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[Beer Lecture] Chapter 15. Orange Zest, Coriander, and Pierre Celis

Sergey Konstantinov
7 min readAug 16, 2022

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This is the Chapter 15 of my free book on beer and brewing history.

Belgium is a small country with a huge beer tradition that spans many centuries in the past. Let’s take, for example, the Belgian white beer — witbier or bière blanche. The history of this wonderful beer style begins in the XV century! Belgium was a part of the Netherlands then, which was a colonial empire that imported lots of exotic goods from overseas territories, including spices.

All beer was sour those days, and in order to get rid of this sourness, Belgian monastic brewers from the village of Hoegaarden started experimenting with these spices, particularly, coriander and famous oranges from the island of Curaçao. That’s how the famous witbier recipe of 1445 was born, and closer to the 18th century Hoegaarden became one vast brewery.

Despite witbier production stopped in the middle-20th century (in 1957, the last remaining manufacturer — the Tomsin brewery — was closed), the villagers did not allow the recipe to vanish: local milkman, Pierre Celis, restored the tradition in 1965[1].

How to try

Of course, the beer lover’s choice №1 is Hoegaarden itself. Apart from this, many other breweries (first of all, Belgian and American ones) produce witbier: St. Bernardus Wit, Allagash White, Blue Moon Belgian White, Blanche De Bruxelles, Kronenbourg 1664 Blanc, Blanche De Namur.

The witbier myth

We hope that a reader exclaimed ‘what a nonsense!’ at least 10 times while reading the previous two paragraphs.

Let’s start with the fact the state of the Netherlands that could have controlled Belgium did not exist in 1445, nor couldn’t it have New World colonies, as the Columbian expeditions happened half a century later. Furthermore, the Netherlands got colonies exactly because it had parted ways with Belgium in 1588 — or rather with the Habsburg empire that continued ruling Belgium until 1790. Oranges could not be known in Belgium earlier than in the 16th century as only Moors were growing citruses in those times.

Coriander, on the contrary, could easily be an ingredient in Belgian beer as it wasn’t an exotic spice at all. It had been being cultivated in Europe since at least the second millennium BCE and was a part of gruit. Then why hops in the recipe, though?

Dutch beer of the 14th-16th centuries was at least half oats, which were then the main cereal. And it must have been dark, in the best case, amber, but definitely not pale. But there are neither oats nor dark malt in witbier — at least, in the ‘classical’ Hoegaarden one.

As for the sour taste, the late Medieval brewers were quite able to fight it without the use of coriander, as both chronicles and reconstructions demonstrate[2], and orange zest could only increase acidity.

Finally, what monks-experimenters we’re talking about? Monasteries were obliged to be self-sustainable — implying growing oranges locally, which looks quite unrealistic in Belgian climate — to say nothing about cities and guilds being the main drivers of innovation in brewing in the 15th-century Netherlands, not monks.

The answer to all these questions is quite simple: though Pierre Celis actually got a recipe of authentic Hoegaarden beer from Loius Tomsin himself, the newly made witbier had nothing to do with it: the Tomsin recipe (and the earlier ones as well) contains no oranges or coriander, but does contain oats (though let’s be honest, Celis’ Hoegarden did include a small proportion of oats until 80s)[3].

In 1985, Celis sold the Hoegaarden brand to the Artois company (now AB InBev) and moved to the US, where he opened a new brewery borrowing his name — the Celis Brewery. American consumers got a taste for witbier, and soon other brewers start to make it — above-mentioned Allagash, also Ommegang, Samuel Adams, Bell’s, Canadian Unibroue and even the mainstream giant, MillerCoors (under the Blue Moon brand).

We are certainly not trying to diminish Celis’ achievements. He did a great job for the beer Renaissance of the late 20th century. His witbier is an elegant and balanced beer style. Still, it has nothing to do with the previous generation of Hoegaarden beers. As for the tale about monks adding orange zest to pale beer in 1445, it was probably just invented out of thin air.

How to try real Hoegaarden

No way, unfortunately. Several authentic recipes of ‘Belgian white beer’ survived (not from the 15th, but 19th century, of course). The variant described by George Lacambre in 1851 comprised wind-dried pale barley malt and unmalted wheat and oats[4]. Hoegaarden recipes also prescribed inoculating the wort with airborne yeasts (which means ‘bretts’ and sour taste). Gravity and attenuation of this beer should have been quite modest, giving maybe 2.5% ABV. And, of course, the shelf life of this beer was several days, maybe two weeks at the most. No surprise that nothing like that is being manufactured nowadays[5]. So your best option is to enjoy Pierre Celis’ variant.

Through the ages

If ‘Hoegaarden’ is not an authentic Belgian beer, then which one is? Which beer was not invented in the 20th century?

  • Pilsners first occurred in Belgium at the very end of the 19th century and gained their market share in the interwar period[6] — a striking contrast to the nearby Netherlands where almost nothing except lager was brewed, to say nothing about Czechia where the pilsner revolution had ended two decades earlier.
  • The main Belgian specialty — strong pale ale — was first brewed in the 1960s. Before that, all strong commercial beers were English-style barleywines.
  • The famous monastery (aka Trappist) beers were first produced in the interwar period. Of course, many Belgian monasteries had been brewing beer for centuries; however, if we take specific beer recipes, their history will turn out to be much shorter, barely more than a century. (The oldest one is probably Westvleteren 8, which was first mentioned in the WWI times.)
  • What is now called ‘abbey beer’ (in fact, commercial versions of monastery beers) started as an imitation of the Trappist beers, and therefore is even younger than them.

Almost every kind of beer that now makes Belgium famous was invented in the 1960s or the interwar period, except for a few cases that we will describe in the next chapters. Furthermore, Belgian beer exports became noticeable even later than that, in the 1990s[7].

It might look like we’re pushing the readers to a conclusion that Belgian beer culture is but a marketing decoy, but that’s not true at all. If we take a look at the nearby Netherlands, we will learn that not a single historical beer style has survived 1960. Only German and Czech-style lager makers can boast about more than a century-long history[8].

The 1990s success of the Belgian beer had happened only because at this point Belgium was the only country that, first, preserved its originality and, second, possessed not only the tradition but also a zeal to maintain and develop it. Unfortunately, all these processes were accompanied by active myth-making or sometimes sheer marketing lies. As a result, we now have a paradox: Belgium with its beer diversity had become a Mecca for beer lovers, but it’s almost impossible to find any genuine information regarding those beers and their history, even if we talk about the recent past.

The real story of brewing in Belgium

The question of why it was Belgium (and not, let’s say, the Netherlands) that preserved and improved traditional brewing is definitely awaiting its researcher champion. What we can say confidently is that this phenomenon must originate in the history of Belgium.

Narrating the history of Belgium until it gained independence in 1830 is an unrewarding business. One is risking drowning in the multitude of names and dates. Let us state the following: during the preceding ten centuries, Belgium was a territory of conflict between close and not-so-close neighbors, from the dukes of Burgundy to the emperors of Austria. Probably, this constant struggle resulted in a certain Belgian stubbornness and rejection of alien traditions.

Another important factor was that Belgium finally gained independence being the most underdeveloped region of Western Europe. 19th-century Belgium was an eclectic patchwork of rapidly industrialized regions coexisting with primitive rural agricultural sectors (which included brewing). In particular, the above-mentioned ‘white’ (e.g., wind-dried) malt for white beer was made by spreading a thin layer of grain on the rooftops of barns; a method, hardly suitable for large-scale production (because of the necessity to build a myriad of such rooftops, pest control issues, weather dependency, etc.) and thus almost not used outside of Belgium[9].

Of course, the nuances of taxation played their role as well. Belgian brewers paid their levies based on the mash tun sizes[10]; also, not only beer production but also beer transportation was taxed. Both factors naturally favored small artisanal producers. Opening modern pilsner breweries was a disadvantageous business in 19th-century Belgium as they were high-tech installations that generated a profit at a large production scale only. As a result, not only the number of independent breweries was stable (unlike England, Czechia, Germany, or the Netherlands — universally everywhere as beer production became monopolized by large companies), but it was even growing: in 1900, Belgium counted 3223 breweries, 15 thousand beer varieties, 185 thousand pubs (one for every 32 citizens) — and drank close to 200 liters of beer per person per year[11]!

It’s interesting

As brewing was a major source of income for Belgian cities, town (or village) mayors were often brewers, and their election rivals, competing brewers[12].

References

Beer
Brewing
Beer History
Witbier
Hoegaarden

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Sergey Konstantinov

Written by Sergey Konstantinov

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