HOEGAARDEN ~ BROUWERIJ VAN HOEGAARDEN

MACRO BELGIAN ~ I remember a number of years ago when I had my first Hoegaarden; it was poured in a heavy glass that looked at large as a fish bowl.  The glass was rinsed with its very own beer bidet before pouring.  It was my introduction to wit beer. 

Sampled from a bottle the beer poured a cloudy light yellow (fermented twice but not filtered).  Aroma has lots of sweetness and wheat, with a smidgen of citrus..  Taste has tons of wheat, with a trace of citrus and spice.   It is an easy drinking summer beer, not bad, but not stupendous either.  I’ve heard this called a lawnmower beer, something to quench your thirst on a hot day.

Hoegaarden (the location near Flanders) had been the site of a brewery from the mid 1400’s.  The tradition had died out in the 1950’s with most of the breweries shuttering their windows.  In the late 1950’s Pierre Celis (who had been a milkman) decided to purchase the brewery and make ago of it.  His new brewery was called Celis; they used the traditional ingredients of wheat, hops, yeast, coriander and dried orange peel in their brew.  By the 1980’s he could not keep up with demand and expanded.  After a fire in 1985, several brewers offered their help, Interbrew (now InBev) the largest brewer lent him the money to purchase other buildings to keep up with production.  He felt that they corporate brewery pressured him to adjust the recipe in order to ‘mass market’ the beer.  Celis then sold InBev the brewery and moved to Texas, US, where he set up Celis Brewery, and continued to make the original wit beer.  Miller, who later sold the equipment and name to Michigan Brewing Co, which went bankrupt and also sold the name, later acquired that brewery.  Since the InBev takeover, the original brewery in Hoegaarden was threatened with closure, sparking many protests among the locals.  InBev has kept the brewery in Hoegaarden and invested to upgrade facilities.  Multinational Anhauser Busch now owns the beer company.

4.9% from Hoegaarden, Belgium