Happy Orval Day everyone! Here are some snaps from 1997 (from slides, except for the last pic) while visiting the brewery and staying in the peaceful guest quarters at the abbey for a couple days. I was 22, living in Belgium as part of a year researching brewing overseas on a post graduate Watson fellowship, and Yvan De Baets (of brasseriedelasenne) who I met by chance a few days before, helped me head there to interview Jean-Marie Rock and Ann Francois Pypaert, the head brewer and right hand. It was an ecounter that would later inspire the first article I got published (Brewing Techniques Magazine, out of Eugene, OR, a super cool publication beer geeks of the era treasured). All of this good fortune changed my future as much as the first sip of this magnificent beer; it rewired my senses and help set the path forward toward writing about beer, and later brewing it, for a living. From the start this complex, goaty, luminous, dryhopped wonder heavily influenced us from the earliest pilo...