I'd love to, but I don't live in Europe. Do you still want to know? Cuz I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, and we drink more Belgian beer here than in all of freaking Germany put together, and I ain't talking Stella neither. Just so's you know.
Well, IMHO you shpould look a little bit deeper into it first, and realise that countries such as the Uk, France, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, even Scandinavia are already pretty much saturated with belgians special beers already, ie. in those countries, beer enthusiasts can already buy pretty much all the yould want in terms of Uk beers
Question is badly formulated : I am, have been for years.
Again, badly formulated a question : there's probably something on the lines of 150-200 different belgian beers currently available on the Swiss market if you know where to look for them. And it's been the case for 25 years or so. We even get beers that are reportedly hard to get hold of outside the immediate vincinity of the brewery... :o>
Besides, trying to pick ONE brand over the whole Belgian beer scene is IMHO plain silly. What makes it all interesting is its diversity !
Standard price in a swiss specialist chop is CHF 3.50 to 4.00 swiss francs for a 33cl bottle of Duvel or Chimay, and CHF 7.50 to 8.50 for a
75cl of the same. Rarer beers command a higher price, of course.
BTW You might be better off posting this on specific european NGs such as uk.food+drink.real-ale, it.hobby birra, z-net.alt.bier, fr.rec.boissons.bieres...
I live in the U.S. but spend about 10 weeks in Germany every year. I would love to be able to buy Belgian beers in Hamburg (you can sometimes find Chimay--but you have to search--and the bottles are dusty). The reason they don't carry Belgian beers there, I think, has to do with a pathological obsession with the Reinheitsgebot, and a bizarre closed-mindedness.
The beers I would like to buy there (as I can easily do in supermarkets in France and Spain) are Orval, Bush, Duvel, anything called a tripel, anything called a grand cru, Westvleteren, and anything else that is dynamic and original.
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