In June 1847 several newspapers featured a remarkable story. For instance, the Leydse Courant (from Leiden in Holland) told its readers: ‘Gent, 22 June. A new or rather old type of beer is brewed here now, which is called crabbeleire and which was highly regarded by the citizens of Gent in the 15th century… Mr. Van der Haagen has retrieved the recipe and is now supplying tasty, foaming crabbeleire to several innkeepers.’[1] Nice, a lost beer brought back to life, that’s how we like it. But what was the story behind it?

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September 1901. In the East-Flanders town of Sint-Niklaas demolition workers were busy tearing down the old post office. Suddenly, one of them saw something glittering beneath a wooden floor. A two franc coin. A stroke of luck that doesn’t happen every day! It was quickly decided to go and spend the coin in the adjacent pub. As you do when it’s Friday. ‘After the first round there was a second, and they liked the drijdraad so very much that soon they were all slightly “in the wind”.’ And then, they started arguing about the level of their wages…[1]

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‘The double beer of Oudenaarde,’ wrote journalist and author Karel van de Woestijne in 1906, may not be as famous as its gothic city hall, but those who know it ‘compare it to the best wines of Burgundy. To them, Oudenaarde’s beer compares to ordinary beer as Musigny does to the most common of table wines.’ Those who were familiar with Oudenaarde’s beer, turned their nose up at gueuze-lambic and other beer types, when ‘lying in its basket, a bottle of Oudenaarde’ was served. In Gent, where it was particularly popular, there were people who fell out with each other over the question which of the two main Oudenaarde brands were the best: Felix or Liefmans.[1]

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On November 23 in the year 1877 there a very tragic accident took place in a brewery in the town of Geraardsbergen in the province of East-Flanders. One of the workers was cleaning a large vat that had been used or making old beer. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed by the vapours emanating from the yeast on the bottom of the vat, and he about to suffocate. Brewer Emile Vande Maele quickly jumped into the vat to save his unfortunate employee. The other workers tried to stop him, but it was too late. Vande Maele too couldn’t get air and choked. From everywhere people rushed forward to help, but there was so much carbon dioxide in the air that even the lamps held above the vat extinguished several times. In the end, the vat had to be chopped into pieces to get the bodies out.[1]

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Lately, I’ve been trying to make more sense of the history of the sour beers of Flanders, more specifically the ones found in today’s provinces of East and West Flanders.[1] These beers include well-known masterpieces of brewing, such as Rodenbach, Duchesse de Bourgogne, Liefmans Goudenband and others. Unfortunately, not a lot has been written about the history of these beers. For one thing, it’s very hard to find anything that resembles aged sour beers in Flanders prior to about 1850 (if you leave out the myth that somehow the Scheldt river is a Medieval boundary between the sour beers of Flanders and those of the rest of the country, which is utter fabricated nonsense).

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If there is one Belgian beer of which its fans want to know all about its history, it has to be lambic. This extraordinary beer from the Brussels region is surrounded by an aura of age-old tradition: supposedly, it is a kind of ‘primordial beer’ from the Middle Ages. Even more so, the ‘High Council for Artisanal Lambic beers’ HORAL (which is an incredibly pompous name, what’s wrong with just calling yourselves ‘Association of Lambic Brewers’?) pretends that ‘the first lambic was already brewed before the year 1300’.[1]

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Tripel Karmeliet is one of Belgium’s most famous beers. It has received multiple international awards and rightly is considered a modern classic. And according to the label it is brewed ‘according to a 17th century recipe from the Carmelite monastery in Dendermonde’. Which of course made me wonder: what recipe? Or: why real Carmelites are not allowed to brew this anymore. (more…)