Wendy Littlefield took a few seconds from her busy schedule getting ready for Tuesday’s Coast to Coast Toast to drop me a link to a story about what brewers in Belgium think of AB InBev’s Belgian Beer Cafes OPENING SOON IN AN AMERICAN CITY NEAR YOU! For that I thank her.
A few paragraphs into the story I was thinking it would be better if the author talked to Yvan De Baets. I’m biased, because Yvan made important contributions to both Brew Like a Monk and Brewing With Wheat (including the foreword). I try not to go back to the same experts for every book, but he’ll also be contributing to For the Love of Hops because nobody makes more sense to me when we are talking about the integrity of beer.
So as I scrolled down into the story and first saw the top of a photo of Brasserie Verschueren, which is located in the neighborhood where he lives, I smiled. Two more clicks and there he was in front of it. Of course, he totally nailed it.
He says he understands and supports In-Bev’s Belgian Beer Cafe idea from a financial point of view, but not from a human one.
“You don’t build create a Belgian beer cafe in five minutes,” De Baets says. “It’s generations of owners and customers that build the place, and then give a soul to it.”
De Baets likens In-BEV’s Belgian Beer Cafes to the “Irish pubs” that sprung up around the world in the 1990s. It’s a gimmick, he says, it’s kitsch, and he wonders how outdated they will look in a few years.
The beer menu, he notes, features well-known InBev heavy-hitters like Stella, Hoegaarden, and Leffe. It also has Westmalle, and Chimay, two beers still brewed by Trappist monks.
And while those beers are part of the Belgian brewing heritage, Da Baets says, he thinks the Belgian Beer Cafe could do better.
“It’s beers in which all the angles have been rounded. There is no character, no real personality. I hope this is not the real image of Belgian beer,” says De Baets.
It’s not 10 a.m., but I find myself suddenly thirsty for a Brasserie de la Senne Zinnebir.
I can understand why some people aren’t big fans of this Belgian Café thing, and de Baets makes a very good point with Irish Pub example. But all this seems to come from people that are part of the “beer intelligentsia”, for whom Chimay is “mass produced” and what have you. But it should be also seen from the point of view of those who’ve never had Chimay or even perhaps Hoegaarden.
In Argentina, and I reckon that in many other countries, too, Guinness was the first “different” beer many people drunk and to not few of them, it was also the beer that got them to explore what else was there. Why can’t Leffe do the same?
A link to the full story would’ve been appreciated; a Google search turns up PRI’s “The World”:
http://www.theworld.org/2011/11/belgian-beer-cafe/
And, yes, I understand this is a watering-down of the culture, but it’s at least a taste, which is much more than 95% of Americans will ever get…unless they have a great beer bar (in Atlanta we have several) or travel to Belgium (I’ve been 6-7 times).
The beer list for the cafe’s does include some over-sweetened lambic imitators, but also has Chimay, Straffe Hendrik, Duchesse de Bourgogne, Westmalle, Delirium, Duvel…granted most of these are well-known Belgian beers, but some of them are considered the ideal examples of their styles and some of the best beers in the world.
And the other 2 things I’d say are:
– yes, some of these “malternatives”/faux lambics are horrible, but you see them all over the stores in Belgium. They’re obviously popular there, so then you have beer snobs saying, “Well, I don’t care if you’re belgian, you’re not drinking the right thing.”
– would these smaller breweries (De Dolle, etc.) be able to produce enough to keep cafes in America stocked? You’d wind up with old stock at a high price, which may not impress anyone, although the high-gravs can age well, obviously.
Sure it’s a dumbing-down of culture, but I don’t think anyone is going to these bars to get a lesson on Belgium–they want to try something different, have some drinks, and a good time with friends. Lighten up.
Sorry about leaving out the link, Mark. Added now. I shouldn’t allowed to post on Saturday mornings.
I have to say, the idea that I could get Duchesse de Bourgogne someplace was enough for me. Sure it could be better but then it will not be a “brown bar” or some other level of purity. And can you ever really experience it if you yourself are not local? Twenty years ago when I was an English teacher in a newly unshackled Poland, I thought I would go to the neighbourhood working joe bar. I opened the door and was greeted by a roar of the Slavic version of “get the fuck out of here, you foreign arsehole!!!” Oddest was I taught all their children. But I got the point, shut the door and walked away.
This horse has already left the barn.
Loose-use of “Belgian”, in relation to beer styles, has misinformed a generation of American consumers. “Shock Top” and “Blue Moon” have seen to that.
The further west one travels the worse it gets. Portland’s “Cheers to Belgian Beers” just completed (again) without one authentic Belgian beer was poured.
Few pedestrian american beer drinkers can parse the notion of “Belgium” being a place. To them, its just a descriptive, style-related marketing term, like a Kansas City strip.
PS: The Poland analogy doesn’t work.
I was not born in Belgium, but have been there 20 times or more. I’ve always been treated graciously. I’ve firm sense of what a Belgian bar is, and can easily sort Flemish from Wallonian without reading the signage.
JG, I agree and think you make many excellent points. I would add that someone (and I had always thought it was AB-InBev) had already acted on this concept as I saw this restaurant (http://marktrestaurant.com/) in New York in the 1990s.
The Belgian Beer Cafe in the Intercontinental Hotel in Abu Dhabi saved my life on a large number of weekends over the past 18 months (and there’s something deliciously “up yours” about drinking alcohol and eating pork in the capital city of a conservative Muslim country on a Friday night). It was certainly a better stab at “Belgianness” than any mock “Oirish” pub is at imitating a genuine Irish bar. But what amused/depressed me was sitting at the bar and seeing all the British expats come in, take one look at the beer line-up, and immediately order a pint of Stella …
I don’t have a problem with this. Yes, it’s inevitably going to be an approximation of the real thing, but so what? Purely independent attempts are inevitably going to be approximations of the real thing. Chicago’s wonderful Hopleaf is an approximation of the real thing, and may not even be recognizable as an approximation any more, but it’s a great place. It’s what places become once they’re open that makes them good or not. It’s whether people feel welcome and want to come back. It’s not as if every beer cafe in Belgium has 200 different beers, 195 of which are hard to find. I’d bet much more have lists like the Belgian Beer Cafe.
Fact is, unless we actually go to _live_ in Belgium and become part of the physical community, we’d experience beer cafes there as outsiders. Nothing wrong with that, but there it is.
I don’t think we should be dreaming up ways not to enjoy beer.
I’ve tempered my initial hostility toward this thing a bit. I still don’t think that beer list is worth a damn, for the most part, although there are a few I wouldn’t mind drinking right this moment. Taken as a whole it represents the longstanding move of Belgian ales toward sweet, strong, spiced, bland, and a US market that has happily lapped that up has helped to keep it going.
I have a couple of suspicions about this thing. The first is that the beer buyers of these places will have some freedom in what they can get from distributors, and that might well mean more interesting or varied lists than what’s seen on the company’s website.
My second suspicion is that unless the company building these cafés can prove that they are really independent of AB InBev influence — and freedom in beer lists would be a nice way to show it — then they could be in for some very interesting legal troubles. But no doubt their lawyers have thought of that already.
“You don’t build create a Belgian beer cafe in five minutes,” De Baets says. “It’s generations of owners and customers that build the place, and then give a soul to it.”
Perfect.