Does Belgium Have an "Intangible Cultural Heritage" of Beer? Does Anyone?

Yesterday, news came out that UNESCO had given Belgium a singular honor:

Citing Belgian beer's integral role in social and culinary life, UNESCO is putting the country's rich brewing scene (with nearly 1,500 styles) on its list representing the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Belgium's beer culture is one of 16 new additions that were announced Thursday.

The honor came with an accompanying video (see below), which helped flesh out the case--one that might have come straight from the Belgian tourist board. Perhaps you picked up on one tell of a certain kind of exaggeration in the quoted paragraph: "with nearly 1,500 styles of beer." That would indeed be a hell of an accomplishment!

I actually think UNESCO intuited something profound in Belgium's beer culture, but they didn't do a very good job of documenting it. Had they done so, they would have seen that a few other countries have a similar cultural status. Beer, almost uniquely among human activities, is a mirror of the culture that brews it. This was the great discovery I made researching The Beer Bible, and one I speak about whenever anyone invites me to do so. When you pick up a glass of beer from one of these countries in question (Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, the UK), you can only understand it fully if you know the agriculture, history (including things like wars, famines, and rulers), drinking culture, laws, and ineffable qualities that seem to have no source. Of course, these manifest not just in the ingredients and final color, strength, and flavors of the beer, but the way it was made.

In the video, Senne's Yvan De Baets describes the four different types of fermentation found in Belgium, but he skips over the most interesting element--warm rooms. This is absolutely central to the production of Belgian ales of all types, and is a process used nowhere else (except the new world, where breweries make Belgian-style beers). The English practice of cask-conditioning, the Czech insistence on decoction, the German approach that is filtered through the restrictions of Reinheitsgebot--all these countries do something that looks totally bizarre when you compare it to other countries. And those practices are a kind of distilled version of the whole national tradition.

Perhaps the Belgians, living in a smaller country where cultural heritage is more evident nationwide, decided to pitch this idea first. (I have no idea what gave UNESCO the idea.) But they have no greater claim to the heritage than these other countries--though indeed they have enormous claim to it on its face. Even Julius Caesar noted that the Belgians brewed beer. (They were probably doing something offbeat even back then.) Walk into any cafe in Belgium, and it's hard not to observe something unique and pervasive happening there. So yes, Belgium deserves this. But so do at least three other countries.

Now, enjoy the film (it is pretty good).

Considering the Belgian Tradition

Palm Brewery, Steenhuffel

Post updated; see below.

We are quickly approaching the tenth edition of Cheers to Belgian Beers, which comes on May 13-14. The original idea behind this fest was educational, to "help introduce Oregonians to the breadth of style and flavors of beers brewed in Belgium." (That comes from the press release.) Initially, brewers just agreed to use the same yeast strain and brew whatever they liked. As it evolved, the Oregon Brewers Guild, which organizes it, tweaked the structure so breweries didn't all brew the same type of beer; they're now sorted by color and strength.

All good so far, right? Well, I wonder. Does it still serve its mission? Are people learning anything about Belgian beer? As a way of getting ready for the fest, I wondered if it might not be useful to consider some of the hallmarks of Belgian brewing and then see how well the fest reveals these to people.

We think of "Belgian" as a pretty good description for a school of beers ... until we think about them very much. In fact, it's not even so great as describing the two populations, Flemish- (Dutch, really) speaking northerners, and French-speaking southerners. They have never formed a cohesive whole, and for a couple of years recently their troubles were serious enough they couldn't form a government. If you consider the range of native beer styles, you see a similar range of incoherence: Belgian breweries make everything from simple little pale and brown ales to titanic abbey ales, from sweet, heavy, spiced ales to bone dry saisons, stouts, hoppy ales, and of course the several exotic funky styles. Calling all of them "Belgian" is asking that word to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Dubuisson Brewery, Pipaix

If you want to try to tie these up with a single bow, you could say that, in Belgium, the distance between some of the old styles and the new ones is shorter than anywhere else. Reading about bizarre old German ales doesn't make you think of modern ones. But Peeterman, the brown beers of Mechelen, Liege saison? These extinct beers are familiar to fans of certain contemporary products. There's a wonderful old text that describes beers from the mid-19th century, and if you read that and then tour around modern Belgium, you can discern a line between the two.

Another way to group these beers is in the way they're made. From a sensory perspective, the range is too diverse to identify a through-line. But if you visit a few breweries, you see that the beers are made in a similar way, and issue from a national philosophy about what beer should taste like. There are three major hallmarks.

• Yeast character. This is the main thing people mean when they say "Belgian." Ale yeasts are teased to produce as much character as possible, whether wild strains are in play or not. Belgians practice “high fermentation” (warm fermentation), and it is often very warm when compared to other countries—mid-70s for pitching is not unusual, and terminal temps in the eighties or nineties is not unheard of. The result is beer with tons of fruity esters and spicy phenols. Brewers may also stress yeast by under-pitching it, which also causes it to create esters and phenols. (Many times they do both.)
• Secondary fermentation. Nearly every ale brewery in Belgium (from Duvel to Dupont to Rodenbach) has a “warm room.” It’s a temperature-controlled space where bottles ripen while bottle-conditioning. For Belgians, the carbonation is only a secondary effect--the real goal is refermentation in the bottle. That’s when the yeast flavors mature and evolve. It’s why you mostly don’t find Belgium’s famous ales on tap; to properly develop, beer must go through this secondary fermentation.
• Sugar. It’s common for Belgian beers to be strong--7% and higher is completely typical. To keep the beers light on the palate and attenuative, breweries regularly use sugar, often in high proportion. (Occasionally they use adjunct grains, deploying a cereal cooker, to achieve the same thing.) It's also worth noting that nearly all breweries just use dextrose, not whatever it is Americans think “candi” sugar is. Plain old corn sugar is the ticket.

These three things work together, too. Secondary fermentation builds on the yeast character formed during primary fermentation, and the use of sugar creates a thinner body so malts don't mask the flavors produced by yeast. As in all national traditions, once certain proclivities get a toehold, they tend to build on each other. These three elements are not mandatory, of course, but you find them in simple, large-scale breweries, in breweries using wild yeasts, in saison breweries, in monastery breweries. 

Orval

So back to Cheers to Belgian Beers. Does it function as a great way to highlight these qualities? Yes and no. Yeast is the key flavor-driver in Belgian beer, but Belgians consider secondary fermentation a key part of the flavor development. When you skip that step, you lose some of the complexity. Many Americans skip the sugar when they're making Belgian-style ales, too, and this leads the beers further away from their Flemish inspirations. In educational fests like this, subtleties do matter. The goal should be trying to point out all the elements of this tradition so people can begin to recognize them. I've missed the past couple CTBB, so I'll go with this in mind.

If you're interested in prepping your palate, go buy a few bottles of Belgian beer and attune yourself to those fermentation characteristics.

Update. On Facebook, a number of people mentioned mashing regimes as an important part of Belgian brewing. They're correct! I skipped it because it's fairly technical and I figured the average beer drinker wouldn't care. The mention of sugar and highly attenuative beers was meant to point to that. But for the geeks, a bit more. One way Belgians goose their yeast is by adding a ferulic acid rest somewhere in the 113-122˚ F range. Certain yeasts ("phenolic off-flavor positive" or POF+) metabolize ferulic acid to create a phenolic or spicy flavor in beer. This is very common. Belgians also tend to use two saccharification rests, a low one of around 144-145˚ F and a high one somewhere between 154˚ F and 163˚ F, to get maximum fermentability out of their malt. This, along with the use of sugar, is another way they thin the body of their beers.

At St. Feuillien

We'll Soon Be Getting Back to the Spotty Content You Prize

I see that I last posted on Wednesday, and a lame filler post at that.  Well, guess what?  More filler!  An article making the rounds today comes from the Chicago Tribune, recounting the grim beer scene in Germany.  I've been reading these articles for years, and to be fair, they reflect the mood of breweries in the grand old bierland. 

Yet for many German brewers, the good times are over.  A slump in consumption of more than a third in the last 25 years has hit Germany, Europe's biggest beer producer, triggering intense competition and price discounting.  With young Germans turning to spirits and non-alcoholic fruit drinks, beer sales fell 2 percent last year alone.  Traditional family breweries, also under pressure from double-digit rises in energy, glass and malt costs, are struggling, some dying.

"We're in an extremely tough market," Weihenstephan boss Josef Schraedler told Reuters. "You can't grow here unless you lower prices or .. develop a cult brand and charge a premium."

I'd like to add a Very Big Caveat here for all to consider: compared to what?  In the United States, where beer geeks have declared undiluted cultural victory over the vanquished mass market lagers, something like 90% of the beer is still mass market lagers.  In the US, beer consumption continues to dwindle, too, and wine and liquor consumption are on the rise.  Belgium, where local breweries are even more morose than Germans, has one of the most robust ale markets in the world--far stronger than anything in the UK or US.  (If I weren't doing a filler post here, I'd check on Ireland.)  At my last check, ales had about 11% of the market in Britain, but 30% in Belgium. 

So yes, things used to be better in these countries, and if you were watching production slip every year, you'd be anxious and morose, too.  But German and Belgium (and the Czech Republic) are the world's greatest beer success stories, where local styles have managed to weather the onslaught of mass market light lagers.  And things change.  The trend is down now, but that doesn't mean it always will be.  The craft renaissance may well come to those countries, and it may have unpredictable and yet still wonderful effects.

Just sayin.

St. Feuillien

Busy today, so I leave you with an image from 2011--the old brewery at St. Feuillien.  Such a gorgeous old place.

Back tomorrow--

Deeper and Deeper Into the Surreal World of Belgian Brewing

Okay, I have now completed my survey of non-lambic beers produced in mid-19th century Belgium. The tour guide was one G. Lacambre, a man in possession of prejudices but lacking an editor. He would sometimes discredit certain styles of beer, some he even admitted were renowned, and offer biting commentary about the methods of the brewers. It goes without saying that Lacambre was himself a brewer, and this is exactly the kind of thing you expect (modern brewers are just the same). But he was also strangely imprecise, offering conflicting data or using different measures across styles. (Hops, for example, were sometimes measured by the barrel, sometimes by the hectoliter. Fair enough, except that barrel sizes weren't standardized.) All that accepted, he highlights some absolutely amazing stuff. To wit:

• Every beer style he mentioned spent time in a coolship. The procedure varied a bit--sometimes beer would get filtered first, sometimes not. Usually breweries pitched yeast, sometimes (Leuven dobbel gerst, Hoegaarden wheat ales) not. (Sometimes he didn't specify.) But here's the point: no beer sits overnight in coolship without picking up scads of bugs. Every beer was infected in 19th century Belgium.
  
• Lacambre lists about 18 styles and sub-styles, and the average boil length was nine hours. Only four of those were boils of three hours or less, and five were over ten hours (the longest was twenty).
• Only one style--a cluster of three substyles from Leuven--was made entirely from barley. Two others were usually 100% barley, but often had wheat and oats. Nearly all of the beers had wheat, and a large number (11) used oats. One beer, the saison from Liege, was usually made with a majority of spelt.
• It seems the Belgians were into poorly-modified malts that resulted in pretty sweet beers. Lacambre doesn't give a lot of final gravities, but the ones he does give are in the 1.020s and 1.030s.
  
• Blending, as in gueuze, was common, and many styles had blended variants. The act of blending beer was “a special art entrusted to special men who should have a truly exceptional palate.”

Below are the beers Lacambre details, with very brief comments:

• Antwerp Barley Beer. An aged beer that was blended with young beer and sounds much like modern gueuze.
  
• Uytzet. Came in two strengths, ordinary (about 4%) and double (6%). One of the famous beers Lacambre slagged, saying “uytzet is an amber beer, fairly dark yellow, and very good quality when well prepared but but ordinary uytzet generally has a particular dry and more or less sharp taste."
  
• Flemish Brown Beer. The beer boiled up to twenty hours, similar to uytzet but darker. Locals loved it, and for this reason Lacambre begrudgingly admitted it might be an acquired taste. For his purposes, "far from being very pleasant indeed, for it is bitter, harsh and somewhat astringent."
  
• Leuven biere de Mars, enkel gerst, and dobbel gerst. These were the beers Lacambre made himself, and shockingly, he thought they were the best. Made from all barley, and divided into four runnings of the same mash. The first two made dobbel gerst, the final two biere de Mars, with enkel gerst being a blend of the two.
  
• Biere de Maestricht. A brown beer made largely in Holland about which Lacambre was vague. Popular.
  
• Wallonian barley beer. An amber to brown beer that was boiled to sharp bitterness.
  
• Bieres blanche of Leuven. Light, refreshing beers that sound like a cross between lambic and witbier.
  
• Peeterman. Similar to Leuven white beers, but brown and made with gelatin usually taken from fish skin. Tasty! Lacambre: "“viscous, very brown-coloured and has a slightly penetrating and aromatic bouquet." One of the more famous of the lost Belgian styles.
  
• Biere de Diest. A strong golden ale (1.066-1.082) that sound sweet and delicious. Lacambre offers this left-handed compliment: “a very sweet and pleasant taste; their creamy flavour slightly sweet, and has something honeyish which is highly sought after by aficionados, amongst which we must count the majority of women and especially wet nurses who find in them a drink which is comforting and nutritious, as well as healthy and pleasant to drink.”
  
• Mechelen Brown Beer. This sounds like a precursor to the sour ales of Flanders (which is to the west of Mechelen). They were aged up to two years and blended with a quarter to a third fresh beer--much like modern-day Rodenbach.
  
• Hoegaarden beer. This is effectively a lambic--a spontaneously-fermented partially-wheat ale. Strangely, it was served fresh, not aged, apparently to great effect. Lacambre: “This beer is very pale, very refreshing and strongly sparkling, when it is fresh; its raw taste has something wild which is very similar to that of beer from Leuven which it resembles in many respects.”
  
• Lier Beers (two versions). A stronger, paler export version and a darker version for locals. Not a lot of info.
  
• Liege Saison. A beer often made largely of spelt and aged at least four months and often up to two years. Lacambre didn't like the methods of brewing and seemed to regard this as a crude beer whipped up by bumpkins.
  
• Liege Biere Jeune. A lighter version of the saison served fresh after a couple weeks.

I must now leave the translation Randy Mosher made of these texts and delve into the one I made via Google Translate--which though less elegant, is remarkably coherent. I am especially interested in his thoughts on "lambicks." He also discussed the beer of other countries, which also ought to be interesting.

And You Think Belgian Beers Are Strange Now

I have now left the island of Great Britain, traveled across the English Channel and found myself in 19th century Belgium--metaphorically, at least. After several months reading the past practices of British breweries, it is phantasmagoric to dive into the Belgian archive. The old British brewed more or less like the current British. Even strange old techniques like parti-gyling and the use of Burton union systems hasn't died out. But Belgium? Wild, wild stuff.

Take for example the practices described by G. Lacambre, whose 1851 Traité Complet de la Fabrication des Bières is the source for much of what we know:

"Boiling of these beers is longer and stronger than uytzet: commonly the boiling of these beers is 15 to 18 and even 20 hours in many breweries."

"When the colour is produced purely by a long boil, there is certainly no great harm, but unfortunately there are many breweries today that reduce the boiling time and force the colour using lime which is sometimes, as we have seen, very detrimental to the interests and even the health of consumers."

Or my favorite, which is just the second of six paragraphs on the mash schedule for Leuven white beer:

"As soon all the liquid has been extracted, they remove the baskets, of which there are eight to ten for a tank of 100 hectoliters, and by the underback, they refill the mash tun with completely cold water in summer and lukewarm water.... Once there is enough water in the mash tun it is stirred again very strongly, then they extract the second mash in the same way as I have described the first, and it also goes in boiler no. 1. Once there is no more liquid on the top, the liquid contained between the two funds is drawn off, then, always through the underback, a third infusion is added. The water used for the third mash is drawn from boiler no. 2, which is at this point filled with boiling water. The third mash is mixed until the warm mixture is perfect, then by means of baskets, and operating in the same manner as the first two mashes, they extract the slightly white wort which is poured into boiler no. 1 until the liquid reaches 40 or 45 centimeters from the top; the rest of the mash being drawn from the bottom of the mash tun, is placed in the clarification tank."

In sum: breweries regularly boiled their beer for 8-20 hours to achieve a darker color (or other mysterious, unidentified qualities) unless they dosed them with toxic calcium hydroxide. This followed mash schedules (in some beers) so baroque they took dozens of steps and required six vessels. I guess you can see why the lime seemed like a good idea.

Study questions:
1. What happens to hops after a twenty-hour boil?
2. Had they never heard of dark malts in Belgium or did they just like that tweaky lime buzz?
3. Extra credit: was the production of lambic a short cut for slackers tired of 29-hour brew days? (Provide corroborating evidence.)

The Remarkable Rodenbach Brewery

When Rudi Ghequire, the master brewer at Rodenbach, took Sally and me on a tour of the brewery, we spent less than ten minutes in the actual brewhouse. We spent a similar amount of time on the history of the brewery (history is a big deal at Rodenbach) and a few minutes on fermentation. But our tour lasted two hours. The remainder of our time? We spent it inside the maze of cellars that contain the massive vats of aging beer.

This is not incidental. Rodenbach takes care making its beer--the new owners, PALM, just spent a boatload of money on a beautiful new brewery--but what happens in the mash tun and kettle aren't primary. The real action happens in those famous wooden vats. Rodenbach brews a single base beer--a sweet, red ale made with 20% corn and roasted barley. Fresh, it is very sweet, and in fact, the hops are used to retard bacteria, not balance the beer (they fall below the threshold of taste). A portion of the beer is then put in the vats and left to age there for a full two years. When it has fully ripened, it's blended back with fresh beer to make regular Rodenbach (25% aged beer) and Grand Cru (67% aged beer). What makes Rodenbach Rodenbach is what happens in those vats.

There are 294 of them altogether, and they're housed in ten vast cellars that can hold up to 33 each. Many of them are very old--the brewery says "older than 150 years" but they've been saying that for awhile. The three oldest date back to the 1830s, if I'm hearing my audio tape correctly [!]. The brewery has its own cooperage, not for building the vats, but maintaining them. This is how their version of an acidified red ale has been made for well over a century. Inside the vats, a happy little colony of wild yeasts work away for months, adding lactic acid to the beer and dropping the pH. This is where Rodenbach is truly made.

For those who know their history of English brewing, Rodenbach's methods will be familiar. It's how the great London porter breweries made beer two centuries ago, aging their beer in immense vats until wild yeasts had given it a refined, mature finish. I was surprised and delighted to learn that this isn't a coincidence; in the 1870s, Eugène Rodenbach went to England and learned to brew porter. He brought the techniques he learned there back to Roselare, where they're still practiced--long, long after the English abandoned those methods in porter-brewing.

When it comes time to bottle the beer, Ghequire leads a team of tasters who blend the vintage beer to get the character they want. Each vat is its own ecosystem, so the beer coming out will taste different vat to vat. (Brettanomyces is not the main culture in the vats, though when we tasted beer from one, Rudi detected it in the sample. It was too subtle for me to locate, but he knows his beer pretty well.) Once they have a final blend of vintage stocks, they will blend that back with fresh beer to make Rodenbach and Grand Cru.

Rodenbach's baroque production methods would only be worthy of a footnote if the beer were ordinary. Of course, they're not. Rodenbach is a lovely session tipple that has surprising versatility with food (the sugars and slight acid work in tandem to team up with a wide variety of flavors) and Grand Cru is simply one of the world's best beers. Americans are adept at recreating most styles, but approximating Rodenbach is tough; Rudi believes this is entirely due to the wood. Without the interaction of wild yeasts and the tiny bit of oxygen that permeates the grain, beer can't develop the depth and character Rodenbach has.

Of all the breweries I toured in my three weeks in England, Scotland, France, and Belgium, Rodenbach was the most awe-inspiring. Every older brewery I visited discussed the balance between tradition and efficiency--such an important consideration for a commercial enterprise. Rodenbach is off the charts in terms of the expense and inefficiency it takes them to produce a single bottle of beer. No modern company would or could consider the Rodenbach model. The vats alone cost thousands (tens of thousands?) of dollars, never mind the cellar space. Add to that the notion of vatting beer for two years--it's an absurdly expensive venture. And yet here the brewery is, putting beer in vats and then trying to compete in a marketplace where industrial lagers can be made for a tiny fraction of the cost.

It's no surprise that the sour beers of Flanders are on the endangered species list. Very few make authentic sour red (or red/brown) ales, and none make them the way Rodenbach does. (De Struise, though it makes a tiny amount, produces a totally traditional, wood-aged sour called Aardmonnik that gives me hope--it's authentic and an exceptionally good, complex beer.) It is almost impossible to imagine any brewery will join Rodenbach in the near term, either. If we could designate breweries "world heritage" sites that could somehow never fail because of commercial pressures, I'd put Rodenbach at the front of the list. In the world of beer, there's nothing like it, and we are fortunate indeed it has survived the vagaries of wars, depressions, and modernization. If you haven't had a bottle recently, go find one and remind yourself what a remarkable beer it is.


Here are a few more photos of the brewery:

The modern brewhouse overlooking the historic brewery compound.

From the right comes "bier" (fresh, unaged) and on the left "oud bier."
They are blended here before being sent to packaging. (click to enlarge)

Like many old breweries, Rodenbach used to malt its own grain.
(Like many old breweries, the maltery used to catch fire.
Now they buy their malt.)

Oak drying before being milled into staves for the vats.

Belgian Beer in Belgium

Although I'm back in the US and need to attend to things local (Holiday Ale Fest, anyone), I still have a fair amount of content I didn't get to address on the road. I'll be mentioning it over the course of the next few days or weeks. Other people's travel stories are never that interesting, but I'll do my best to make them relevant.

First up, the terrain of beer styles as they actually appear in Belgium. My sense was that Belgium would be like Britain and the US: a binary market of macro lagers on the one hand and a rich tapestry of different "good" beer styles on the other. I was half right. The beer market is both structurally different, and also distributionally different.

Macro lagers (Jupiler, Stella, etc) control 70% of the market, as expected. On the "good" side, though, there's serious homogenization, too. Go to any cafe in Belgium, and you'll find that the "good" beer side is also dominated by the same familiar names--Leffe, Grimbergen, Duvel, Orval, one of the krieks*, etc. Some of these are macros with middling character, some indies with great character. But you'll be hard-pressed to find more than two or three smaller breweries available. It's more like a three-tier system, where there's the macro lagers, the large ale producers, and everyone else.

A big part of this dynamic is that Belgian breweries largely bottle their "good" beer--particularly the strong, robust ales we think of when we think of "Belgian beer." Cafes will always have lager on tap, and they may have a handle or two for ales. But mostly, if you order a specialty beer, you'll get a bottle, not a pour. This is intentional; Belgian brewers design their beers to go through a secondary fermentation in the bottle. Many don't even keg their beer. Typically, a beer will spend a week in primary, then some longer period in conditioning (often a long period of lagering) and then spend time in a "warm room" after bottling to finish out the secondary fermentation. When you're served a beer in Belgium, the waiter will bring the appropriate glass (breweries often have a different glass for all their beers), decant it for you, and leave about a half inch of beer in the bottle with the lees. He will turn the bottle toward you so you can see the label. Very elegant.

All of this is the inverse of British brewing, where the good stuff is designed to be served on cask. In Britain, this means you're always finding beer from local breweries (though you may find national brands, too). In Belgium, you have to seek the beers out, either at specialty cafes or bottle shops. The former are much less numerous than they are in the US, the latter much more, at least in medium-sized cities. In local towns, markets are harder to find. In bottle shops, you do find the local stuff, though. So if you go to Belgium, make sure you visit them, not just the cafes. It's where you'll find the beer you're looking for. Go to cafes, too, but content yourself with a bottle of Du Bocq Gauloise Brune or Rochefort--something interesting, but probably not obscure.


____________
One of the most disappointing developments in Belgium is the debasement of kriek. While there are a few extant examples of real lambic-based kriek, by far the more common concoction is a sticky substance that reeks of cough-syrup-cherry flavor. In fact, it seems like the word "kriek" has gone through a transformation so that this is the meaning of the term. At this time of the year, you can also get it warmed up (gluhkriek), which only volatilizes those horrible aromas. Serve someone a very dry, complex 100% spontaneously-fermented kriek and they'd probably sue you for poisoning. A shame.

Trappists

I am now in the Amsterdam airport (free wifi!) waiting for my direct flight home. Yesterday we had quite a day. Rochefort in the morning, Orval in the afternoon. Much as with Dupont, I was already quite familiar with the breweries in 2-D; all that remained was to experience brewing in an ecclesiastical setting. And also to pick up a few odd tidbits I'd either forgotten or missed.



If I were given ten slots for beer I could only drink the rest of my life, Orval would surely be among them (along with Saison Dupont, Rodenbach Grand Cru, and Boon Mariage Parfait--other breweries I was able to visit). So spending time at Orval was, if not enormously educative, an important ritual stop. Plus, the monastery is absolutely stunning. Rochefort's brewhouse, though, is the more attractive and contemplative. More on the breweries I visited later. Now, I'll gird for the flight home.


__________
Photos: Orval at top, Rochefort below.

The Unholy Abbey Beers

One of the reasons you go to a country is to understand the beer from the inside. It's not enough to find bottles on a shelf in Oregon to understand a country. So much of what makes it to the United States goes through a filter of nostalgia and expectation. To sit in a cafe and discover how hard it is to find the kinds of beers Americans think of as Belgian--good luck finding a saison anywhere--while be assaulted by Jupiler and Leffe signs is a revelation. Our tidy belief in regional brewing is shattered, too, by visiting a village and failing to find the beer brewed there. And then talking to breweries is fascinating, too, because you hear what it's like to inhabit a market not on skewed by industrial titans (every country has that) but ones that disguise their beers in the homespun fabric of the humble monastery. This is uniquely Belgian.

Indeed, everywhere you go, you'll find dubbels and tripels and sints and saints, and brewery brands with dates like "anno 1023." Belgian consumers believe themselves very educated about beer, but as one brewer told me, "ask ten Belgians where Leffe is brewed, and nine will say in an abbey." The Trappists have done an amazing job of bringing attention to Belgian beers, but their success has skewed the market so that authenticity is often seen through the crack in a monastery cloister, not the slow development of style and process in actual commercial breweries. Huge industrial breweries make arrangements to associate a bland product with a non-brewing abbey in some cases; in others, the mere existence of a historical abbey is enough to justify the name on a label and a date that has nothing to do with brewing operations.

I heard this complaint again and again in the breweries I visited. I mean to do a post on Rodenbach soon, and it's a great example of the contrast. This is a brewery that has been making beer in the same way for decades and which has a tradition of cask-aging red ales that goes back nearly two hundred years. It is one of the most impressive breweries in the world, and certainly one of the most traditional, and yet it is easily dismissed for a lack of "abdij" provenance. Meanwhile, Grimbergen enjoys the halo of sanctity.

In the United States, this isn't such a big problem because it's easy enough to shift products around. If you happen to have a brewery that makes a traditional ale--particularly if, like Rodenbach, Cantillon, or Boon, the brewery has been designed only to make a certain kind of beer--you're not in a position to chase fads.

Unlike the British market, where breweries are now feeling excited about a rejuvenated market, in Belgium they are gloomy. Traditional breweries depend on foreign markets like the United States to meet capacity, and they're not sure how to increase sales locally. Some, like Dupont and St. Feuillien (which I visited yesterday) are thriving and growing. But others are finding it much harder. I'll follow up with a post about what strategies these traditional breweries have adopted, and what their prospect for success is, later on. But since I'll be visiting two Trappist monasteries tomorrow (Orval and Rochefort), it's worth mentioning how they've managed to monastacize the Belgian specialty beer market.

Probably we have Stan Hieronymus to blame.

Duivels Bier

I spent a good six hours with Frank Boon yesterday afternoon and evening, and I'm still absorbing all that he told me. (One factoid: Boon is building a new brewery that will be unique for having been designed specifically for lambic brewing and turbid mashing. It's overdue; his current system is cobbled together from 90-120 year old pieces.) I'll do a full post later on, but here's one of those curious little local stories that may not shake the earth, but is fascinating nonetheless.

The beer below is brewed at Boon, but it's not a lambic (that's Frank in the background, incidentally):



It's a dark beer that's something akin to a dubbel, with a little borrowing from Edinburgh. The name goes back as far as Boon's mash tun--at least. You'll note that the name "Duivel" bears more than a passing resemblance to another gothic-scripted beer (Duvel). Indeed, they have the same infernal inspiration.

In the case of the older one, it goes back to the era when pilgrims visited Halle (near Lembeek) and its stunning cathedral which dates to the 13-15th century (it took a long time to complete). My memory of the exact details of the story fray here, but somehow this type of beer was brewed and named "the devil's beer"--I think because its heartiness and lusciousness distracted the faithful from the spirit and led them to cater to their flesh.

Boon recreated the beer from historical documents just to be brewed locally. Of course, the larger Moortgat, located on the other side of Brussels, took note. But nothing doing--when Boon referred to the historical record, Moortgat (whose own devil, Duvel, is spelled according to a local dialect) relented.

So now if you go to Halle, you have to specify either dark or light Du[i]vel or say Duvel Moortgat. Without a qualifier, you'll get the local product.

Cantillon

I managed to navigate the streets of Brussels today and find parking just two blocks (and I use that term generously--the streets of the city writhe like snakes, so what lies between them is rarely rectilinear--away from the legendary Brasserie Cantillon. To top it off, owner and brewer Jean Van Roy was brewing today, and as I arrived, he was pumping steaming wort into the koelschip (cool ship). Since Cantillon is one of the world's most famous breweries, and since he has an open-door policy to all who drop by, everything I could write is already well-documented.




So instead I'll tell you three things that surprised me.

1. The brewing season, which depends on cool temperatures to drop the wort to fermentation temperatures in the koelschip by morning, is getting shorter. It runs from roughly late October to early April, but this is down by a month since Jean's grandfather brewed. (Capacity, not available brewing days, are the limitation for the brewery.)

2. Faro is strangely malty. Cantillon's is as historic as you'll find (though strong), but I've never had the chance to try it before.




3. Unlike in Britain, where a renaissance in brewing has excited the market (without exception, every brewer expressed optimism and excitement for the future), the same isn't happening with lambics. In the US, we're crazy for sour beers. Jean said Italians are even ahead of Americans. But in Belgium, not so much.

Jean let us try a 2006 bottle of Gueuze before I left and it was stunningly good. Cantillon's fauna sometimes produce beers too dry for my taste. This one was absolutely perfect. It was alive with citrus rind and a lavender delicacy. The souring was more acid than vinegar, and the resemblance to wine was marked. It would be a useful mile marker for new world brewers looking to find the sweet spot for sours. They don't have to be extreme to exhibit amazing complexity, and they don't have to have (indeed shouldn't have) excessive Brett harshness or exotic solvent notes. I mean, we should know that the taste of burning tire is bad, right? This beer's a reminder.

I will see Frank Boon tomorrow.

Tips for the Belgian Traveler?

On November 5 I fly to London, where I will begin a two-country odyssey that will take me north to Edinburgh, then to Belgium, and then back home on November 29th. (I hope to keep blogging at each stop, probably briefly but with more multimedia than usual.) I've scheduled stops at around two dozen breweries, including some of the bigs (partial list: Fullers, Greene King, Rodenbach, Dupont, Orval) as well as some of the less-known. I will tour some of the great brewing regions, and am excited to see the museums in Burton and Poperinge (hops). I've even lucked into a guided pub crawl in London (where I'll be joined by a certain American cask ale brewer thanks to amazing, uncoordinated synchronicity).

Even the process of setting up the trip has been hugely illustrative of how different beer regions are. Britain has many more massive breweries and, owing to its huge market, is focused far more on the domestic end (in this way, it's like Oregon). Belgium has dozens of wonderful artisanal breweries, but a small domestic market dominated by pilsner (70%, according to Tim Webb). So they depend enormously on exports.

The British leg of the trip is quite tightly scheduled. In Belgium I've got more freedom to roam. Since I know a great many of you have traveled there before, I thought I'd inquire: have you had transcendent experiences you'd like to share? Must-see pubs or restaurants I'd be fool to miss? Of course, I've been researching this already, and my copy of Good Beer Guide to Belgium is already dog-eared so I'm not going in cold. Still, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

What Will Become of "Belgian Beer" if Belgium Divides?

Big things are happening in little Belgium. A country separated between the Flemish (or Dutch-speaking) North and French-speaking South, it has long been a divided nation. Now, for the first time, the separatist party has won a majority of seats in Parliament, leading to decent prospect that the already-wee country may break in half. No doubt there are many, nested issues here, but I wonder--is no one considering the beer?

Belgium may be a country divided by language--but zymurgically, it is distinctive. In the Flemish region, sour reds and browns of Flanders; in the French region, sour lambics. In the Flemish region, Trappist breweries (Westmalle, Westvleteren); in the French, Trappist breweries (Orval, Chimay). In the Flemish region, strong goldens (Huyghe, Moortgat); in the French, strong goldens (Du Bocq). No country produces more indigenous beers of greater diversity, and so certain styles are region-specific; still, it's hard not to argue that "Belgian," when applied to beer, means something.

Beyond the brasseries and brouwerijs, however, things are less coherent:

The southern region of Wallonia - poorer, with higher than average unemployment - is home to mostly French speakers, who make up about 40% of the population. The other 60% are Dutch speakers who live in the more prosperous Flemish north. To add confusion, the capital Brussels is officially a bilingual (but largely francophone) enclave in Flemish territory.

The linguistic gulf runs deep. There are no significant national political parties - they too follow the language split, so there are both francophone and Flemish versions of liberal, socialist, Christian democrat and green parties. Likewise, there are no national broadcasters, no national newspapers or magazines.

If the country breaks in half, how will we describe the beer? "Belgian" may become a politically-charged term--like "Bombay" in India--and beer fans will be caught wondering what to call their beer. Will we have to learn the location of every beer in order to know what to call it? Calling a Scot "English" instead of "British" is a grave insult; will our future be fraught with similar unwitting low country slights?

Not the most pressing concern for Belgians (or should I say Walloons and Flemish?) perhaps, but something about which beer aficionados may fret.

Belgium in Turmoil

This may or may not have substantial effects on brewing, but I am alarmed nevertheless:

BRUSSELS -- In the back room of an exclusive social club across the street from the U.S. Embassy here, Flemish separatists are plotting the breakup of Belgium....

The campaign here is a modern-day separatist movement for a globalized world. This is not a war of guns and guerrillas in jungle hideouts or suicide bombings on city streets. It is a conflict debated daily in the news media, parliaments, cafes, bars and establishment clubs of a country confronting the schisms now facing nearly every European nation: the struggle over national identity following mass immigration from Asia and Africa, the preservation of native culture and language, and economic competition in an era of global markets.

Belgium has been without a national government for more than three months now.

Will the Walloons have to start referring to their ales as "Belgian-style?" What other consequences might it have? Hmm...