Hoegaarden White

As we know, Belgian monks have been knocking out cracking beers since the mesozoic era. In fact there is evidence that it was a drunk monk on a moped that wiped out the dinosaurs after too many pints of Stella led to an unwise bet with a tipsy triceratops on a violent volcano.*

But monks didn't just happen upon tasty beer. For many years the art of monkish ale making was quite hit and miss. Consistency was difficult to maintain in primitive brewing and the importance of sanitation in the process was as little understood as it was difficult to attain in the 15th Century. All this led to a wide range of possible results from amazing to sour, which any modern homebrewer would be able to sympathise with.

All this would be resolved by the 17th century with better sanitation and understanding of the brewing process, but until then other means were required to give your beer a more subtle and consistent taste.

The Monks of Hoegaarden, a small Belgian village then part of the Netherlands, which at one point was home to over 20 separate breweries, came up with the idea of adding spices to the brew hoping to mask the sour flavours. As the Netherlands was at the time one of the dominant colonial powers, ingredients from across the globe were newly available for the adventurous monk to experiment with.

Eventually the monks hit upon a recipe for an unmalted wheat beer that included hits of orange peel and coriander creating a mellow, easy to drink, citrusy witbier. Hoegaarden White was born and quickly established itself as a favourite. Yet despite this popularity, during the twentieth century the art of making Hoegaarden nearly died out, along with many other Abbey beers, as pressure from large commercial beer manufacturers left the traditional brewers either needing to sell-up or call it a day.

It was the villagers of Hoegaarden themselves who came together to protect the brand and re-establish a commercially viable brewery so by the 80s it had regained not just its local reputation, but was making inroads globally. becoming for many people their first taste of a wheat beer.

Of course, canny marketing always helps and Hoegaarden had a trick up their sleeve that would help them stand out from the crowd in the shape of the now infamous Hoegaarden glas; a magical item that simultaneously makes anyone holding it look tiny and the amount of liquid within look voluminous! The half-pint glass looks like a pint and the pint glass looks like it could hold the contents of an oil tanker.

Hoegaarden is brerwed at 4.7% and has a floral aroma and subtle spice flavour with a slight honey and fruit background. It's a pale beer with a thick foamy head to help fill the heavy glass it comes in and keep those aromas fresh.

You can enjoy Hoegaarden in one of those unreasonably huge glasses on tap at Brussels Beer Cafes.  Alternatively Hoegaarden White is available in bottles in many supermarkets in Malaysia along with Hoegaarden Rose, its fruity sibling.

You can read about some other monk-brewed abbey beers, here.

*Some of the above may not be strictly true