Saint Michael Saves the Belgian day
In August 1948 the Leader Republican, a small-town newspaper in New York State, printed this wire dispatch:
Belgian Brewers Make Drive for World Trade
BRUSSELS – Belgium brewers have organised an association, “Unibex” (Union des Brasseries Belges d’Exportation), to push the sale of Belgian beer abroad. They plan to produce a standard beer of controlled density, which will keep well even in the tropics.
M. Jean Grofils, President of Unibex, speaking at a luncheon here, said Belgium had lost a large part of the export market abandoned by the Germans and Japanese, because the government had ruled after the liberation that the home market must be supplied first. As a result, he claimed, the thirsty in America and Africa were drinking Dutch beer out of Belgian bottles.
“As for the Belgian Congo,” he added, “we are selling there, but we have just learned that in a little while we shall again meet a competitor, whom we had believed eliminated for a long time. I mean German beer, paid for in dollars.”
M. Grosfils also complained that of 30 commercial agreements which Belgium had signed with other countries since the war, only one – that with England – contained a “drop” of beer.
It seems likely Unibex was later absorbed into one of the current Belgian beer associations, maybe Belgian Brewers.
Belgian beer-makers, like their Dutch counterparts especially Heineken and Amstel, grasped the importance early of developing export markets. On paper Belgium was well-poised after World War II. Compared to its more war-damaged neighbours it came out of the war reasonably well. According to a 1948 Ogdensburg Journal report:
… Belgian losses in the war were not large. Like England, thickly-peopled, Belgium lives by foreign trade, importing raw materials and food and exporting manufactured goods. Assisted by America in particular, Belgium obtained certain raw materials soon after liberation, which enabled factories to start production. Foreign demand for goods has given Belgium the advantages of a seller’s market. Coal output which affects industrial production at every turn, of course, has been remarkably stepped up by granting special financial and social welfare inducements to Belgian miners and by bringing in foreign workers. Belgium’s own yield of coal is being supplemented by imports from the [German] Ruhr Valley. And the trade of the African Congo colony, much increased during the war, has a significant bearing on the well being of the Belgian motherland. Belgians are aware that the economic health of their country is closely bound up with world conditions.
Yet, as the Leader Republican explained, when the Belgians broached potential markets Dutch beer was already there, including in the U.S.
Even worse, an indignity played out in what was then the Belgian Congo: German beers loomed, with U.S. cash backing the exports – only three years after Germany’s unconditional surrender in 1945.
How did this happen? The money to finance German beer exports likely flowed from the postwar Economic Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan. which inaugurated in July 1948.
Unibex’ plan to export a beer of “controlled density” envisaged a Heineken-like product: stable, pasteurized, a blonde lager, well-suited to warm climates. In fact, Belgium sent beers of this nature overseas in subsequent decades.
A beer store advert in the 1959 Times-Union in Albany, New York included Ekla, a Belgian pils type lager that appeared in other foreign markets.
Belgian beers, lager and others, were also being written up by pre-craft beer writers including Michael Weiner and James D. Robertson.
Yet, Danish and especially Dutch beer, Heineken as Exhibit A, captured the American fancy for imported beer in that period. German, Canadian, and Mexican beers competed into the 1980s, with varying degrees of success, but Belgium was not a player internationally until relatively recently.
The purchase of America’s Anheuser-Busch to form Belgian-controlled Anheuser-Busch InBev gave an impetus to Belgium’s Stella Artois, but it was preceded by the international success of Belgian specialty beers – abbey and Trappist beers, white beers, West Flanders red ales, lambic and gueuze.
A 2011 article in the Economist outlined various factors to explain a pivot to Belgium in world beer affections. Yet, the story failed to mention a key background factor: the books and other writing of British-based beer author Michael Jackson, especially the 1977 The World Guide to Beer.
His deftly-written chapters and evocative photography delineated an intriguing Belgian beer culture, one hitherto unsuspected. He gave it a wide-screen romantic allure it retains to this day.
Jackson created an avidity in the anglosphere to taste these beers and understand their ethos. Other writers soon elaborated on the charms of Belgian beer, all the offbeat details from robed monk-brewers to cobweb-lined lambic cellars.
Beers that were sourish or tasted of clove and blackcurrant were now lauded as gastronomic specialties. In the 19th century, many visitors to Belgium dismissed its beers as retrograde, anchored in primitive practices. These lines from English writer W. Beatty-Kingston in 1890 will illustrate.
Today, 70% of Belgian beer production is exported, which adds considerably to the national balance of payments. Lisa Bradshaw reviewed the recent data in Flanders Today.
Unibex would have swooned at this picture. Mr. Grosfils would have found it curious, too, that success was based in part on obscure, half-disappeared styles such as Trappist beers, white beers, and lambics.
In Percy Shelley’s famous phrase, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Unibex had the right idea in 1948, but needed a poet to sing the siren of Belgian beer.
The saviour finally came, 30 years later, in the form of Michael Jackson (1942-2007). That is why in 1994 Belgium awarded him its Mercurius award for service to Belgian brewing. No less than a Crown Prince, Philippe of Belgium, now the King, presented the honour.