Journeying to where craft beer’s roots run deep
107 brews of all types, tastes and levels of alcohol were sampled on a five-day trip
BRUSSELS— Wine lovers tour Italy. Whisky connoisseurs tour Scotland. Beer lovers visit Belgium.
On my five-day beer pilgrimage to Belgium, I tasted or drank more than 107 beers, visited six towns/cities and at least 11 breweries and lost count of the number of brewers I met.
With the relatively recent craft beer explosion in North America, it was a treat to visit a country where the beer roots run deep and be part of the 2015 European Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference.
The conference was sponsored by the non-profit Belgian Family of Brewers. It’s made up of 22 family breweries, which have been brewing beer in Belgium for at least 50 years. They represent 15 per cent of the total annual beer volume produced in Belgium. Only 185 beers carry the Belgian Family Brewers label. This trip broadened my beer palate. At the famous Moeder Lambic bar, I had my first sip of lambic beer. This bar was my launching point as I waited to visit Cantillon Brewery (cantillon.be). Cantillon is like Mecca for many of the bloggers I met and it brews lambic-style beer.
Lambic beers are a product of spontaneous fermentation. They’re left in open vats where wild yeasts and bacteria do the work. They are left to take on the floral and fauna influences living in the air. Once the fermentation process begins, the beer is stored in barrels and aged for up to three years.
The result is a distinctly sour beer and definitely one for a specific palate. Many bloggers told me the love of lambic comes as your beer palate matures.
With the 107-plus beers I tasted, there were a few lambics, some sours, blonds, bruns, pale, fruit, wit, saison, dark and tripel, some with high alcohol, others with low alcohol and some with very high alcohol (more than 11 per cent).
One of the most unique bottledbeer experiences I had was from Petrus Sour Beers (petrussourbeer.com/en).
As the story goes, the brewer was showcasing his selection of sour beers at a bar and caught a bartender mixing a few of his beers together to make a beer more to his liking. After getting over his initial anger, this gave the brewer an idea. Why not let everyone create their perfect beer and Petrus would give them the sours they needed to do that?
So by packaging up the Petrus Aged Pale, Aged Red, Oud Bruin and the 50/50, which is half red and half bru- in, the beer connoisseur can mix up his or her perfect beer.
We were able to try this at the conference. With a little of this and little of that, I found my perfect beer. For us, we didn’t have the 50/50, but I found that 40-per-cent bruin, 40per-cent red and 20-per-cent pale made a delicious beer for me.
This isn’t available in Ontario yet, but it can be found throughout the U.S., Belgium and parts of Europe.
Having gained all this new beer knowledge from the conference, I then toured the country to drink all that it has to offer.
The next Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference (beerbloggersconference.org) is on July 8-10 in Tampa, Fla. Registration is now open. Anne-Marie Marais’s trip was sponsored by Tourism Flanders, which didn’t review or approve this story.