Beer pilgrimage – advice for lovers of Westvleteren 12 from Abdij St Sixtus

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Westvleteren 12One of my main objectives for Belgium was to pick up a case or two of the Westvleteren 12, widely considered the best beer in the world.  It is brewed by monks in Westvleteren and is notoriously difficult to get hold of.

I had previously visited Belgium in October 2005, and was only able to get a few bottles of Westvleteren Abt 8.  This time, everything lined up pretty well, and I was able to purchases two cases and send them back.

While going through this process I realised I had a lot of questions I needed answered, and although a lot of people make the pilgramage (the Westvleteren Abdij St Sixtus is the only place in the world you are allowed to buy the beer), I did not have much luck finding similar stories.  As such, I have collected all my advice I have for other beer lovers into one rambly post:

First of all – be as flexible as possible. You have a pretty good chance of getting some kind of beer (they make three types, the Blond, the 8 and the 12), but it will be sheer luck that it was be the 12, so be willing to accept one of the other two. Check what is available and what is coming up on the abbey’s website.  It will also tell you which beer is coming in the following week (eg “For the Trappist Westvleteren Blond, please wait until further notice.”)

The Blond is highly underrated by the way. Do not leave the abbey without going to the cafe (called In De Vrede) and having a Blond and a 12. Also you MUST get the “In De Vrede” ice cream, made with the 12. Unbelievably good. The cheese is also excellent and also made by the monks. You can buy any amount you want at the cafe (compared to the 1kg chunks at Orval) and it will generally last 2-3 days without refrigeration. Combined with Trappist bread and a 12 it is the perfect dinner.

The appointments for picking up the beer are first come, first served. Ring up the beer phone as early as possible so you can get the appointment that suits you best. I failed to call on the first couple of days, and by the time I got through it didn’t fit my trip plan at all and I ended up having to drive 400 miles round trip to pick up the beer.  The beer phone must be called from a real number – it blocks anonymous numbers, so Skype and calling cards don’t work. The number is +3270210045.  You are supposed to give your car’s license plate details, but turning up in a rental car is fine – give your name instead of a license plate number.

Before you arrive to pick up the beer, be prepared. On your way to Westvleteren, go to a post office – preferrably in Flanders rather than Wallonia. That way they will speak English. Get two of the largest Kilopost boxes and at least 3 rolls of bubble wrap and some tape. One roll of tape should do, but maybe get two. Some newspaper will also be useful for the padding. Each box will hold 24 bottles if you do it correctly. Each box will then cost 75 euro to post back to the US, as it will weigh 18-19kg if you have packed it correctly.

If you drive to Ieper (10 minutes from Westvleteren), there is a post office there. After posting the beer, you can then either take the cases back and get 10 euro per case back, or keep them and take them in luggage. I tried posting and it’s just too darn hard. Two cases will fit in a regular sized suitcase pretty easily and weigh about 5kg each.

Total cost if you keep the cases:

90 euro for the beer/recycling fee/cases
150 euro for postage

Works out at 5 euro per beer. (approximately USD$7 at the moment)

I rushed my packaging and only 1 beer broke in transit. I remembered thinking at the time I meant to put some extra packaging in but was in such a hurry I forgot. If you do this right you should get zero breakages. Label the beer as glassware and fragile. It should take less than a week to arrive.

Westvleteren 12

Some packing advice. Individually wrap in bubble wrap. Wrap the bottom to the neck in one section and have a separate one for the top. Layer bubble wrap between the bottles. Lay them sideways in the box. Allow for at least 1-2 hours to do this!! It will take time to do it right.

You can get 6 packs at the cafe. I found that they did not offer them on a Saturday, but did offer it on a Monday. I am not sure if this is indicative of anything, but just what happened when I went there. It might be worth trying to call the beer phone to ask if they are in stock before driving to Westvleteren. The 6 pack is actually a degustation kit. From memory, you will get 2x Blonds, 2x 8s, 2x 12s and a glass. I can’t remember the price exactly but I believe it was 14 euro. The kit is worth it if you don’t want the hassle of shipping a massive amount of beer, or if you want a few of the other types. If you’re serious about the 12, it is totally worth getting the crates and shipping.

The glass by itself was 3.50 euro from memory. MAKE SURE YOU BUY 2 GLASSES. You can’t buy it anywhere but the cafe, and they go for ridiculous prices on eBay. If one breaks imagine how sad you will be. I made the mistake of getting a single glass (no, it’s not broken, but I wish I had 2 now!). Take the glass in your carry-on luggage.

Another alternative to shipping is to get an empty suitcase and fill that with the beer, but you will need to split part of the beer into another suitcase (approx 8-10 beers) so that its weight does not exceed the 32kg maximum. Most airlines have a 23kg limit per bag as well. The simplicity of posting and forgetting makes the 150 euro worth it in my opinion. If taking a few bottles in your luggage, putting two socks over each bottle seems to work great to prevent breakages.

Good luck! It’s totally worth it.

How not to run customer support

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I just got back from vacation last week.  It was a whirlwind tour of Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the UK.  I had a great time, sampling a lot of beer and seeing a lot of cool places.

At the start of the trip, I was connecting from London Heathrow to Oslo.  Given I had around 5 hours to kill in Terminal 5, I decided to pony up for some airport wifi.  They have several providers in T5, and I went with the brand name I knew, which also had a decent price.  Boingo.

Everything was just peachy when I signed up. Then I tried to log in.  Complete brick wall – everything started timing out, and authentication just wouldn’t happen.  No biggie, I signed up for another provider and sent an email to them letting them know their wifi wasn’t working at that location and if I could get a refund.

Hi there,

I just tried to sign up for Boingo and it worked just fine for taking my credit card details.  However, after this I was unable to surf the internet – the client I downloaded could not authenticate me, nor did the online authentication work.  The online authentication seemed to work momentarily and then sites began timing out.  I tried restarting the computer and reconnecting, but even the unauthenticated pages wouldn’t work.  I had plenty of wireless signal.  I have screenshots of the problems if that helps.

I needed to use the net in a hurry and ended up having to buy access through another wifi provider.  Since Boingo could not provide the service I paid for, could I please get a refund?  My username is <xxx>.

Thanks,
Tim

After three days, I hadn’t heard anything.  Hmm, not a good sign.  This time I CCed service as well as support.

Hi,

I haven’t heard anything back yet, and was hoping someone could help me with this?

Thanks
Tim

This is the response I got (literally the whole email):

Thanks for contacting Boingo Wireless.

What is your username?

Irritating and unhelpful, but nevermind – I can understand that CSRs are usually busy and overworked.

Hi there,

As per my original email, it is <xxx>.

Tim

A day later I got another response…

Thanks for contacting Boingo Wireless.

It could be any number of things and your account status is active.

So that we can better trouble shoot you please call when you are at the hotspot location.

I didn’t think they could be serious. This is how you’ve trained your CSRs to help customers?  For a company that is based entirely on wireless hotspots?  You ask your travelling customers to go back to the hotspot they had trouble in and to troubleshoot from there, days after their missed opportunity?

Finally, I requested a refund again:

Hi,

I was at Heathrow Airport for a period of 5 hours, and needed the service then.  I am in the middle of a trip, and I will not be back at the service location.

This is getting very frustrating – I would really like a refund, otherwise I will need to request a chargeback from my credit card company.

Thanks
Tim

This was the response:

We were unable to locate an account for you, with the info provided below. You should not be charged.

At this point (a week after first requesting the refund), it seems like a customer care supervisor saw our back and forth, and thankfully intervened.  I can happily say I then received the refund:

Dear Tim Cederman-Haysom,

Thanks for contacting Boingo Wireless.

This is to confirm your refund of 5.95 to your credit card and we do apologize for this inconvenience.

If we can be of any additional help, please don’t hesitate to contact our Customer Care team.  We’re available 24/7.

Warm regards,
Brenda Cooper
Online Customer Care

It is safe to say that I stuck to Boingo alternatives for the rest of the trip.  The worst part about providing sub-par support like this is you don’t lose a single customer: you lose the word of mouth from them as well.  I’m still not sure why people skimp on providing excellent customer support when companies like Amazon, Fog Creek and Zappos have used customer support to as a way to get talked about, in a good way, and this word of mouth brings an incredible amount of business.

Incidently I had great service from The Cloud, the alternative I used, and T-mobile wasn’t bad either when my wife used it with her roaming account.

Is something usable, or is something useful?

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One thing I’ve been reflecting on lately is how often I will use something because I find it incredibly useful – and yet in a lot of cases it’s quite unusable.

A potential reason for companies overlooking the importance of usability testing is that they have had success in the past with an innovative product, “so why change?”  Time and time again I’ve seen examples where a design has succeeded simply because it offered something people needed even it wasn’t in a usable fashion.

An extreme example is the ATM.  It’s only recently ATMs have been getting easier to use, but they are still the same old clunky things, with awkward questions and poorly laid out buttons.  But getting access to your money isn’t a “nice to have”.  It’s a long term piece of infrastructure, and given security requirements it’s rarely upgraded.  So we put up with it because it’s useful.

In the cut-throat consumer world you see the same thing with products that have an innovative edge.  The Logitech Harmony 880 remote is a great example.  It combines price, looks, and a reasonable amount of usability to make a pretty compelling package for improving the experience with controlling your hifi.  And yet when you really look at it, it’s a horrible product.  The remote is laggy, the screen of poor quality, and the ergonomics are honestly the worst I’ve seen in a remote.  Don’t even get me started on the PC software – it is very obvious they never tested the UI outside of the QA team.  If someone were to bring out a properly usable version of it in the market, it would kill.  But it’s a success because it’s so useful and so people are discouraged from competing.

A final example – during my thesis I looked at how dentists used their patient charting software.  Specifically I talked to dentists about how they used the periocharting software (measuring the space between your gums and your teeth).  Unanimously the dentists hated it and felt it wasted a lot of their time.  Yet they all used it, and for some, it was a major reason for purchasing the software.  The simple reason being it was incrementally better than previous software in terms of usability and more importantly improved patient education far more than any other product available to them.

So what’s the lesson?  I guess it’s a double edged sword.  If you have something you want to get to market immediately, and you’re concerned about usability, then maybe you should just get it out there.  It will be an even bigger success once you make it better.  However if you are the first to market with a half decent product, and then someone comes by with something truly usable you’re in trouble.  Me?  I’ll always be running the usability studies.

Random Wikipedia factoid of the day

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Beer was prohibited in Iceland until 1989.

This was too crazy a fact for me to just trust Wikipedia on.  Sure enough:

Beer was illegal in Iceland until 1989.  Yes, this is not a misprint.  Iceland, like the USA, underwent prohibition in the early part of the 20th century.  Our friends in Spain & Portugal helped resolve this situation in the 1930s when they unilaterally stated that they would accept no more Icelandic salted cod (fish & fish products are Iceland’s largest export) unless Iceland agreed to import red wine.  Iceland’s response was to agree and the door was open.  Iceland also had a history of producing a rough home-spirit called Brennivín (tastes like Aquavit) and the push was also made to legalize hard spirits.  Somehow, beer slipped through the cracks and remained ‘prohibited’, although I am told it wasn’t especially illegal to have it, just illegal to buy or sell it.

Happily they now have a national beer day to celebrate the end of the prohibition – March 1st.

Cuil.com – the next Google?

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From the way Mike Arrington carries on about it (oh and a bit more here too), you’d think so.  My initial impressions are quite different (to be fair, he does state “…it doesn’t appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant“).

I started with the old vanity surfing evaluation.  I initially searched for plain old “cederman” (I’m number 2 on Google behind darn Lars-Erik at the moment!).

Searching for \

Very confusing list of results without any sort of rhyme or reason to them.  None of the vaunted contextual search options delineating between the few Cedermans on the web (there are only three or four of us, with three of us being published authors).  There are also some incredibly irrelevant results there, and why is an extremely old copy of my twitter page listed there, but not cederman.com?

“cederman-haysom”, “tim cederman” and “tim cederman-haysom” didn’t fare much better either.  Ouch, it’s not hard when there are literally only three cederman-haysoms in the world!

Anyway, whatever.  The true test of a search engine is looking for stuff that you actually want.  While TechCrunch did several broad searches (such as for “dog”, “apple”, and “france”), these are fairly rare in real world searches.  At the moment I’m planning a trip to Belgium, so I tried one of the cities I’m looking at accommodation for and trying to plan a tour of.

No results for Ghent on cuil

No results!  Search for the alternative spelling “Gent” only showed pages in Dutch.  The most curious aspect to this is that contextual search worked here.  The options shown up the top are valid Ghent related things you’d search for, and it’s actually really nice having them identified and clickable in this manner.  So why have “no results” for the main page?  Doesn’t make any sense at all…

Finally, what’s with the ordering of results?  At first I thought I had to read sideways, in rows essentially, but the results don’t line up.  If I have to read by column, then I need to scroll to the bottom, and then all the way back to the top.  Without a sense of relevance, it’s very disconcerting, particularly if you’re searching for something you don’t know much about.  Sure it might help provide some users with a shotgun spray of results, but I think there’s a good reason why Google’s layout still works best.

As an example, imagine someone looking to buy a new Roomba:

Results for searching for a cheap Roomba on Cuil

While Arrington also states “I want to reemphasize that Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.“  This is disingenuous to say the least.  Cuil is certainly not an hour old, and Google was VERY impressive when it first launched.

Still, I’ll have a close eye on what they do next.

Best analysis of a PhD I’ve ever read

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Found over at Jamie Lawrence’s blog.

I found myself nodding the whole way through.

I remember hearing that, on average, 1.6 people will read your PhD thesis. I’m pretty sure that includes yourself, your spouse, your supervisor, your second supervisor and your examiner (yeah, that’s technically 5 people. If someone says they’ve read your thesis, they’re probably lying – they read page 9). You have to accept, that no one in the world will want to wade through this document. Ever.

Oh, and the glorious days of a constantly clean house:

If you’re like me, when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, boring detailed work of the PhD, you need to remove as many distractions as you can because, at this stage, just about anything is going to be preferable to your PhD. Computer games, good fiction and the Internet are all obvious distractions that can be minimised. Washing up was one of my favourite distractions, which I never found a way to avoid.

Required reading for any potential PhD student.

iRobot and lessons for design

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It’s funny how something can be a great design, and yet with a few tweaks, it becomes completely awful.

Witness the Roomba.  I love my Roomba – I bought it in October 2006 when I moved in to my cottage and realised I needed a vacuum cleaner.  I bought the bottom of the line model, no accessories, and as of August 2008, with some minor maintenance it still runs great.  Even its battery, while definitely not as great as it once was, still has enough charge to clean the whole room.  It’s easy to use, cleaning it is very simple, and maintenance is also very user friendly.  And of course, it does a great job of cleaning the whole cottage (although I am lucky to have Roomba friendly floors and furniture).

With so much love for the Roomba, it was a natural choice to buy a Scooba as well.  I don’t mop and I could see grime building up.  Scooba was only $99 on Woot, so I bought one straight away.  I noticed immediately that it’s a lot bigger and heavier than Roomba, making it more difficult to move around and to manipulate while cleaning.  It doesn’t fit as nicely in our cupboard, and its increased height means the light sensor keeps getting caught under cupboard doors.  It leaks water when being moved from room to room, and will often insist to check the tank for no discernable reason.  There are a lot more parts to clean, and maintenance is a lot more complex.  Emptying it becomes a gross chore (instead of tapping a box into the bin, I usually manage to cop a bit of spray back when pouring out the dirty water).  When I lift it up, the tank often separates from the body.  I am struggling to get it to clean a single room at the moment with its myriad of problems, and it’s only 6 months old.  iRobot won’t support it because it’s refurbished.

Long story short, I’d never recommend the Scooba to anyone.  But I’d recommend Roomba in a heartbeat.

So how did they go so wrong?  There were several key areas:

  1. They identified an alternative niche and went for it at all costs.  I suspect their other products like the Looj will do better.  It seems like at no point someone wondered “will having <problem x> in addition to all the other problems mean people will just give up?”
  2. It’s overcomplicated to the point it can no longer complete its original purpose.  Mopping by definition is more complex than vacuuming because it is a 2 phase process.  However I can’t help but wonder if it would be more successful if they sacrificed some of the cleaning capabilities for simplicity.
  3. Too many choke points in the design.  The beauty of Roomba is it keeps working if some parts of it aren’t.  Scooba will fail if the tank connection gets clogged, if the hand-mixed formula is not done right, or if it detects a problem with its pipes.  One of these three things happens to me every time I try to deploy it.
  4. They forgot the Roomba design ideals.  It’s clunky, hard to use, makes a mess and has inherent design faults (such as a battery that fails after just a few months).  It was like they started from scratch without taking on-board any of the Roomba lessons.

I love domestic robots, but unless you’re really desperate, do not buy a Scooba.