[Beer Lecture] Chapter 32. New Belgium
As strange as it may sound, American craft brewers, indefatigable in their rally for recreating classical British recipes, had been ignoring for a quite long time the tradition of another ‘beer Mecca’: Belgium. By the beginning of the 90s, the only Belgian-style ale produced in the US was the Redhook Ale and its creation was quite anecdotical: yeasts for the new ale of 1982 were borrowed from the University of Washington, and they made the beverage taste like cloying overripe bananas; consumers were considering the beer just spoiled. It was Michael Jackson, the beer writer, who saved the business by pronouncing the Redhook product ‘Belgian-style ale’, as it soon began being advertised[1].
This is Chapter 32 of my book on history of beer and historical beers.
The real advent of Belgian tradition to American soil is tied to the name of Jeff Lebesch. Jeff was an electrical engineer and one of the first Papazian’s pupils when the latter was giving master classes in homebrewing (by the way, illegal at that time) in his kitchen. In 1988, Lebesch realized his old dream, inspired by Jackson, and spent a vacation traveling Belgium on bike, guided by Jackson’s almanac. From this journey, he brought back a journal full of notes on Belgian brewing, and a firm determination to make Belgian-style beers of his own. In 1991, Josh and his wife Kim Jordan launched a craft startup in the basement of their Fort Collins home. The logo of the new brewery featured a bike, and the first beer they made was named ‘Fat Tire’. It was an amber ale in the Spéciale Belge style (see the corresponding chapter). Soon, Lebesch started to brew a second beer, ‘Abbey’, in the Trappist dubbel style.
New Belgium Brewing Company was an instant success. In 1993, ‘Abbey’ was awarded a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival — in the ‘Various, Special’ category as nobody in the US has heard anything about ‘dubbel’. Ten years later, the brewery was making fantastic (for craft brewing) 180 million dollars in sales.
Almost immediately, other ‘Belgian’ craft startups popped out: Canadian Unibroue was founded in 1993, Allagash Brewing Company in 1995, Brewery Ommegang and Russian River Brewing Company in 1997. Also, the Celis Brewery was opened in 1992 by Pierre Celis who moved to the US after selling Hoegaarden to Artois, though calling his witbier a traditional Belgian beer is rather a stretch (see the ‘Orange Zest, Coriander, and the Hoegaarden Milkman’ chapter).
Interestingly, the boom of ‘Belgian’ craft brewing in the US preceded the boom of Belgian beer exports by a decade. Even in 2005, when New Belgium alone was producing 70 million liters of beer per year, real Belgian beer exports to the US comprised modest 2 million liters, and it was mostly Stella Artois and Jupiler lagers[2]. In fact, American craft brewers reinvented Belgian beer totally independently (as they did with British beers twenty years before that).
How to taste
The author of this book considers craft Belgian pale ales such as let’s say, Gnommegang by Brewery Ommegang or Damnation by Russian River, a beer style in its own right, in some sense more ‘Belgian’ than real Belgian beers. Craft versions are more characteristic, the ‘Belgian’ traits are more extreme in them. We would suggest the reader try and make their own conclusions.
References
- 1 Hindy, S. (2014), see chapter 1
- 2 Persyn, D., Swinnen, J.F.M., Vanormelingen, S. (2010), pp. 11, 34