Belgium Banned Spirits in Its Bars for Sixty-Five Years
For most of the twentieth century you could not order a gin in a Belgian bar. Not because of licensing hours, not because of a local rule, but…
Category: Belgian Beer
Belgian beer styles, breweries and glassware, explained from the beer list Meyboom Brasserie poured.
Grand Cru, Reserve, Vintage: What Beer Labels Are Allowed to Promise
Rodenbach Grand Cru. Chimay Grande Réserve. Somewhere on a shelf near them, a Vintage Ale and a Brewer’s Reserve. All four borrow the vocabulary of wine, and on…
Which Breweries Are Actually Trappist? The List Keeps Changing
Search for a list of Trappist breweries and you will be told there are six, or seven, or eleven, depending on which article you land on and when…
Belgian Beer Culture Is on the UNESCO Heritage List. Here Is What That Means.
In December 2016 UNESCO added Belgian beer culture to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, alongside falconry, Neapolitan pizza-making and the Argentine tango. It…
Manneken Pis: The Statue Brussels Dresses Up and Plumbs Into a Keg
He is sixty-one centimetres tall, he stands on an unremarkable street corner, and the reliable reaction of first-time visitors is that he is much smaller than expected. He…
Why Belgian Beer Costs What It Does
There is a question that answers itself the moment you rephrase it. Belgian beer is not expensive; Belgian beer abroad is expensive. In a Brussels supermarket a bottle…
Barrel-Aged Beer: Two Traditions That Use Wood for Opposite Reasons
Two breweries put beer in an oak barrel. One is trying to make it taste of bourbon and vanilla; the other is trying to let wild organisms turn…
How Beer Is Made: Grain to Glass in Five Steps
Beer is four ingredients and five steps. Everything else — style, colour, strength, whether it tastes of banana or grapefruit or nothing at all — is a decision…
How Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Made, and Why It Finally Tastes Like Beer
Non-alcoholic beer was, for most of its existence, bad. Thin, sweet, vaguely of wort, and drunk mainly by people with no alternative. In the last decade it has…
The German Purity Law, and Why Belgium Ignored It
In 1516 Bavaria passed a law saying beer could be made of three things and nothing else. It is still cited on labels five centuries later, usually as…