There are thousands of beers made in or imported to the United States, hundreds of which are dark. I love dozens of them, and certainly appreciate the cornucopia of splendid beers available here. And yet the one I crave in my heart of hearts — and brave ridicule to mention — is a large-production, molasses-dark, blue-collar French beer called Pelforth Brune, brewed since 1937 in the town of Lille, near the Belgian border.
There’s nothing rare or precious about Pelforth. It’s available in most cafe-bars and supermarkets in France, where it’s one of the most widely consumed beers. Since 1986, it has been owned and distributed by Heineken. But it’s rarer than rare here: it doesn’t exist. Unlike most worthwhile French products, somehow the powers that govern Pelforth Brune have never seen fit to export it to the United States.
You can look. I have, everywhere, to no avail. The only time I can ever scratch my Pelforth itch is when I chance to get back to France, or when someone I know is going there. I’ve had friends drag me back bottles of it, with disbelief. Truly? With all the haut de gamme products one might purloin from Paree, you want this beer from the supermarket? This reaction is a mere shadow of what the French themselves exhibit when I regale them of my love for Pelforth Brune. Most of them smirk acidly, trying to parse whether I’m being facetious or not. Imagine some excitable French nerd sputtering on about his deep love for Miller High Life.
Pertinent online chatter seems to divide neatly in its summation of Pelforth Brune. Your plain tourists who have happened upon it during stays in France seem almost uniformly to love it, while serious beer-o-philes feel professionally compelled to put it down: too sweet, one-dimensional, too bitter, what have you. It is certainly a touch sweet; it’s a double-malted beer, after all, with very little hop bitterness as balance. Compared with the world’s best porters and dunkels, I can’t say it would hold its own. My love for this beer harks back to my school days abroad, when I didn’t know a Flemish sour ale from a Coors Light, and friends have suggested that my almost irrational attachment to Pelforth has much to do with its link to fond memories of youth, or simply that its unavailability makes it more alluring. Yet every few years when I get another chance to taste it, and am half-expecting to be finally disappointed, I am always delighted by it anew.
Pelforth Brune has long been the flagship of the Pelforth brewery, founded in 1921 and originally named Brasserie Pélicano after a fox-trot number once in vogue, echoed by the iconic pelican symbol on its red label. “Forte” means strong in French, and the 6.5 percent alcohol-by-volume, bottom-fermented beer was created in 1937 to mimic the muscular English ales gaining admiration then, hence the marketing decision to use the Englishy sounding “forth.” That it is brewed using a combination of lightly kilned malt along with caramel malt — a liquid concentrate of roasted barley malt sugar considered a shortcut by some — rather than all-pure roasted malt, seems to be what moves the elitists to scoff.
This was pointed out to me by Garrett Oliver, the longtime brew master of Brooklyn Brewery and editor of the recent Oxford Companion to Beer, who took a lenient view of my simple pleasure, at one point comparing it to his rarely indulged affection for a White Castle cheeseburger. “There’s no subterfuge there, it gives a simple caramel flavor that’s easy to like, and people have been doing this forever. It’s a perfectly accepted practice,” he said of Pelforth’s malting process. “If you can do that and do it well — no it’s not Ayinger Bavarian Dunkel, sure. But what’s funny is, if you do something for 100 years, is it still an adulteration?”
I freely admit to taking some small pleasure in the tsk-ing of the alt-connoisseurs of beer, for whom a “macro” brew is anathema to what anyone with knowledge — and a pulpit — should be championing. I’m reminded of a good friend who owned a brew pub in the Pacific Northwest, where for years he meticulously brewed his own lagers, ales and bitters. He once picked me up from the airport in a Cadillac convertible, with two dachshunds riding shotgun, and pulled from a cooler in the back seat two cans of frozen Heineken. “Are you kidding me?” I squawked. “What?” he shrugged, chortling. “It’s a lager slushie.” If a man with that pedigree can embrace his inner bubba, I have no problem stumping for Pelforth Brune, which looks downright haut-bourgeois in comparison.
In fact, Oliver’s exoneration of my Pelforth obsession tacitly acknowledges something I like to call the Penalty of Knowledge. When people tell me guiltily that really, above all things, they love Fetzer Sundial Chardonnay or rum-and-Coke, I invariably tell them, “Then you know what? You win!” If what does it for you is something that is simple, available and inexpensive, regardless of what the cognoscenti say, you’ve won. Invariably the more you know about any subject, the more discriminating your tastes become, and it dooms you to wanting to drink (eat, watch, hear, collect, play…) only the most rarefied exemplars of that pursuit. You’ve fallen into the Penalty of Knowledge, and good luck climbing out of that pit.
You’d think that a company as large as Heineken would recognize that this beer could be the next huge thing here, given Americans’ aspirational clamor for all things French — and particularly anything like Gauloises cigarettes or the ubiquitous Bréton sailor stripes that whiffs of calloused authenticité. I recall the beer we used to drink as students when we weren’t quite flush enough to afford Pelforth, a lackluster Belgian lager that went down inoffensively enough with a merguez-frites sandwich, called Stella Artois. Imagine the Croesus who brought that to the American market. Why then not an authentic artifact of Gallic blue-collar existence, the bibulous version of an Opinel knife? Pelforth is nothing if not a working stiff’s beer. For years its famous motto was “Donnez une Pelforth Brune aux hommes qui ont soif”: “Give a Pelforth Brune to thirsty men.” As far as explosively catchy slogans go, that may take the door prize for the most leaden. When I queried Heineken on the possibility, however, I was routed nervously from its American offices to Amsterdam and then on to France, where abrupt corporate boilerplate dashed my fervent hopes to one day have Pelforth on my home turf: “non, non et non.”
Be mindful when doing your own importing, however. Returning from Paris several years ago, I cleverly stashed four extra-tall aluminum cans of Pelforth Brune, carefully wrapped in many layers of clothing and secreted snugly in my luggage. A brewer had once pointed out to me how much more vulnerable to microbial contamination bottles are than cans. Plus, I figured, a can can’t shatter. But I discovered at the baggage carousel at Kennedy Airport that a can could nonetheless simply explode. I knelt transfixed before my open bag, gnashing teeth and rending garments as I plucked sodden items from the morass. Then I was struck midgrowl by the most heavenly frappe of malty cereal. I relaxed, closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, smiling, descending into the rich, engulfing aroma to capture a stray iota of what glory might have been. Mmm. Alas.
