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]
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]
A while ago I made a study of the Belgian beer style saison, and in connection with that, the historical beers of the Walloon countryside. As it turned out, there wasn’t much connection to begin with: although the current reference beer for saison, the Saison Dupont, does hail from the countryside of Hainaut, the beer type saison once was found in a much wider area including in cities, especially Liège. Unfortunately, the history of saison as compiled by renowned Brussels brewer Yvan de Baets in the book Farmhouse ales, turned out to contain a substantial amount of half-truths and selective reading. Too bad, really.
One of the subjects I love writing about, is the beer history of France. You mean, they have a beer history? They do, because besides all the wine there are also the extreme north (French Flanders and Picardy) and the east (Alsace), that both have a tradition of brewing. For centuries, even Paris had a brewers’ guild. And there was another place that I encountered from time to time: Lyon. Europe’s southernmost traditional brewing city.
Much of what has been written on beer history in recent years, would not have been there if it hadn’t been for modern digital resources. With one click of the mouse, you find yourself searching through thousands of newspaper pages with the wildest keywords, and retrieving obscure books which otherwise would have cost you an arm and a leg. Although I still leave home frequently to have a look at everything that hasn’t been digitised yet, what has been scanned by archives and libraries at home and abroad is substantial. (more…)
Spontaneous fermentation: magic words to anyone who loves wild, sour, aged beer full of brett, bugs and lactic acid. A method characterized by the fact that no yeast is actively added by the brewer. It’s mainly known for lambic, that wonderful Brussels beer which, after having aged for a few years, is used for making gueuze, faro and kriek. But what if I tell you that once there was another spontaneously fermented Belgian beer type, but one that was considerably different? One whose distant relative is still available on every corner in Belgium?
And now a legendary beer from Antwerp: seef. But, the city beer of Antwerp, that would have to be De Koninck? It may be now, but in fact this amber-coloured ‘spéciale belge’ only began its rise in the 1930s.[1] No, before that there was a beer called ‘seef’ (pronounced ‘safe’), a beer type so popular that an entire district of the city was named after it. Since a few years, this beer is back on the market again, which is of course a great initiative. So, today we will look at the question: what was seef exactly? Including a historic recipe with notes on yeast types, turbidity and grains like oats, buckwheat and rye. (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…)
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]