Proost, Troost

Mar 31, 2014 | by Hannah Fuellenkemper | Food

About the author

I'm a food stylist, like pugs and doomcore and will buy a book twice if I like the edition. My favourite thing about Amsterdam is its windows and a certain house on the gracht where people read and plans are hatched by candlelight.

The second brewery I visited in as many weeks after Butcher’s Tears was Troost, newly opened in de Pijp. Can and should the experiences be compared? Difficult.

To compare?

Difficult, at any rate, to resist because a comparison seems like something you might expect if it’s your business plan to open shop in the backyard of the latest pioneer in your field. However, apart from the fact that both brew on sight (or, technically, both will in the near future. Last I spoke to the brewer at Butcher’s Tears, they would be equipped to do so by the end of the month), the two are as different as the beers they brew.

Or just to drink

The battle cry of Brouwerij Troost is to brew drinkable, Dutch beer (they make a point of not doing any of the ‘crazy stuff’ the Germans and Belgians do to theirs) with lots of taste, which they do on and in sight of anyone who cares to watch. The fact you’re actually sitting in an aquarium of beer making equipment is a really nice feature, so is the fact that your beer flows into your glass via one of the metal clouds floating over the bar. At first sight I thought that perhaps they’d taken a leaf out of Heineken’s book and the tanks were fake, but evidence in the form of condensation told me otherwise. This made me happy even before I had a beer on my Troost coaster.

Troost’s I.P.A makes for a very drinkable Sunday in a glass.

Just to drink

To the Butcher’s six, there’s a choice of three, the beers all their own. The refreshing bitter of Troost’s blonde beer was first, their bitter but still fruity spin on the traditional cloudy German wheat beer was second and the I.P.A third; not as bitter as other I.P.A.s nor as thick a colour, making for –as promised on the tin – a (very drinkable) Sunday in a glass. In terms of measuring Sundays by beer glasses, an afternoon spent at the Butcher’s would make it a different sort of Sunday whereas I could still imagine pretending to be productive after an afternoon at Troost; something encouraged by the menu which comforts you that the alcohol percentage is low enough to order another one.

Habitat wise, Troost is more sunny yellow canteen then elegant bistro utilitarianism. What did give rise to some questions, however, was the outside seating situation, something which, and at the risk of sounding old, if you wish to attempt, requires you to first stand on the bench you plan to sit on in order to do so. I found this more than a little counter-intuitive and haven’t entirely given up wondering why someone would put so much effort into providing people with every excuse to sit and drink all day and then put no effort into making the places they sit, comfortable.

I feel like Sunday

I didn’t try the food and whether or not I will is just one of those things I guess we’ll never know until we know, but for good, comparative measure: the Butcher’s doesn’t have food (though you’d be surprised how grateful you can be over the presence of a peanut). I love the beer vats and think they could really hit a good thing if they were to show us what goes on inside of them and even though I appreciate there’ll be no hands-on learning, I know that I, for one, would sign up just to listen. I’m happy to have more and more choice as to where I spend my beer money and another certainty? I feel like Sunday.