The Pro Speaks (A personal comment from someone who makes their living from beer)

MOST BELGIAN BEER IS RUBBISH

Aromaless, flavourless beers dominate the Belgian scene and are now being exported around the world. I sell Belgian beer for a living, and the problem I face is that most of the best known brands are the blandest and most characterless that the country produces.

The reputation that Belgian beers have as high quality and distinctive is being thrown away by their larger breweries, whose products have become poor imitations or almost parodies of rightly famous beer styles. Trappist beers were once brewed to refresh the monks. If you can find them in your local

Supermarket in Britain, it means the monks sold out to Mammon years ago.

The original high reputation of Belgian beer came from the painstaking, unusual and lengthy methods of preparation. Aging the beer in oak vats, harvesting wild herbs from the neighbourhood, steeping whole cherries in the beer and other strange practices were used to produce extraordinary flavours, flavours which could be produced in no other way.

However, it seems to me that as soon as a brewery decides to increase its market share, quality suffers. It happens as soon as the first sales force or reps. are appointed, rather than relying as before on their local area and sheer quality to sell the beer. As the production is expanded to fill new orders, the beers tend to lose their aroma; they lose that full mouth feeling, when the sip of beer seems to expand and fill the whole mouth with different flavours.

To reach the mass market, the strategy is that each beer, each bottle must taste the same as the last. No room for real bottle conditioning, previously an essential feature, when a refermentation takes place through yeast in the bottle continuing to work to refine the beer. With the exception of wheat beer, the famous ales have been made clearer, more transparent, and the amount of yeast added to each bottle lessened to the point of disappearing altogether. The thick snake of yeast advancing towards the neck of the bottle is replaced with the finest, near invisible wisp. Can't take the risk of the beer changing with age, y'see. The result is blandness. Where the small brewery would take pride in the excellence of their beer, these expanded breweries introduced computer-controlled production lines.

Result: Standardised, sterile beers. Mass-market lager is suited to this processing, as flavour and aroma are at best secondary requirements, and it is meant to be drunk too cold to taste anyway. Stronger ales produced by the same process tend to gather the same characteristics.

Any laborious procedures such as slow aging to produce a finer flavour are scrapped where some extra saccharine might produce a similar impression. Or maybe jacking up the alcohol content would do it. And about those cherries - syrup would be cheaper.

"And we could introduce a peach or cola flavoured one!"

"Like you’re thinking, mate"

"And hey! With the money we save on this, we could mount an advertising campaign - we could emphasise the old reputation we had for quality beer!"

In Britain, the bigger breweries lost interest in cask ale for the same reasons. Too laborious and expensive to make. Why not produce a branded, dead version, with a semblance of life squirted in from a gas canister. Yeah, and put the cost savings into ads. nagging people to buy it! Unfortunately, these imitations are the first beers to be exported. As British nitro beer appears in Belgium, the worst Belgian beers appear here.

In the lager or 'blond' beer market, blandness is accepted by producer and customer. But people opting for stronger Belgian ale are usually looking for a proper beer, looking to find out what the famous Belgian beers are like. If you buy your Trappist, fruit lambic, wheat or strong ale in Britain, all you are likely to taste will be bland, clean tasting parodies designed to cash in on this reputation. Either understand and accept that, or do some research (Read Tim Webb's 'GOOD BEER GUIDE TO BELGIUM AND HOLLAND' and Rigley and Woods' 'THE BEERS OF WALLONIA' for a start) to find the great beers of the Belgian tradition which are struggling to survive, clinging on thanks to some old traditional breweries and a few individuals labouring with love and pride.

 Don't accept the supermarket Belgian beers as anything other than the beer equivalent of Long- Life milk.

 The author, Hugh Shipman, runs BIERLIJN, a specialist foreign beer importer

 http://www.bierlijn.co.uk/