This week’s Beer School post will actually end up being a combination of last week’s and this week’s classes. I wish I could say that I was too busy to write up the post. In a way I was but the truth of the matter was that I was stumped for words. I couldn’t just start writing about Belgian ales and not expect a short novella to be the result. I needed sometime to gather my thoughts, to be concise. Now that I have twice the material, let’s see how I do?
Week 8 saw the class tackling Belgian and French Ales, no small task, let me assure you. Belgian Ales are some of the most complex beers in the world and part of that is because they take advantage of one ingredient that most breweries try and minimize: yeast. Next to water, yeast is probably the most misunderstood of all the ingredients of beer. Many people know hops, they add bitterness, blah, blah, blah. Just as many know malt, they add sweetness, color, blah, blah, blah. Water holds everything together (gross oversimplification, I know) and yeasts eat the sugar to turn into carbon dioxide and alcohol (the big payoff, cha-ching!)
If you’ve ever had a hefeweizen (and by now, who hasn’t?), yeast play a vital role in the flavor of that beer. Depending on many factors (fermentation temperature, yeasts strain, etc.), the yeasts can impart their own flavor to the beer. This results in hefeweizens that exhibit banana fruit esters, clove phenolics or both. Most of the time, it’s both, just the balance varies. Well, how does this affect Belgian ales?
A lot.
For the beers in the Belgian and French Ale category, yeast-derived characteristics play a huge part in the overall flavor profiles of these beers. Yeast will add both fruity and spicy phenolic character to these beers in addition to the already present malt and hop flavors and characteristics. While all very similar overall, their differences have to deal with the proportions of those characteristics.
- Category 16a: Witbier – Witbiers are wheat beers that should be light, refreshing, moderately sweet with yeast-derived citrus flavors while the spiciness is from the actual use of spices, i.e. corriander. Low bitterness. Low hop character and flavor.
- Category 16b: Belgian Pale Ale – A fruity, copper colored beer with medium malt sweetness and easy drinking. Unlike their American and European cousins, these are low hopped.
- Category 16c: Saison – Out of all the beers, probably the most flavorful. These will exhibit the most yeast character. Fruit notes are citrus in nature while the phenols are peppery (peppercorn peppery). Easily the most hoppy of the group as well.
- Category 16d: Biere de Garde – These Belgian ales will be the most malty of the category. Fruity yeast character will be the most prevalent, followed by the spicy character. Even then, everything takes a backseat to the malt character.
- Category 16e: Belgian Specialty Ale – This style is the catch-all for the other Belgian style ales that don’t particularly belong in the above. Think along the lines of black ales such as New Belgium’s 1554.
While the yeast-derived flavors were the running thread for most of Category 16, the subsequent beer category will have an entirely different thread running through it. Catgory 17: Sour Ales, is aptly named because all those beers are sour to one level or another. Here’s how the category breakes down:
- Category 17a: Berliner Weisse – Out of the sour ales, the only one that isn’t Belgian, it’s German. Berliner Weisse beers are known for their mouth-watering and refreshing tartness. Lactic tartness is the star of the show for this beer with a grainy, wheat flavor playing second fiddle while hop characteristics work very quietly behind-the-scenes.
- Category 17b: Flanders Red Ale – Complex fruit characteristics (oranges, black cherries, currants) are complimented by an equal level of malt sweetness. These beers should have a medium level of lactic acid sourness/tartness.
- Category 17c: Flanders Brown/Oud Bruin – These beers will have a complex malt character that is dominant to all other flavor characterisics. Dark fruit chatacters will abound but are secondary to the malt. This will also be the least sour/tart of the beers in this style.
- Category 17d: Straight (Unblended) Lambic – Straight lambics are some of the most outrageous beers ever made. These beers were extreme before there was even such a term. Lambics will be predominantly sour (lactic acid) balanced by and equal number of microbiota-derived character that can only be described as horseblanket, hay, goatey and barnyardy. Any fruit is in support of these two, hops are non-existent.
- Category 17e: Gueuze – Pronounded “gooze”, this beer style is actual a blend of 1, 2 and 3 year old lambics. The result is a beer that is more balanced than a straight lambic as the sour and barnyard characters are in balance.
- Category 17f: Fruit Lambics – For a long time, lambics were the only style of beer available. Much of that was attributed to a lack of microbiological knowledge. In essense, this style is defined by the Straight Lambic that is either balanced or slightly subordinate to whatever fruit is going to be in it.
So there you go, Weeks 8 and 9 wrapped up fairly easily and concisely. Unlike past weeks, I actually sent out a few tweets during class letting you know what beers we were drinking. I won’t be doing that all the time but enough to keep things interesting.
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