… in Belgium
Beer is made primarily from barley malt, hops, yeast and water. Sometimes non-malted grains or sugars are added, or fruits and spices, coffee, and other things.
The results can vary widely in time and space, with correspondingly different opinions on value. Many traits well-regarded today, cloudy beer say, were regarded with bemusement or worse a few generations ago.
The present age venerates Belgian beers. They can offer a wide range of flavours: clove-spicy, sweet, fruity, sometimes sour. In the 19th century travellers from the Anglosphere often dismissed Belgian beer. Sourness was not infrequently cited as a reason.
There were exceptions, see e.g., in my recent post. Canadian Alan McLeod in A Good Beer Blog has offered further examples.
Still, my conclusion is most visitors who encountered Belgian beer didn’t like it.
A telling illustration is the jibe by William Kingston-Beatty in his 1890 book, A Journalist’s Jottings:
How funny is that in a time when Belgian beer is a pillar of recherché beer culture? Not very.
But every age has its likes and dislikes, its causes, its antipathies. In matters of taste, inherently subjective, history can’t be said to be any kind of judge.*
William Beatty-Kingston
The Briton Beatty-Kingston (1837-1900) was a civil servant turned journalist, librettist, and author. He had spent much time professionally in Germany. This brief obituary in the Glasgow Herald has further detail.
His exposure to German and Austrian brewing was evidently in-depth, as his beer commentary suggests.
Together with (Britons) George Sala, Henry Vizetelly and George Saintsbury whom I discussed earlier, Beatty-Kingsbury was a progenitor of modern beer writing.
His opinions therefore are not amateur or casually expressed, while at the same time possessing relativity in the great maw of history.
So what can we learn here, or pin down?
Beer i) is a cereal beverage, and ii) always has alcohol, irreducible components that define an unchanging vocation – the final draw, so to speak, through the ages.
…
*The Chavette mentioned was French comic novelist Eugene Chavette, see more here.