Monday is here, and it’s time to start another week. Pick of the Weekend is our weekly post where we recap our favorite brews of the weekend past.

Saturday was Belgian Independence Day, and we celebrated with some Belgian beer and chocolate! 

In addition to the Belgian abbey-style ale we had in celebration, there were a few other notable new beers that we tried over the weekend.

The New Belgium’s Lips of Faith line has a new collaboration beer, made with Lost Abbey, simply called Brett Beer. The American Wild Ale is a recreation of Lost Abbey’s classic Mo Betta Bretta (and Lost Abbey has released their bottles of the collab with this name). The beer is a simple pale ale that is 100% fermented with wild yeast for a tart and funky flavor full of fruit notes. The beer was very effervescent and light, but in our opinion needs some age to really develop the wild yeast character. As it is now the beer is alright, but in a few months or a year we’d wager that it will be really excellent. So grab a bottle if you see it and stash it in a closet for a few months.

The beer that stole the show for us this weekend was the dubbel from Brouwerij Corsendonk in Belgium. Known as the “Pater Abbey Ale” in Europe, and the “Abbey Brown Ale” in America, this 7.5%ABV brown ale was packed with roasted and toasty flavors and aromas. While the Corsendonk brewery isn’t considered Belgium’s greatest, we find that they make extremely approachable beers that are a great way to introduce yourself to the Belgian and abbey-style beers.

The dubbel paired wonderfully with some dark Belgian chocolate, and the lively carbonation cut through the intensity of the chocolate. Highly recommended.