beer is.

The Fan

Oproer brought two new beers. This attracted people already familiar with Oproer. There was a lot of interest especially for the Mixtape #3, a barrel-aged mixed fermentation beer. Also released this day was a new IPA called Uncut. Perfect for the warm day that this was. Social media made people aware of these two releases and it is always great to here they are already familiar with most of the beers but also want to try the news ones, like fans of a band waiting for a new song to be released. Hoping their favorite band made that one song that beats all the previous ones. Or in this case the beer that makes them silently weep, slowly diluting that perfect stout.

The Geek

The geek will often have a notebook and will try most of the beers they have not had before. Often they visit in groups so they can sample from each other. Sometimes they will systematically go down the list. I always wonder if they actually enjoy the beer or are just in it to fill their Untappd account with checkins. You will get the geeky questions about the types of hops used or the yeast. You do of course hope they come back later and try a full glass of a beer because it is really that good. So good that he sits down with his friends and bursts out crying explaining about how good that beer is.

The return customer

“I liked that one so much I want it again”. This is of course what you really want. In a time when there are thousands of beers available a lot of people tend to try different ones. At a festival it is always nice to see someone’s face a second or third time. Sometimes they try a different one, sometimes they keep drinking the same beer. Not really what I would do at a festival but hey, good for the brewers and hopefully they are going to chase it in the stores as well or visit your brewpub if you happen to have one. And at the brewpub they will choke up when they ask for that special beer they had at a festival one day that was so very very good.

Future

If the organizers of the ‘old’ Utrecht Beerbrewers festival decide to hold another one next year they would do well to look at the smaller version that Van De Streek organized. 40 is just too much. Why not let every brewery with their own installation in and rotate with the gypsy brewers. If they decide never to organize it again I hope this smaller festival will remain on the calendar. Or both ;).