When making a beer trip to Belgium, you can easily get mesmerized by all the history you see: venerable old brown pubs, knighthoods with seemingly Medieval outfits, stained glass windows, old carriages and most of all: lots of labels. Labels featuring emperors, monks, coats of arms and of course most prominently a year of supposed origin, usually a millennium or so ago. So that’s why this time I’ll try to answer the inevitable question: what is Belgium’s oldest beer? (more…)

After exploring the presence of saison beer in Belgian cities in the previous article, I will now turn to the place this beer type is now most associated with: the countryside. What do we know about the historical rural beers of Wallonia? (more…)

Lately, I’ve taken on a daunting task: to seek out the history of all the different beer styles of Belgium. When did they first appear, what were they like throughout the years, and in many cases: when did they disappear? In fact, of the many beer styles Belgium knew in the 19th century, only a few survived: white beer, lambic and its derivatives gueuze, faro and kriek, Flemish old brown, and saison. Others, like the Peeterman of Leuven, the drijdraad from the Land of Waas and the grisette of Hainaut, have all died out.[1] (more…)

Researching lost beers demands quite a lot of imagination. More than often the available brewing records are illegible, messy, incomplete or they simply look like something from another planet. The problem is of course that the brewer who once wrote them down was completely familiar with his own brewery and the ingredients, so he didn’t record everything. Clearly he didn’t think: ‘Would someone still understand this in one and a half century’s time?’ Today’s breweries, big or small, differ greatly from the situation back then. What was a hopback at the time? How did you handle a mash tun or a fermenting vessel? Only slowly old texts start to make sense. Therefore, it’s very helpful to see everything for real. And that is possible in Maastricht, a city at the most southern tip of the Netherlands. (more…)

The French-speaking part of this world has a lot of beer history yet to be discovered. An example is an old Belgian magazine that I found, La feuille du cultivateur, published in Brussels as a ‘journal d’agriculture pratique’, which means: journal of practical agriculture. (more…)

Back in February I visited the wonderful Brasserie à Vapeur in the small village of Pipaix in the province of Hainaut, Belgium. Going there is quite an experience: because of the monumental preserved brewery, and because of the uniquely festive atmosphere a brewing day has there. (more…)

A Belgian law from 1919 aimed at combating alcohol abuse, is credited with creating the heavy Belgian beers we now know so well: the dubbels, the tripels, the Duvels. But is it true? Time for a fact check.

This is what well-known Belgian beer writer Jef van den Steen has to say about it, in connection with the rise of ‘heavy’ trappist beers after the First World War:
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Belgium is a hop producing country. Right? However, the Belgian hop growing sector is only a bleak shadow of its former self. Not only has the total surface and production been receding for years and years, Belgium also has given up its native hop varieties long ago. Varieties that were once a staple of lambic and all the other traditional Belgian beers. (more…)

The lambic family of beers, consisting of lambic, gueuze, faro and kriek, has been making a remarkable comeback. Doomed to be extinct in the early 1970s, as drinks made for old men by old men, these beers from Brussels and surroundings were kept alive by passionate people that at first must have been regarded by locals as ‘quite crazy’. By now, their perseverance has paid off: today, lambic and gueuze are beer specialities highly coveted by beer lovers around the globe. (more…)

In the previous article, I wrote about gueuze, one of the best Belgian beers, known for its refermentation in bottles like champagne. However, in the past it was often also sold in barrels. For instance, in 1909 one Edmond Mineur described an old man from Brussels who every morning invariably had a gueuze from cask, but in the evening closed his day with a few good pints of gueuze from bottle, smoking his pipe.[1] So what was gueuze actually? And why is it a bottled beer almost by definition today? I found a few surprising answers… and they have everything to do with the trade of gueuze blender itself. (more…)