ON THE ENDING OF EXCELLENCE
by Tim Webb

We have a rule in England. It says: "Do not intrude on private grief."

But we are all Europeans now and there comes a time when someone has to say something. Especially when it is a problem that is affecting the neighbours. So here we go.

What on Earth is happening to Belgian beer? Why are your brewers trying so hard to make it ordinary?

I discovered your beer culture in 1977. Friends point out that it was probably there before I found it but that is not the point. At a time when the British beer revival was well under way, it came as a great encouragement to a young Englishman that once we had rescued British "real ale" there was a whole world of top quality beer tastes out there to be discovered and enjoyed.

And when the great Belgian ales had become familiar, excellent new breweries like Dolle Brouwers, Achouffe, Abbaye des Rocs, Cantillon, Blaugies and others came along to create more. After a century of rationalisation came a golden age when even the old family brewers were trying to assure beer lovers that they were just as inventive and thorough as all the others.

It was not perfect. Gueuze was still falling. Moriau, Wets, De Koninck, Eylenbosch, De Keersmaeker, Timmermans, De Neve, De Troch all expired or went for the "popular" taste. But they were producing the most challenging beer style in the world so it was inevitable that they would be in trouble, at least until the local Belgian beer palate matured once more.

I remember Interbrew, like a penitent in the confessional, promising not to abuse the beers of Hoegaarden when took it over, and for a time they were true to their word. Those were the days before Julius was made in a parfumerie and Grand Cru could still be offered to friends.

Then Liefmans fell. Much of the hype round that old East Flanders brewery had been sentimental nonsense but their beers were distinctively different and a case of Goudenband always made it into the car for the homeward journey.

"Cleaned up" was the phrase I recall. No longer would oud bruin ale be stewed all day in the kettle, then left to rot in the cellars until suitable for blending. Modern science could overcome the need for all that. Well it didn't. The new Goudenband is an acceptable drink but no way is it either an oud bruin or the great beer I remember.

Then spice happened. I don't mean the formulaic combo who made mega-bucks for the all-male record industry by pretending to have Girl Power. I mean the rapidly evolving love affair between Belgian craft brewers and the EU coriander mountain.

In the old days the big brown ales of Flanders and Wallonia vied for the cache of being a beer of indescribable complexity. Now the big prize is to be tolerable by all. Character derived from doing clever things with malt mixes and brewing temperatures and tweaks to fermentation, is now created with powders. One bucket for subtle, two for mellow, three for smelly. And saddest of all, this impudent substitute for invention is becoming the Belgian thumbprint.

When Rodenbach Grand Cru got "cleaned up" I wept. More from frustration than loss - they have at least retained the tuns, so the situation is redeemable.

I hold the brewing director of Rodenbach in the highest regard and the logic behind his changes to this world classic beer is faultless. Allowing a beer to oxidise is bad technique and most drinkers dislike the acidic taste. On the other hand the lactic tang of aged Flemish beers has a long pedigree so the purists can like that. Let's keep the lactate and stop the oxidation.

Except of course that the international brotherhood of Rodenbach Grand Cru fans was not asked what it thought. Late in the day, I would like to say on behalf of a few friends that the savage appeal of old Grand Cru was exactly that product of bad technique, its oxidation, which took lactic into a new dimension. And I miss it and I would like it back. The new beer is an interesting aged brown ale in a cleaner style and I thank Rodenbach for creating it. But it is not and never will be the old classic and the world is a poorer place for that.

Incidentally, it would have been a less poor place had the Rodenbach yeast supply not also dried up, along with beers that used it such as the deceased Devaux brewery's original and excellent Schwendi. Also Dolle Brouwers' old style of Oerbier, imaginatively replaced by an evolving new classic under the same name, but nonetheless sadly missed.

Then we have God's silent ones.

I do not know why my taste buds' have gone off the beers of Westmalle, or why I have started calling them "brands". It has something to do with their new simplicity. The Tripel no longer begs to be kept in the cellar for a year or two to develop honeyed subtleties. It is now a beer more suited to the supermarket.

Chimay on the other hand might wish to seek new markets through pet food shops. Have you seen the labels? I mean did Belgium cultivate the first commercial hops or not? Why did you bother? These pseudo-religious cowboys can do it all with extract now. Put this alongside the wheat starch in the thinning body of the beers and it may account for why these has-been beers are increasingly unpleasant. Do they think we won't mind or what?

It pains me to say this, but even my latest case of Orval is on the reedy side. Let us hope this is just my imagination. Sadly I have been assured it is not.

The abbeys need to be told that the days when they gave handouts to peasants have gone. Discerning beer drinkers discern - it's our job. And even if we no longer have influence and "the market wills it", will God? I await a sign.

The point I am making is not that the undoubted deterioration in Belgian brewing quality is a travesty or a scandal or even something new. Brewers have been trying to make cheap and easy beer since the time of the first Egyptian famine. Rather, I want to say that I am amazed at the mentality of a Belgian brewing industry that relishes its world-wide reputation for excellence but has taken to exporting increasingly dumbed down products.

Did the French wine industry make its name on its vins de table? Do Scotch whiskey makers jazz up their twelve-year-old single malts with industrial alcohol? I think not.

An international trade in quality beers has developed in recent years to the great benefit of Belgium, whose brewers are seen, rightly or wrongly, as the most talented in the world. But I fear that the market makers, most of whom drink wine by preference, look at the rapid growth of easily made variants of Pils and calculate that trash sells as well as good stuff but carries fewer risks.

What these merchants fail to spot is that their heavily marketed products are fireworks. Launch, flash, fade, gone. They burn out because they are all image and no substance.

When the excitement dies down, the problem for the same exporters is that their better quality products have been made mediocre by a perceived need for them to be just as accessible. The fact is that the world's finest beverages are not easy to drink. Like the world's finest foods, they are "acquired" tastes, which once acquired are held in the highest regard.

A couple of months ago British beer sales consolidated to a thirty year low. No great surprise. British beer production has, during that time, been focussed on making cheap and unnoticeable forms of alcohol for the easily pleased. Flimsy character has been diluted further as bioengineering finds cheaper ways of producing larger batches of adequate fluids.

Meanwhile the rest of the consumables market had been nudging standards upwards because the post-war generations have wanted to grow old and fat with a sense of style. Having decided to be a mass-production, low quality product, beer has nowhere to go in a more stylish drinks market.

Some years ago the French and Italian wine negociants began to ask and get top dollar for their increasingly lazily produced famous labels. The reaction from the trade was an influx of wines from the "New World", which took complacent producers by surprise. Big, well-produced, top quality lines from Australia, New Zealand, California, Chile, Argentina and the new South Africa appeared at a rapid rate, not just on the shelves of supermarkets and off licences but in the best restaurants.

Such wines took off because they were better. Not just better value but better made and better tasting. And it has taken a decade for French and Italian wine makers to claw back their reputation among this generation of wine buyers and their children.

If Belgian brewers insist on continuing towards a goal of producing easily made, tolerable, mediocre beers in place of the great classics, I predict that they will meet the same fate. And they will have earned their failure.

Ironically the nation best placed to challenge for top place is the one that invented the international brand, the US. Its collective mind is temporarily distracted from matters of trade and in the world before the Towers came down it had yet to export most of its great beers. However, its small craft brewers frequently adopt brewing practices that are quite simply superior to those of an increasing proportion of Belgian brewers. In the same way as the average Australian wine makers became better than their French equivalent.

Far from dumbing down their beers, the Americans are smartening them up. But then the Americans are not so stupid as to think that you should pay the same for a hand-crafted oude gueuze as you should for a computer-generated Pils.

It hurt a bit losing the British brewing industry to globalisation. To lose Belgium's so soon after, would be God's way of condemning me to becoming tee-total. That was not the sort of sign I had in mind.

Generously contributed by by Tim Webb

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