Category Archives: Belgium

Belgian Beer Louts, 1964

R01843 Oostende Aug1964

On March 31 1964, the front-page headline of the Daily Mirror was about mods and rockers rioting in Clacton. They were fuelled by ‘pep pills’ but, on the same page, was a story about a bit of bovver overseas, caused by an intoxicant closer to our heart.

“It was the Belgian beer that was mainly responsible,” according to a 17 year-old who witnessed an entire Easter weekend of rioting by English youths on a football tour in Ostend.

The epicentre of the trouble was what sounds like an English pub, the White Horse Inn, where, according to young Ken Calder “a Liverpool beat group were playing”. (A Belgian police spokesman described most of  the rioters as looking rather like the Beatles, too.)

Anyone who’s ever been to Belgium will nod in recognition when they hear what kicked the violence off: “English people had been swearing and shouting at the waiters and staff, because the service of drinks was slow.” Even today, Belgian waiters have a knack for avoiding eye contact until they think you’re ready for another beer.

We don’t know what the English rioters were drinking, but could this be considered an early example of ‘lager lout’ behaviour by Brits abroad?

Picture of Ostend in 1964 by Ron Fisher, via Flickr. (Not under Creative Commons — hope he won’t mind.)

Mock Imports

Wild River beer promotional material from Fuller's.

Importing beer is expensive and inconvenient, and, from the perspective of British breweries, every bottle of Belgian, German or American beer represents a lost opportunity.

Recently, we’ve seen Shepherd Neame launch a licensed, UK-brewed version of Sam Adams Boston Lager; Fuller’s launch a US-style IPA, Wild River, complete with Americana branding; and smaller (for now) breweries are launching saisons, dubbels, tripels, pilsners, weizens, wits and imperial double black bacon IPAs left, right and centre.

Generally speaking, we’d really rather drink a fresher, British-brewed imitation of a foreign beer than a stale, authentic, imported one.

However… the first report we’ve read, from Rabid Bar Fly, suggests that, the Shepherd Neame brewed Sam Adams Lager is fine, but an entirely different beer than the original. We haven’t seen the ‘point-of-sale’ material but our concern remains that most punters will think they’re drinking an imported beer and pay more for the privilege. If it doesn’t have BREWED IN THE UK in big letters, it’s a swizz.

Fuller’s approach is interesting. We’re taking Wild River’s branding as an attempt to convey a sense of the inspiration behind the beer and to give the consumer an idea of what to expect in their glass, rather than an attempt to con anyone: the branding merely evokes America and bears a prominent Fuller’s logo.

The smaller breweries are generally proud of where they’re based and there is little room for confusion in the packaging, as far as we can see. The problem here is that, sometimes, regrettably, the beer is half as good and yet twice as expensive as the real thing.

These wrinkles will iron out. A couple of years back, Meantime’s own lagers were put to shame by the imported beers from Schoenram on sale alongside them at the Greenwich Union; but, on our last visit, Meantime’s beers had improved immeasurably and, yes, were better and cheaper than their imported cousins.

Brewing Without Reference to Styles

We’ve just brewed a… something.

For once, we didn’t set out to make a tripel, an IPA or a stout — we just looked at the ingredients we had, thought about the beer we wanted to drink, and off we went.

It uses a Belgian saison yeast (because that’s the only one we had in) and borrows some aspects of our tripel recipe (because we liked how it turned out) but it doesn’t fit the parameters for an ‘average’ tripel as set out in Stan Hieronymus’s Brew Like a Monk, or those for a saison or ‘super saison’ given in Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski. It uses English pale malt (all we had), Tettnang hops (because… why not?) and a bit of white sugar.

We’re not claiming to have done anything especially innovative (although it does have some unusual secret spices) — all we’ve done is tinker with the variables a bit. It’s going to turn out to be a Belgian-inspired blonde beer of some description, and that won’t set the world alight.

But, still, it felt liberating. We’re going to do this more often.

Lots of commercial breweries defy or even define standard styles: Orval, for example, isn’t anything but Orval, love it or loathe it, and sits awkwardly among the other Trappist beers which have fallen into line with each other.

Many newer breweries, on the other hand, seem to us to trot out one of each from the recipe section in Homebrewing for Dummies and, for a bit of variety, take two standard styles and cross-breed them. The beer might great, but will this approach produce classics? Will it create genuinely new, individualistic, original beers?

On a Tripel Tip

The itch to brew a Belgian-style tripel has been with us for a while but, after a bad experience with Belgian yeast a few years ago, we’ve repeatedly chickened out.

Re-reading Brew Like a Monk and 100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die for the umpteenth time, however, we finally cracked and, on a whim, ordered the necessary ingredients from the Malt Miller. A liquid yeast derived from Westmalle’s and some Saaz hops arrived no more than 24 hours later.

With advice from Dominic Driscoll of Thornbridge (who has a red flashing light over his desk to alert him when homebrewers are about to attempt to make Belgian-style beers) we got a big yeast starter going several days ahead of the brew. (We’ve been surprised to learn that the amount of viable yeast you pitch into the cooled wort is a variable that makes a huge difference.)

The next important step in brewing a new beer style is to drink several, so we spent the second half of that week working our way through some in the stash. Achel Blonde, we decided, may be even better than Westmalle’s effort, as long as you have a high tolerance for banana aromas.

The brew itself was a messy, hectic few hours which left our kitchen floor coated in sugar (it’s still sticky, three mops later) and smelling of assorted secret ingredients. Within hours of hitting the bottom of the fermentor, it had spat out its airlock and was spewing the most delicious smelling yeast all over the place.

So far, a week on, there are no nasty lighter-fuel aromas — just a kind of spicy fruitiness we’d like someone to turn into a jellybean flavour. This might (fingers crossed) turn out to be drinkable. We’ll let you know.

As in this case, we increasingly find that saving money is part of the appeal of homebrewing — not so much on the beer itself, because Belgian beer remains good value, but on mail order shipping charges.

How Can Belgian Beer be so Cheap?

The price of Belgian beer gets tossed into arguments on pricing like a Trappist-made hand grenade: how can newer craft breweries charge so much for their product when a classic, ‘world class’ beer like Saison Dupont can be bought for £1.80 a bottle?

Even in bars with leatherbound beer lists, Trappist beers like Westmalle Triple can be bought for several pounds less than beers of equivalent strength from hipper breweries. We have, in fact, found ourselves choosing Belgian beer in British bars to save a couple of quid.

Are monks less ruthlessly capitalistic than some other producers, as Jeff ‘Beervana’ Alworth suggests here?

From reading Stan Hieronymus’s BLAM! our suspicion is that it’s actually to do with the efficiency of longstanding brewing operations. Kinks have been ironed out, fermenting/conditioning times optimised (without compromise), and quality control processes perfected. They are also not shy with the cane sugar (15%-20% of some brews’ fermentables) and hop extract.

But is there more to it? And will their prices eventually creep up?

Starts out Belgian, Finishes American

Elliot's Brew

One of our missions on our spree last Saturday was to find a Mikkeler beer — any Mikkeler beer. The output of this Danish brewery has come to represent for us all the continental holidays we’re not having now Eurostar is less handy; and all the exotic beers we left behind in the bars of London.

And, of course, everyone is always bloody on about them. (Word of mouth marketing works, it turns out.)

When we enquired, the barman at the Hand Bar in Falmouth, helpful as ever, produced a bottle of Elliot Brew, told us the price and waited for us to recover from our faint before opening the bottle.

It’s supposedly a double or ‘imperial’ IPA but, being brewed at De Struise, and bearing only their name and logo on the label, is a peculiar, hard-to-fathom creature which defies labelling and seemed to metamorphose dramatically as it warmed up from fridge temperature.

Those first mouthfuls: faintly funky, dry and dusty, stale in a good way — just what we expect from a hoppy Belgian beer. But perhaps a little disappointing given the IPA billing, if we’re honest. (More fodder for the ongoing pondering about what IPA means, there.)

Then the second half: the dust dissappeared, the beer rounding out, getting fatter and jammier until, as we drained our glasses, it had somehow become American in character.

It was a remarkable trick, like the transformation scene in a werewolf movie, which made us want another, just to see if we could work out how it was done.

Don’t ask us how much it cost. Too much. We’ve blanked it out. More than our train tickets to Falmouth, at any rate. Shudder.

Coca Cola flavours

Re-reading Stan Hieronymus‘s Brew Like a Monk, we were struck by this statement from brewer Yvan de Baets on p213:

One of the main goals of Belgian brewers should be to fight against the Coca-Cola flavors and those kind of gadget tastes… We should be about cultural tastes, not animal tastes.

He sounds like an artist or writer rather than a manufacturer. It’s almost poetry. We don’t quite know what he means by “animal tastes” but the phrase “Coca-Cola flavors” chimes strongly.

When Belgians say things like this, they sound like Obi Wan Kenobi. When British brewers try it, they sound like berks. Our culture just doesn’t tolerate anything that smells remotely like pretension, does it?

For about the eightieth time, we must add that, if you haven’t read BLAM (hey, cool acronym!) then you should. Very readable, full of characters and stories, as well as technical detail.

Saison cracked?

Saison dupont beer in the glass with bottle

After our recent pondering on the nature of saison, several people, including Alan at A Good Beer Blog, suggested we read Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski. Thanks for the tip, chaps. It’s a great book and has, indeed, helped us ‘get it’.

It’s in the same series as Stan Hieronymus’s marvellous Brew Like a Monk and is designed to help home brewers understand the recipes and practices used by breweries currently producing biere de garde and saison. Even if you never intend to brew anything, if you love Belgian beer, these books are must-reads.

The centrepiece of Farmhouse Ales is an essay by brewer Yvan De Baets which attempts to summarise the history of saison and, crucially, explain what the heck it is. A key phrase occurs therein: saison, says De Baets, “has a small ‘wild side’”. He also cites a (primary) source suggesting that, in the late 1940s, saisons were very like what we would now call geuze.

At this point, something clicked for us. The idea of a spectrum with a point at which wild yeasts in the mix become evident makes a lot of sense, and also helps to explain why so many beers are described as “almost saison” or “saison like”. We slightly repurposed his phrase “wild side” and came up with this.

Diagram showing the relative wildness of various Belgian beers.

Ultimately, of course, it’s up to a brewery if they wish to call their beer a saison, hence some of the lucozade-like sugary beers flying that flag, and the idea of precise categories in this territory is a bit silly, but a beer just on the wild side — that is, with at a hint of wild yeast or ‘roughness’ without being downright sour — is probably what we would now understand to be a saison.

Now to drink some more of them and test this new understanding.

Is saison in the eye of the beholder?

The cap and cork from a bottle of Dupont Saison beer.

After several years of taking beer seriously, and more than four years of blogging about it, we still don’t really understand what saison is or why it has such status amongst beer geeks.

The first saison we tried, Saison 1900, was underwhelming (like Lucozade) but, everyone told us, we’d been drinking the wrong one. No-one rates 1900 much.

In their excellent book 100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die, Tim Webb and Joris Pattyn describe Saison Dupont as “either the last or the first of the great saisons”, and it was also the example recommended by our commenters back in 2008, so we decided to make that our subject for the next attempt to ‘get it’.

We had the big 750ml champagne-corked bottle which instantly made it feel special.

It is an extremely delicious beer. We picked up a hint of whatever aroma it is that wafts out of the open cellar door of an old pub — stale beer, rotting wood and mould? — and then lots of what you might call the usual suspects of Belgian beer flavours: coriander, bitter peels, sugar and dusty hops. It doesn’t contain coriander or peel, apparently, those flavours supposedly coming from the yeast.

It seemed a very clean beer to us.  We had expected a little wildness with all the talk of farmhouses and barns that surrounds saison.

So, yes, it’s great, but we’re still stumped. How is this different enough from the interesting ‘blondes’ that many Belgian breweries produce to warrant a different label? Is Poperings Hommelbier a saison? That’s what this most reminded us of.

Any suggestions for what we need to do to get our heads round this gratefully received. We’re beginning to feel like those people in the nineties who couldn’t see magic eye pictures.