Letter from North America

In Praise of Belgian Beer

In a typical year, in fact, over the course of every year between 1997 and the start of this damnable pandemic, I would reliably find myself in Belgium at least once. These visits would almost always start in Brussels, or at least the Brussels airport, but might take in any number of different cities, as well, from Ghent and Antwerp in the north to Mons and Liège in the south.

The one constant, and the main draw, was, not surprisingly, beer.

Belgian beer has had a tough time of it lately, at least in North America. The combination of some 10,000 breweries covering Canada, the United States, and Mexico, the incredible success of the ‘drink local’ ethos promoted by many of those breweries and the organizations which represent them, and the COVID-induced shrinking of all of our individual worlds has led to the virtual collapse of the Belgian import market on this side of the Atlantic.

Which is why a recent development in my home province of Ontario raised many eyebrows, mine included. Two companies, Toronto ’ s Godspeed Brewery and Tooth & Nail Brewing in Ottawa, combined their resources to create Abbaye des Sept Minutes, a virtual brewing company that launched with a quartet of beers unapologetically fashioned in Belgian abbey ale styles, appropriately named I, II, III, and IV.

(For those unfamiliar with abbey brewing, those Roman numerals reference the styles enkel, or single, dubbel, tripel, and quadrupel.)

Those eyebrows shot upwards because Belgian styles aren’t exactly the hottest thing going these days. In fact, they’re pretty damn cool, almost frozen.

And that’ s just a fricking shame.

Now, before you give up on me and turn the page, let me quickly note that I have nothing against hoppy beers in general and IPAs in particular. Hell, I even enjoy the best of the hazy/New England style set - I’m talking to you, Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing! - and have been known to go for days drinking naught but best bitters and pale ales and IPAs.

But as much as my 1980s beer style education was fuelled by imported British ales and Czech and German lagers, and later by ‘ microbrews ’ inspired by those same imports, it was a Belgian beer that first opened my eyes to the immense variety of flavours contained within the world of beer. And as time progressed into the 1990s and early years of the new century, Belgium remained the source of the greatest diversity of beer styles and characters available anywhere.

Of course, in the decade and a half or so since those days, the world of beer has caught up to Belgium big time. Today there are Italian grape ales in Italy, Catharina sours in Brazil, IPAs conditioned in tequila and mezcal barrel in Mexico, revived and revitalized styles like grodziškie in Poland and Lithuanian kaimiška, saké-influenced beers in Japan, and creativity occasionally crossing from the sublime into the ridiculous yielding dozens if not hundreds of styles and ‘ styles ’ in the United States.

And in Belgium? Well, new breweries are opening, if not quite at the pace they have been in neighbouring France or Italy, and new beers are coming to market from breweries both old and new. But for the most part, Belgium just continues to do what it has always done – make good to excellent, and for the most part reliably sound, beers in a multitude of styles traditional to the land.

Which to my mind is exactly as it should be, since there is little point in reinventing the wheel when the thing is working quite well already. The challenge is the new generation of beer drinkers who have grown up chasing the novelty of the new and exciting, be that a densely cloudy double IPA, an Imperial pastry sour – a ‘ style ’ I actually encountered recently –or a beer ‘ smoothie ’ of garish hue and no fewer than a dozen flavourings.

Belgian ales like Westmalle Tripel and Duvel, Rodenbach Grand Cru and Cantillon Gueuze, Saison Dupont and Rochefort 8, are anything but new and their labels could hardly be described as exciting. Yet I remain convinced that, were you to package them differently, or present them already poured rather than in the bottle, most younger drinker would be every bit as enthusiastic about them as they are about Brewery X’s new bourbon barrel-aged Imperial porter or Y Brewing’s guava-milkshake IPA.

But then again, maybe hiding the origins of Belgian classics isn’t the answer. Maybe, just maybe, the real answer is for brewers to follow the Abbaye des Sept Minutes lead and start turning out their own interpretations of Belgian styles, perhaps with labels a touch more graphically adventurous than the originals. Then watch as younger drinkers first become enamoured with them, as has almost anyone I’ve witnessed sample a Belgian ale, particularly a malt-forward one, and then trace the style back to its Belgian roots.

The pendulum has already swung pretty far to the unusual and experimental. Maybe it’ s time now that it swings back the other way a bit.

Stephen Beaumont