#125 – Campus

#125 - Campus

Size: 330 ml

ABV: 7 %

Campus is an orphan beer. This is a term I tend to use for those beers who have survived on in the new world despite losing their parental home. The foster parents in this case are Huyghe who rescued a number of small local breweries through acquisition in the 1990’s.  Biertoren from the town of Kampenhout, were the unfortunate original mother and father.

Biertoren translates fairly easily into English as the Beer Tower, and was a title used when the Smedts family first began brewing in a property previously owned by the Duke of Arenburg around Rotselaar. The place was already loosely titled ‘the tower’ after the local castles main keep, and so it didn’t take much imagination to finally agree on ‘beer tower’. The Smedts at the time were very much leading a collective of locals in producing the beer, and eventually common ground was lost, with a number of other partners choosing to set up other breweries.

In the 1930’s the Smedts family were forced to move due to the high rents placed upon them, and they found the empty brewery buildings in Kampenhout which in 1939 would begin to serve as the home of Biertoren. These buildings already had a rich brewing history since around 1840, and a range of Campus beers were added to the menu. The beer gets its name from the town of Kampenhout, and the label bedecked with the university mortar board is an apt one, in that it reflects the student spirit which is centred around Leuven.

If I ever get the dubious honour of drinking another beer from this orphan stable then I will detail a little more of the recent history at Kampenhout, although to be fair it’s fairly uninteresting, just as was the Campus beer itself. It’s important to discern this amber brew from the Campus Premium (lager), and the Campus Gold (blonde) which by all accounts are even worse. This beer should have come with a sheet of muslin, to enable the pour – never have I seen so much crap in a beer! After three attempts at some strategic decanting, in which I lost about a quarter of the volume I was able to start drinking. Amber, fizzy and decidedly herbal were the best descriptors I could use. It did improve as I neared the canal sediment, but by that stage I had definitely decided to give this one up for adoption.