Who am I?

Some statistics

  • Favourite beers: Gooische Bubbel, Van Moll’s Ons Blackie, 100 Watt’s Orchestra of Angels, Schumacher Alt and Orval
  • Favourite breweries: Gooische Bierbrouwerij, Mommeriete, Schumacher, Schneider Weisse, 100 Watt, Van Moll, OLDSKOOL
  • Do not like: I have a very strong aversion to Tonka Beans, Vanilla and Coriander.
  • Most recent beer related activities: I write for PINT-magazine, I have been on television talking about the Dutch beer culture, on several podcasts and the radio to talk about all things beer, I have been a judge at two of the biggest Dutch beer competitions, at the Women World Trophy and for the preliminaries for the Brussels Beer Challenge, I organised several beer history tours and treasure hunts through Eindhoven, I helped a next generation of biersommeliers with their studies and organised off flavour workshops. I brew historical beers on a regular basis and organise beer tastings and other beer activities whenever I can.
  • Beer related studies/certificates: International Beer Sommelier StiBON/DOEMENS/Kiesbye, Social Responsibility.

My story

Like every person born in the 70s and 80s in the Netherlands I grew up in the beer wastelands. It was a time where pils/lager was synonym to beer. Needless to say I, and probably most teenagers then with me, began my alcoholic adventures not with beer, but with mix drinks and liquor. It were different times back then, the drinking of soft alcoholic drinks was already legal at the age of 16, and it was quite easy to buy other alcoholic drinks at that age as well.

Fast forward, life happened. After some alcoholic adventures at high school, I didn’t drink as much during my university years and stopped drinking altogether the years during one unmentionable unhealthy relationship. I got out.

I found my love for life again and I found a new love for beer. Not the pilsners though, those were and are still most common around, but all those other beers that were finding there way (back) into the Netherlands again! I probably started with Belgian beers, but the first beer to impress me back then was Guinness at the Trafalgar pub in Eindhoven. I never had something like it, but it was much better than Bavaria (I grew up in Eindhoven, so that was almost as synonym to beer as pils was as well) and I didn’t want to go back to what I now know to be pilsner again if I could help it.

A few years later I met my now husband. He is also a big fan of beers and together we went for a tour in the Hertog Jan brewery in Arcen. That tour was for me the start of my quest for knowledge about beer. There I found out what a pilsner actually was, that it wasn’t a synonym for beer. I found out about the difference between so-called bottom-fermented and top-fermented beers and I wanted to know more! I found beer in a box and I looked for options to educate myself in beer and came across StiBON. After a false start in Amsterdam (life got in the way again; I became ill, they found my first tumor, I had surgery, I switched jobs, I moved town) I began anew in Eindhoven in 2017 and kickstarted my beer life.

March 2019 I became Diplom Biersommelier and now I’m really ready to dive into the world of beer. In the blog part on this website I want to take you with me on that journey.

I still don’t know much yet, there are so many things to research, so many books to read, so many beers to taste. I’ll probably come back to certain subjects better educated in a few years than in the first blog posts of mine. I certainly want to explore and research some specific subjects that are important to me personally like beer and history. And I want to tell you about my beer travels, about beer board games and about our training for the Dutch Championships.

– Boukje

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