Hello, it’s Robert, Jen’s other-half (we’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to which half). What am I doing here? This is, after all, “Jen’s Eats,” not “Robert’s Eats.” I’m here to tell you about our weekend trip in search of one of our favorite beers, and one of the world’s finest.
Jen has written here before about our love of Belgian beers, especially those brewed by the Trappist monks. While last in Napa, we were put on the trail of the Trappistes Rochefort 10, one of the consistently highest-rated beers on RateBeer.com and BeerAdvocate.com. After searching the city of Napa thoroughly, we found one–ONE–bottle at JV Wine. We tucked it away in the communal fridge at the B&B where we were staying and actually forgot about it until the morning of our departure. Not wanting to leave it, we hastily drank it and instantly regretted having not tried it sooner. Alas, one quick taste and then we had to leave California. The magnitude of this did not hit us until we returned to Texas and discovered that Rochefort is not sold within the state. Our local beer maven broke the bad news to us and said something mysterious and indecipherable about Texas’ weird labeling laws. Oklahoma is the nearest place where one can place one’s hands on the fruits of labor of the monks of the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy, near Rochefort, Belgium.
Months passed and we were content to scour local stores for other specialty beers and we discovered a lot of good ones along the way–Gouden Carolus, Orval and the Brooklyn Local 2, among them. However, we still longed for a better, deeper and less-rushed taste of that elusive Rochefort beer. This weekend, we set about in earnest to find it. The aforementioned beer maven did not know where in Oklahoma the beer was sold. Great–that narrows it down to one state out of 50. We started with the largest town closest to the border: Durant, OK. We dug through the interwebs for beer stores in Durant and started calling them all. After a lot of strange and often humorous conversations (For example: “Hello, Al’s Likker.” “Do you stock Rochefort 10?” “What’d you say?” “Rochefort 10. It’s a Belgian Trappist Ale.” (Silence) “We got Bud Lite.”), we decided that Durant was empty and we had to look elsewhere.
Further internet searches revealed that Norman, home of the University of Oklahoma, might be fruitful, so we repeated the exercise here. Google coughed up the name of a large beer and wine store–Cellar Wine and Spirits. Could it be? A quick call confirmed that, indeed, Rochefort was in residence. We found out the closing time and determined that we could make it before closing and we quickly gassed up the car and pointed north.
Norman is about a three-hour drive from the DFW Metroplex and there’s not a whole lot to see in between, other than plains and a casino or two, so Jen and I filled our time with heated yelling and hurling of baseless accusations about the other (not really–Jen is perfect and we mainly passed the time by joking about things that we saw along the drive or talking about the splendor of that sweet, amber, nectar-of-the-gods finally hitting our tongues).
Thanks to the power of the iPhone’s GPS, we skillfully navigated to Cellar’s and could barely maintain a normal gait as we sprang from the car and tripped over ourselves trying to get in the door before some unseen forces beat us to the remaining bottles. Cellar’s is HUGE and all of that space is filled with the largest variety of beer and other spirits that either of us have ever seen under one roof. So large, in fact, that we began to get panicky as we scanned the wall (an entire wall!) of specialty beer and could not initially locate the Rochefort. Finally, we found it, along with a very good selection of the other Trappist Ales. Not only did Cellar’s have the Rochefort 10, but they had the 6 and 8, as well. We quickly loaded all that they had of each variety into our cart, securing it from all of those Belgian beer poachers that we were sure were present, just waiting to pounce upon our bounty and snatch it all away from us.
Beer in cart, we continued to browse the other selections in Cellar’s inventory and we were impressed. Many of our favorites–Orval, La Trappe, Westmalle, to name a few–were there. Alas, no Gouden Carolus or Pliny the Elder, but those were the only notably-absent brews. Tempted to load our cart with more, we abstained, saving our hard-earned cash for the Rochefort. Hey, it ain’t cheap clearing the shelves.
After checking out and tucking our treasure safely in the beer-mobile, we set off to sample the pub recommendation that the helpful folks at Cellar’s had passed along (The Abner Ale House). We’ll talk about our experiences there in a separate post but, suffice to say, Norman was a surprise hit and will be a repeat destination in the near future and not just for Cellar’s.
