03/22/2024
Saturday 3/26 is Orval Day!
Orval is one of only five beers on our little beer list at Meetinghouse, & one of only two that isn’t a house beer.
Why?
A few reasons.
Orval was very important to , our predecessor in this space. Their back bar wall was adorned with a massive Orval mural, bottles from multiple dates were always readily available, Orval glass were themselves decor on the back bar. This room was synonymous with Orval. So we serve this beer in part as a gesture of reverence for the decade & a half of amazing work Memphis did here.
Additionally, I’ve just always appreciated Orval for being totally singular. Like our other steady ‘guest beer’ Guinness, Orval is a style unto itself. Iconic, strange, bold, elemental. The center of an international cult of followers. Yet it could hardly be less like Guinness as a drink. Where Guinness is soft, creamy & nearly flat, with an alcohol content set for session drinking, Orval leaps from the bottle with furious carbonation, & an alcohol content that suggests maybe we save this one for special occasions. We think the two beers live together quite happily on our list.
Finally, Philadelphia’s modern beer culture is strongly rooted in a fascination with Belgian imports (thanks in large part to ). But Belgian beer has fallen somewhat out of fashion amid the dominance of hazy hoppy beers, smoothie sours, big stouts, & indeed even the more recent fascination with Czech- and German-style Lagers. & that makes me sad, as someone who kind of discovered beer through Belgian imports – strange & wildly varied beers, always with the distinctive stamp of some house microbes. Orval embodies a lot of what I find special about Belgian beer.
So on Saturday, for , we won’t be running specials, or pushing any sort of fanfare. We’ll just be serving this special beer as we do six days a week – from well-kept bottles, in proper glassware, with a careful pour. But being a new venue for Orval Day, we’ll do it all with an extra appreciation for the lineage we’re taking part in by serving this beer in this space.
-Colin McF
