Beer Blog; The Belgian Styles

Beer has essentially just four ingredients. Water is one of them and there's not a lot of variation you can coax from that, so that leaves you with just three.

What will you emphasize? My favorite styles (Pils and IPA) emphasize the hops. Lambics: Gueze and Faro. Lambics emphasize the yeast. They use an extraordinary process of brewing. Unlike most brewers who are religious

What a country!  They use hops for hegdes!

about hygiene to avoid externalities in the wort, they open the doors and invite them in. They use the naturally occurring yeasts, floating in the air around us, to spontaneously ferment the brew.  They don't worry that each batch may be a little different. This is only possible in a small valley south west of Brussels and only for part of the year (October through March). It produces an interesting and unique beer. Light, kind of crisp, and a bit sour.  A Faro is a gueze to which candy sugar has been added in the wort. It does not make it sweeter, just bumps the alcohol content.
Belgian fruit beers. Lambics mix well with fruit and so they mix them...  A Kriek was the first beer I bought in Belgium.  It was clearly popular with the locals judging by advertising presence and shelf space.  For me it was just OK.  Now that I know more about the brewing process, the beverage is more intriguing. They use local sour cherries and add them to the wort. The malt is really just background. The Kriek is very red and more like an American cider. A little fruitier and sweeter than the English cider.  Lindemann’s Apple: very much like the American ciders. Long on Apple taste and much sweeter and fruitier than the English ciders. Framboise. A Delhaize brand, probably not the best example, but while the Lambic is well suited to blending with fruit, not all fruits are created equal. The raspberry is a little too light. This ends up more like a Gueze than a fruit Lambic.

Abbey and Trappist: Here’s a shocker!  Abbey Ales were made in Abbies and Trappist ales by monks. Today the appellation doesn't mean all that much, especially for the Abbies as all that is required is a license from the Abbey and the giant BrewCo can use their name. The Trappists still hew a little closer to tradition. They actually at least still have direct involvement with the process, though it may be just supervisory. There is no stylistic norm. Variation can be significant though they tend to be strong, emphasizing the malt element and sometimes aged in casks. If malt is your thing, the dark dubbles have a lot of character and make a nice sipping beer.  Westmalle: very nice, smooth, dark brown malty beer.  Ciny: very strong more yeasty. Orval: lighter in color and flavor, the malt shines through.  Kaiser Karl: a red in the Belgian mode, light hops - spices instead. Kind of like a Christmas beer, only they make it year round.

Belgian Triples: What makes a triple?  They have three times the alcohol content of your average beer. I feel compelled to try a few but it is not my favorite style. One .25 ml bottle packs a big punch. Two would put me under the table. The problem I have with a ‘triple’ is a kind of like why I prefer beer to wine, generally. Wine you sip.  Beer, water, lemonade, you drink. Triples you had better sip or else have somebody walk you home.  Leffe: an abbey beer with that distinctive spicy wild yeast flavor. 9% alcohol content. Tasty.  Florival, another. Good for style. Spicy and fruity.  Grimbergen:  Abbey style.  As you can see, Abbey style is just another twist on the ‘Belgian Standards’; Blonde, Double and Triple.  If that difference translates into differences in taste, it was too subtle for my unsophisticated palate.  Still they are all nice sippin’beers.

Brugse Zot. This beer was made by the brewery we toured in Bruges. Great tour, beautiful brewery. They don’t use it to make beer anymore but that didn't dampen enthusiasm of our guide for the brewing process or the rooms where they used to make their beer. They make both a blonde and a dark.  Both of them very good, very flavorful, perhaps the best dark I've had in Belgium. You can still taste the hops. Most Belgian darks tend to be more yeast flavor than hop flavor. The brewery is very small and very old in a quaint building on a canal (all Bruges buildings are quaint, it’s a requirement). De Halve Maan.  Turns out it's owned by the giant Belgian brewer who turns out Maes Pils, which it turns out is owned by Heineken, the world giant. It is sad that such a nice artisanal beer is actually produced by one of the worlds biggest brewers…