L'ecole de bierre

After a hearty Vietnamese meal in the heart of Paris Chinatown last night, followed by two pitchers of Dublin Ale at the Sputnik Bar on Butte au Cailles, I wished bonne nuit to my Metro-bound friends and  wandered onwards to find a nightcap of sorts. What I found was Chez Michel, a bar devoted to top-class Belgian beer run by an Algerian. This would normally have been enough to have put the cherry on top of a wonderfully cosmopolitan Parisian Friday night.
Chez Michel, compared to the other more salubrious, chic or lively pubs and bars in this little area of the 13th, has a more rough-and-ready atmosphere. Many of the beers advertised are done so with a scrawl of felt-tip pen on a blank piece of full-scap paper stuck to the wall. This is made more exotic by the sheer variety of spirits behind the bar, ranging from top-shelf Absinthe to what looked like witches' brews of various fruits in alcohol, not to mention the plethora of well-known beers (Kwak, Duval, Kriek) to the unknown (to me at least) like Chouff.
Unwittingly, I chose the strongest and darkest, an almost syropy thick Trappiste, served in what looked like a flat-based white wine glass with a gold rim (I admire barkeepers who use the authentic glassware for these beers). Michel poured out a trickle into the glass and left me to it. Not really aware that there was anything more to it, and slightly worse for wear, I continued to pour and took a sip. A taste like smokey, hoppy molasses rolled onto my tongue, ensuring that, as late as it was, and as weary as I was, this was not beer I was going to quaff.
Unbeknownst to me, my naive and unskilled supping had been noticed by the proprieter. He put his glass of milky pernot down, ambled over and in a patient tone, usually reserved for about this time of night, rhetorically asked me if I had never drunk this particular beer before. Not waiting for the obvious answer he took the bottle, with the remainder of the beer, and with a deft hand, swirled it expertly around. The aim of this action, he informed me, was to dislodge the sediment that would otherwise have collected at the bottom of the bottle and given me a nasty surprise at the end of my otherwise heavenly drink.

I thanked him profusely and then sat in admiration of this Mahgrebian prof de bierre and wondered if a barman anywhere else would have bothered, or would they have just let l'anglais murder his drink and his taste buds. Pride in one's profession and the in-depth knowledge of one's wares is a little found quality these days. So with this deft flick of his practiced wrist, Michel had ensured that this gallois, another potentially one-off customer, would make Chez Michel a little part of of chez moi from now on.