FAQs

What is this rubbish? Never heard of any of it. 

  Then the ones you have heard of are probably the ones advertised to your attention by breweries with bigger budgets. They have got these bigger budgets by saving money on the costs of the ingredients they use, and in the amount of time they allow the beer to mature. They don't want unsold beer hanging around on their premises.

These beers you haven't heard of are made by small breweries, where the money is spent on the product. Unfortunately beers of the big breweries are seen all over the country, and set the market price for each category of beer. So the smaller brewery has to match that price while producing a beer that costs more to make. So the small ones didn't have the money left over to advertise to you. You have to find out about them yourself.

 Is Leffe blond lager?

The bigger breweries love to filter their beers. It makes the flavour stay constant for the whole of the shelf life. This was tried in Britain in the 1960s with "keg bitter". The big breweries swamped the country with it, but the people revolted, and the Campaign for Real Ale saved the unfiltered, real ale from extinction.

Unfortunately, this trick of filtering the beer did work on consumers in Belgium and Holland. The big breweries filter almost all their "special beers". Surely part of what makes a beer special is the complex flavour developed by long secondary fermentation? No! apparently you're to be satisfied by the full flavour created by saturating the beer with sugar. 

In the UK, you could tell from whether the beer was in a cask or a keg whether it was real or "keg" ale. In Belgium and Holland you can't. Both filtered and unfiltered beers exist side by side in identical kegs. But the small breweries almost all pressurise their kegs by filling beer into them with enough live yeast included to cause secondary fermentation. The big brewery has filled the keg with filtered beer and pressurised it with industrially derived CO2. One sort of beer will develop more complex flavours by secondary fermentation, the other is held inert under a gas cloud. One is 'keg' ale, one is 'real' ale. Is Leffe blond lager? That is a technical question about the type of yeast used in the brewing process. More important to ask, is Leffe blond filtered or unfiltered? 

Why did my teeth rot and fall out after I drank a fruit beer?

 Unfortunately, there is no requirement to state on the label whether a beer is fermented with an actual fruit, or whether a concentrate or syrup has been added. For a brewery where the advertising budget has priority, it is more convenient to take an insipid beer and pour some sugary fruity fluid into it. It's cheap, sweet, and it appeals to childish, undeveloped palates.

For the small brewer, fermenting beer with whole fruit added presents particular interesting brewing challenges. The fruit brings its own natural  sugars and possibly wild yeasts to the brew, which must be balanced and accounted for. It takes a certain artistry to get right. The results are almost always a delicate hint of the flavour of the fruit, balanced against the flavour of the beer. It isn't the hammer assault of sugary fruit concentrate reflated with a beer you can barely taste.

I had geuze and it wasn't sour. What are people on about?

 Oh dear. You have drunk "Industrial Geuze". Traditional geuze is sour, and within that flavour is a huge range of delicate flavours unmatched by any other beer style. This is achieved by aging the beers from one to three years.

As we have already established, having beers hanging around the plant "maturing" is not interesting to the accounts department of big brewers, so a different maneuvre has been attempted in order to be able to claim to have a geuze beer in their portfolios - changing the consumer's perception of what this type of beer should be. What is actually on offer is a lambic beer of short maturity, and even then sweetened with saccharine or sugar. The result is so unlike traditional geuze that it deserves a category name of its own - 'Industrial Geuze'.

Was my Trappist beer really made by monks?

 If you found it in a "4 for the price of 3" cluster pack in a supermarket, probably not.

 My beer has got a funny gnome on the label. Does that mean it's La Chouffe?

 Not Necessarily. It could be the tip of an iceberg of the "Label beer" phenomenon. The brewery's name and address you can see may not even exist. In the fantasy world of Belgian brewing it's not just the critters on the labels that are make believe.

In Belgium and Holland, there are a limited number of breweries, but an unlimited amount of people with who have "concepts" which involve getting some beer from somewhere and "marketing" a "brand" . This can also involve the concept of "pretending to have a brewery".