A pale, hazy, spiced wheat ale from Belgium — refreshing, lightly tart, and flavored with coriander and dried orange peel in addition to hops. Soft, bready wheat character and Belgian yeast esters give it a soft, almost cloudy body. Typically 4.5–5.5% ABV. Revived from local extinction by Pierre Celis at Hoegaarden in 1966.
In the glass
Origin
White beer was once a specialty of the Belgian village of Hoegaarden, but the tradition died out in the mid-20th century when Louis Tomsin’s brewery — the last in the village to make it — closed in 1957. Pierre Celis, a Hoegaarden milkman who had helped out at the Tomsin brewery as a young man, set out to revive it. He took up brewing in 1965, starting in his father’s barn with secondhand equipment, and made his first batch of Hoegaarden beer on March 19, 1966, working from his own memory of the style and the recollections of townspeople who still remembered its taste. The beer caught on and became the template for modern witbier. Celis transferred production to a larger site, the De Kluis brewery, in 1980, but in 1985 the brewery partly burned down; uninsured, he was forced to sell to the brewing group Interbrew, today part of Anheuser-Busch InBev. Celis went on to found a brewery in Austin, Texas, carrying the style to the United States and helping seed its adoption by American craft brewers.
Notes
Witbier differs from German wheat beer in both grain and seasoning: the Belgian version leans on unmalted wheat (sometimes with oats) rather than malted wheat alone, and it is spiced with coriander and dried orange peel, where the German styles take their character from yeast alone. A traditional warm, slow mash rest encourages a touch of lactic tartness, a deliberate echo of the gentle acidity old farmhouse beers picked up before refrigeration. American drinkers often garnish the glass with a slice of orange or lemon — a habit that started with Blue Moon’s marketing rather than any Belgian tradition; in Belgium the beer is served plain.
Defining examples
Hoegaarden·Allagash White·Blanche de Bruxelles·Avery White Rascal·St. Bernardus Witbier