Back in the olden days, when life was hard and resources were scarce, brewers often did an odd thing: they boiled their worts for insane lengths of time. The Belgians seem to have been kings of the long boil: an average wort would spend four to six hours in the kettle, and some ranged upward way
Let these names roll around your mouth a moment: mumme, jopenbier, Peeterman, Cöpenicker Moll. Delicious, aren’t they? And yet the beers they designated don’t always sound equally so. Jopenbier, for example a specialty of Gdansk, Poland had an original gravity of near 1.200 (that’s not a typo), was spontaneously fermented, but was so poorly attenuated that it
Modern minds have been rewired by technology such that some features of the pre-technology world are simply incomprehensible. I’m thinking now of the basic thermometer, which is knitted so tightly into our being that we can’t engage the
The diversity and creativity of the beers that come out of this small country are justifiably famous, yet often it’s the wilder side that draws all the attention. Let’s renew our friendship with the foundational ales that first put Belgium on the beer map.