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| "Three Sheets to Belgium" | |
|---|---|
| Three Sheets episode | |
| Episode no. | Season 1 Episode 1 |
"Three Sheets to Belgium" is the first episode of the television show Three Sheets . It originally aired on June 18, 2006.
Comedian and host Zane Lamprey begins his beer tour in the capital city of Belgium, Brussels. Zane claims that you should never drink on an empty stomach so he ventures to meet "Terry" at Chez Léon, a local restaurant famous for serving the national dish of mussels and fries. When Zane goes to the bar to order a beer, he notes that the bartender scraped the foam off the top of the glass after he was done pouring. Belgians believe that this releases the bouquet of the beer and makes drinking it more enjoyable. He takes his beer over to a table to eat lunch with Terry. Zane tries to toast their meal and finds out the word for "cheers" in Belgium is "gesundheit", the same word Americans use when someone sneezes.
Zane's next stop is a café called "À la Mort Subite", which translates to "Sudden Death". Inside, Zane meets "Bart the Bartender" who serves beer to customers and oftentimes drinks with them too. At one point he says it is not unusual for him to consume 20 beers in one day. Bart introduces Zane to a game called 421. It is played by rolling three die and trying to get the combination of 4, 2 and 1 among the three. One person gets three tries to get the combo before letting someone else try. The person who ends up getting 421 wins the game and the loser has to buy the round of beers. Zane ends up losing to Bart and buys a round of apple-flavored beer for the two of them. He states that fruit flavored beer is so common to Belgium because beer is so common to Belgium and they want a beer to fit everyone's tastes.
The final bar on Zane's drinking excursion is the Delirium Café. The café is famous because it contains the largest selection of beer at one bar in the world with the number currently topping 2,600. Zane tries to toast with Francois the bartender by saying Gezondheid but discovers that there are two official languages of Belgium: Flemish and French. Francois encourages him to use "Santé", the French word for cheers. The beer they are drinking is non-filtered, giving it a cloudy appearance, and triple fermented, making the alcohol content about 8.5 percent. By contrast, American beers are usually only fermented a single time and contain about 4 or 5 percent alcohol. The next beer they sample is another apple beer but with an extra kick of flaming apple schnapps. Francois explains that the fruity beers only have an alcohol content of 2.5 percent so the shot is used for more potency and flavor in the beer. The shot increases the alcohol content to 6 or 7 percent.
Francois and Zane take a break from drinking beer after that to try some Brussels sprout flavored liquor. It seems to be gin infused with Brussels sprouts and was not to Zane's taste.
The next beer is made by monks and can only be found in Belgium. This "mystery beer" could not be shown on camera and can only be acquired a case at a time. The show then breaks from the Delirium cafe to the Orval monastery where Orval beer is brewed. Father Dennis is a trappist monk who presides over the monastery and explains that Orval means "Golden Valley" and that the profits from the beer mostly go to people and charities. Zane goes inside the brewery and explains that Orval beer is flavored with giant tea bags full of hops. He meets a "beer engineer" who is in charge of checking the color and the alcohol content of the beer. Orval is about 6.7 percent alcohol.
The show flashes back to the Delirium Café where Zane says that trappist beers are non-pasteurized so they contain active yeast which keeps the beer fermenting. For this kind of beer, it is important not to drink the entire bottle. The yeast will settle to the bottom while the drinkable piece remains on top. As a result of the constant fermentation, Zane ends up drinking a beer with 11.3 percent alcohol. He goes on to say that most American beers are clearer and milder than the beer brewed in Belgium. It is at this time that Logan the "Beer Hunter" makes his appearance. He explains that he has been on the road for nearly a year sampling beers across the U.S. and Europe. He then proceeds to spend the rest of his time on camera stealing samples of Zane's beer and talking profusely.
An important staple of the show is introduced in this first episode by Francois. He says that it is a German tradition to make a sign with your hand after someone burps while drinking. The sign consists of your thumb touching your forehead while your pinky points skyward and your other fingers are curled in toward your palm. The sign means "good burp" and it has been used in all seasons including the newest episodes.
The last few beers that Zane samples at the Delirium Café are fruit flavored beers. He first tries those flavored mainly with sugar including chocolate, strawberry, and cactus, which Zane says tastes like "window cleaner". His time ends with a beer flavored purely with cherries and not sugar. The taste makes him gag and he leaves the café in a drunken stupor.
The show ends with a trip to "Le Chocolatier Manon" so that Zane may try to cure his hangover with Belgian chocolate. The chocolatier is a third generation at Manon Chocolates in Brussels and takes Zane through the process of making world-famous chocolate. It needs to be cooled to 32 degrees Celsius before molding so Zane takes a crack at folding the chocolate until its ready. The entire process, including the temperature readings and molding, is done by hand. The show ends with a recap of the trip and Zane's claim that the chocolate cured his hangover.
Episode cost: 180k Host cost: 51k per episode
Low-alcohol beer is beer with little or no alcohol content and aims to reproduce the taste of beer while eliminating the inebriating effects of standard alcoholic brews. Most low-alcohol beers are lagers, but there are some low-alcohol ales. Low-alcohol beer is also known as light beer, non-alcoholic beer, small beer, small ale, or near-beer.
Pilsner is a type of pale lager. It takes its name from the Bohemian city of Plzeň, where the world's first pale lager was produced in 1842 by Pilsner Urquell Brewery.
Stout is a dark, top-fermented beer with a number of variations, including dry stout, oatmeal stout, milk stout, and imperial stout.
Trappist beer is brewed by Trappist monks. Thirteen monasteries—six in Belgium, two in the Netherlands, and one each in Austria, Italy, England, France, and Spain—currently produce Trappist beer as members of the International Trappist Association (ITA). However, the Authentic Trappist Product label is assigned by the ITA to the beer products of just eleven breweries which meet their strict criteria. As of 2021, Achel is no longer recognized as a Trappist brewery because it does not have any living monks.
Orval Brewery is a Trappist brewery within the walls of the Abbaye Notre-Dame d'Orval in the Gaume region of Belgium.
Beer in Belgium varies from pale lager to amber ales, lambic beers, Flemish red ales, sour brown ales, strong ales and stouts. In 2018, there were approximately 304 active breweries in Belgium, including international companies, such as AB InBev, and traditional breweries including Trappist monasteries. On average, Belgians drink 68 liters of beer each year, down from around 200 each year in 1900. Most beers are bought or served in bottles, rather than cans, and almost every beer has its own branded, sometimes uniquely shaped, glass. In 2016, UNESCO inscribed Belgian beer culture on their list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
Beer in the United States is manufactured by more than 7,000 breweries, which range in size from industry giants to brew pubs and microbreweries. The United States produced 196 million barrels (23.0 GL) of beer in 2012, and consumes roughly 28 US gallons (110 L) of beer per capita annually. In 2011, the United States was ranked fifteenth in the world in per capita consumption, while total consumption was second only to China.
The term dubbel is a Belgian Trappist beer naming convention. The origin of the dubbel was a strong version of a brown beer brewed in Westmalle Abbey in 1856, which is known to have been on sale to the public by June 1861. In 1926, the recipe was changed, and it was sold as Dubbel Bruin. Following World War Two, abbey beers became popular in Belgium and the name "dubbel" was used by several breweries for commercial purposes.
Brewery Ommegang is a brewery located near Cooperstown, New York, United States, that specializes in Belgian-style ales.
Gueuze is a type of lambic, a Belgian beer. It is made by blending young (1-year-old) and old lambics, which is bottled for a second fermentation. Because the young lambics are not fully fermented, the blended beer contains fermentable sugars, which allow a second fermentation to occur.
Three Sheets was an international travelogue/pub-crawl television series which aired on Spike in the United States. The first three seasons of the show originally aired on MOJO HD before moving to FLN for the fourth season. Repeats of the show briefly aired on The Travel Channel before being picked up by Spike. The title is taken from the popular expression, "three sheets to the wind," referring to one who is staggering drunk.
An alcoholic drink is a drink that contains ethanol, a type of alcohol produced by fermentation of grains, fruits, or other sources of sugar that acts as a drug. The consumption of alcoholic drinks, often referred to as "drinking", plays an important social role in many cultures. Most countries have laws regulating the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Regulations may require the labeling of the percentage alcohol content and the use of a warning label. Some countries ban such activities entirely, but alcoholic drinks are legal in most parts of the world. The global alcoholic drink industry exceeded $1 trillion in 2018.
Lager is beer which has been brewed and conditioned at low temperature. Lagers can be pale, amber, or dark. Pale lager is the most widely consumed and commercially available style of beer. The term "lager" comes from the German for "storage", as the beer was stored before drinking – traditionally in the same cool caves it was fermented in.
Anheuser-Busch, a wholly owned subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV, is the largest brewing company in the United States, with a market share of 45 percent in 2016.
Drinking Made Easy is a pub-crawl television series that premiered in 2010 and airs on AXS TV in the United States. Comedian Zane Lamprey hosts a humorous bus trip around the United States and Canada, exploring the local drinking culture of various cities in the countries. In each episode, Lamprey samples popular or original cocktails and beers from bars and breweries in the area.
Most beer sold in France is pilsner lager, mass-produced by major breweries which control over 90% of the market, although there are also traditional beer styles, such as top-fermented Bière de Garde, and a number of microbreweries.
Small Town Brewery is a brewing company based in Wauconda, Illinois, best known for producing the Not Your Father's brand of flavored beers.
Hard soda, also referred to as flavored beer, adult soda, fermented soda, mature soda and alcohol soda, is a type of alcoholic beverage and craft beer that is manufactured in the style of a soft drink. It has gained recent prominence in the United States after the success of the Not Your Father's Root Beer brand manufactured by Small Town Brewery. As of late May 2016, at least 39 hard soda brands exist in the United States.
Belgian beer culture includes traditions of craftsmanship for brewing beer and is part of the diet and social life of Belgians. Its cultural value was formally recognised in 2016 when it was added to UNESCO's "Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity" list.