Complex and refreshing taste (Hoegaarden White)

Member Name: nimue

Product:	Hoegaarden White
Date:	28/03/01 (44 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: unique complex flavour of fruit and spice

Disadvantages: thick clumsy glass

Hoegaarden Wit is a cloudy wheat beer, brewed in the Belgian town of Hoegaarden. It is a highly refreshing beer, perfect for hot summer days, but good at any time of year. The flavour is slightly tart, but overlying this is a complex fruity-spicy taste. There is a similarity with the German cloudy (heffe) wheat beers, but Hoegaarden Wit has a far more complex flavour. This is due to the fact that the Belgians, not being fettered by beer purity laws such as the German Reinheitsgebot, dared to add other ingredients to their beers. Hoegaarden's flavour derives from the addition of coriander and bitter orange peel (curacao). Some people maintain that a secret third spice is also added.

Hoegaarden Wit is cloudy because the yeast remains in suspension, instead of settling out at the bottom of the barrel. As with many other Belgian beers, if you buy them bottled, the custom is to swirl the bottle round gently while pouring so as to get out any yeast which might have settled. The concept of drinking a cloudy beer might be very strange to those of us who are used to judging British ales on clarity as well as on flavour. However, the yeast does add significantly to the taste, and it is also good for you, because it boosts your intake of B vitamins. If you do swirl the bottle, you will end up with a really large head on the glass. That again is the way that Belgians like to enjoy their beer; sipping it through the foam adds to the richness and boosts the flavour even more.

Beers like this were brewed in Hoegaarden as early as 1445, and the town boasted 35 breweries in the 19th century. However, by the mid 1950s, the various pilsner type beers had pushed it out of the market. The tradition was revived in 1966 by Pierre Celis, a local milkman who no longer sells milk! Hoegaarden Wit is increasingly becoming available in the UK, where it can be obtained in bottles in supermarkets, off-licences and pubs, and also on draught in some pubs. Like all Belgian b
eers, it has its own speciality glass. This glass for me represents the sole downside of this beer. It is an extremely thick six-sided tumbler, which makes me feel as if I am drinking out of a jam jar. Otherwise, Hoegaarden Wit is definitely one of my favourites.

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