Time to look another long lost Belgian beer, this time from Lier, a nice old little town on the Nete river. It has quaint little streets in the beguinage, a beautiful old town hall, and a Medieval tower with an astronomical clock. Currently, it does not have its own brewery. It does however have a story to tell about historical beers.[1]
Namur, capital of the French-speaking part of Belgium known as Wallonia, is where the Brussels Beer Challenge started today. 85 beer judges will taste over 1400 international beers. However, I already was in Namur last week, where I stumbled upon an old friend: kuit beer. Time to rewrite a part of this Dutch beer’s history… (more…)
Kuit, princesse, Loender, more kuit… lately slowly but surely Dutch beers surface that are based on a rediscovered beer type from the past. It’s not yet a complete renaissance, but all in all there’s more and more Dutch beer history on the market, and then I’m not even mentioning the home brews. Time for a recap. (more…)
To be perfectly honest, I started this quest for the lost beers of Holland mainly looking for recipes of the 18th and 19th century. Why? Two reasons: they are easier to find and to interpret, and nobody had really written about them before. So far, every new beer recipe feels like a lost treasure found after deep digging. Still, the 19th century is not exactly the heyday of Dutch beer. The Middle Ages were. For a few centuries Holland was the leading beer exporting country that taught even the British and Belgians how to brew beer with hops. But we’ll get to that.