Extremely Belgium

American
craft brewers may boast about their innovative ways: bourbon
barrel-aged beers, wild ingredients, beers that tip the ABV
scale well north of 15%. Belgian brewers have been doing
wild stuff for years.

Not that “wild”
is always the same as “good”, just as has been shown with
the American extreme beers. That’s clearly the opinion of
Massachusetts’ own importer of Belgian beers, Dan Shelton of
Shelton Brothers, in Belchertown.

“It’s not that
Belgian beer is all craft beer, or even that it’s mostly
good beer,” Shelton said. “A lot of it is mass-produced and
badly lacking in character. Belgian beer just looks and
feels like the ultimate craft beer. It comes in odd bottles,
often wine or champagne-style bottles with corks. It
sometimes has spices and other odd ingredients that make
people think of brewers as creative chefs, tossing things
into the pot that raise eyebrows but somehow still
work.”

Craft beer or
good beer, the question is whether Massachusetts retailers,
both on- and off-premise, or Massachusetts drinkers, get
Belgian beer, and whether they’re selling and buying enough
of these big-bottle, big-flavor, big-ticket beers. From my
Philadelphia perspective, living in the biggest Belgian beer
market in the country, where I have five local Belgian
restaurants to choose from, Massachusetts is behind the
curve. Is that a fair assessment?

Most of us who
have been at this for over ten years clearly remember our
first Belgian. I remember mine, in an old German place down
the street from my college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, back
in the early 198Os. It was a Duvel, in a squatty little
brown bottle. The owner, Wilhelm Lauzus, a German Navy vet
from World War II who kept a model of his last ship, a heavy
cruiser, over the bar, handed me the bottle without comment.
But as he handed it to me, he pointed ponderously at a
little note on the label: “Pour slowly.”

Yeah, yeah,
okay, I was 22, I knew about pouring beer. I took the bottle
and the glass back to my seat, and poured okay, not that
slowly. Those of you who know Duvel are probably laughing
right now. The beer famous for its huge, mousse-like head
blossomed out over the rim of the half-pint bottle all over
the table. “Hey!” I yelled, “I only poured a little!”
Wilhelm slowly nodded his big head, with just the hint of a
grin on his placid face. Seen it, the grin said, tried to
warn you.

Six years later
I was living in New England, drinking the early craft oh,
excuse me, it was still “microbrewed” in those days, beers –
Harpoon, Catamount, Nathan Hale, Charter Oak – and loving
the fresh-poured stuff at Commonwealth and Northampton. But
I rarely saw any Belgian stuff, except a few bottles of
Orval and Chimay at the most selective beer stores. To tell
the truth, I didn’t really miss it when I could get
beautiful taps of these new (relatively) local beers. Okay,
Nathan Hale was actually brewed in another state, and
Charter Oak just wasn’t that good, but it was the
excitement.

When my wife and
I moved to Philadelphia in 1991, I missed the micros. But I
quickly found the Belgians that Philly was beginning to
embrace. That’s when we started to get the incredible run of
draft Belgian beers, sometimes stuff that wasn’t even on
draft in Belgium at more than one or two places. I just
talked to Michael Jackson three days ago, and he still
recalls an eleven-lambic dinner he hosted at Monk’s Cafe in
Philly five years ago as a beer highpoint in his life.
“People in Belgium simply don’t believe me when I tell them
about it,” he said.

The craft beer
scene in Philly has revved up considerably, but I can’t
think of any of the breweries in the area that don’t make at
least one Belgian-style beer: tripels, dubbels, saisons,
strong golden ales, Flanders Reds, and Oud Bruins, even some
very good pseudo-lambic types. So what’s the deal,
Massachusetts? Just not interested in Belgians?

Well, not
exactly. “I was just awarded the first American
ambassadorship from Orval,” said David Ciccolo, the
Belgian-boosting owner of the Publick House in Brookline. He
wasn’t kidding, either; if his quotes sound a little
disjointed, it’s because he had literally just walked into
the Publick House after flying home from the Zythos beer
festival in Belgium. “We’re not new on the Belgian wagon. We
have 15O Belgians, but only quality Belgians. Not just every
Belgian. It’s hand-picked with love.”

Ciccolo was
being somewhat modest or maybe just jet-lagged and
forgetful. He’d also just been knighted in the Belgian order
of the Chevalerie du Fourquet des Brasseurs, the “Knighthood
of the Brewer’s Mashfork”. It’s an order that’s infused with
a beautifully Belgian combination of pomp and silliness, but
it is also a serious recognition of service to Belgian beer.
That’s a fair evaluation, then, because just about everyone
I contacted for this story told me that if I was looking for
evidence of Belgian beer savvy in Massachusetts, I had to
start with Ciccolo and the Publick House.

“We sell more
Allagash White than anyone in the country,” Ciccolo rambled
when asked what did well at the Publick House. “Our Belgian
drafts rotate. We sell buckets of De Ranke XX, Moinette
disappears when it goes on tap. We sell more Duvel than
anyone in Massachusetts. We sell a ton of Vuuve and ‘tSmisje
Tripel. When the staff gets behind something, it walks out
the door. The usual stuff, like Chimay, sells well because
it’s recognized.”

Selling “a ton
of Vuuve and ‘tSmisje Tripel,” and referring to Chimay as
“the usual stuff”, may be the best evidence that, at least
at the Publick House, Massachusetts beer drinkers are
getting it. “There’s nothing they’re not getting,” protested
Ciccolo. “Everyone who comes through the door gets educated.
The staff learns about the beers, and that’s why I take them
to Belgium.” He had taken four Publick House employees along
to Zythos.

Nick Blakey
encourages tasting and education at Bauer’s Wines, in
Boston. “Much of the beer industry still has to catch up
with the wine business on sampling,” he said. “Bar owners
and bar servers need to taste this stuff, and then they’ll
see what all the fuss is about. If a bar owner just goes to
the Publick House on a Monday or Tuesday night, they’ll see
how much this stuff sells. On a Monday night! It’s up to us,
the retailers and bartenders, to educate the people. I don’t
think enough people are saying “Try this”. Too many people
do the easy thing, just point them to what they bought last
time.”

Larry Bennett,
who handles both the Brewery Ommegang beers and the
Belgian-made beers of Belgium’s Moortgat brewery, would love
to work with retailers on making sales together. “Our beers
are always extremely well-received,” he said, without false
modesty, “but the question is how to get those citizens to
walk into their local [store] and ask for our beer,
the surest way to get a retailer to carry them. If I knew
the perfect answer to that question, I’d be living on an
island in the South Seas, being fanned by voluptuous South
Seas maidens.”

People will most
likely get their first experience with Belgian beers at a
bar, and that’s what makes Bennett shiver. “Staff training
is especially important because the worst thing a bartender
or server can do is plunk down a $6 to $1O bottle of Belgian
beer and a generic glass, and walk away,” he said. “Use the
right glassware and explain why. Pour it, give a little
summation on drinking and aroma characteristics, hold it up
to light and look it over before setting it down. It is just
like serving a good glass of wine, as opposed to plonk. Know
what you are talking about before you are asked questions.
Winging it doesn’t work for good food or wine, why should it
for beer?”

It works
off-premise as well. Have the glassware – everyone loves
paraphenalia when they’re buying something expensive. Pick
up the bottle, hold it, display it, and talk about it.
You’re asking someone to pay five times as much per bottle
as they’re probably accustomed to paying for beer; you have
to explain why it’s worth it.

How do you do
that, and do it smart – the sampling, good answers, and
hand-selling? Get the beers in and train staff while beers
sit on the shelves? Train before you get them in? Chicken or
egg, right? You’ve got to get up to speed as quickly as
possible, but without being too shallow; real Belgian beer
lovers can spot a thin veneer of “training” from across the
store. “Getting retailers up to speed is an interesting
question,” said Bennett. “We work with ours on training,
pouring, glassware, styles, and Belgian background.
Generally they’re receptive, but like any retailer in the
big city they’re besieged with other folks who also want
their attention. As a college town I suspect they also have
a lot of staff turnover that doesn’t help. The traditional
taking of retailers to Belgium hasn’t been used much in
Boston, David [Ciccolo] perhaps
excepted.”

Taking staff to
Belgium is expensive, but as anyone who sells wine or whisky
can tell you, there are few selling techniques stronger than
telling a customer, “Well, when I was at Chateau XYZ” and
being able to add personal detail to a product’s story. And
the thing that separates Belgian beers from the rest of the
import beer category, from almost the entire beer category,
is a pricepoint that can make a trip to Belgium worth it at
the register.

But Shelton
doesn’t think you can really get smart on Belgian beer that
fast. “Getting up to speed quickly is not really possible,
if you’re doing it right,” he said. “Any beer lover tasting
his first Belgian beer is going to be surprised and usually
impressed by the range of flavors there. I was thrilled
myself by some mainstream Belgian beers – Duvel, Affligem,
Corsendonk – when I first discovered them. (There were also
some that I thought were crappy right from the beginning.)
But I didn’t stop there. I went to Belgium to hunt for beer,
and not just the mainstream ones. Eventually, the mainstream
beers come to seem rather pallid, to say the
least.”

Now, that’s
coming from a guy who imports some decidedly non-mainstream
beers, but it makes you think about Ciccolo’s “Not just
every Belgian” qualification. You want to look at what’s
selling, of course, and you also have to think about what
your customer’s thinking when they come in the door and ask
you, “Do you have any Belgian beers?”

Jeff, one of the
bartenders at the Dirty Truth in Northampton, hears that
question often. “When they just ask for Belgian, they’re
usually thinking of a tripel, a strong blonde ale,” he said.
“Or a lot of people drink the witbiers. People will ask if
we have Chimay, and when we ask which one they want, they’re
not sure, they didn’t know there were three of
them.”

Sometimes, in
these days of “best of” lists from magazines and websites,
it’s worse than ignorance, it’s that little bit of knowledge
that’s a dangerous thing. “People come in here asking for
the beer that turns my spine to rubber: Westvleteren,” said
Blakey. “That’s all they want. It’s like buying a Rolls
Royce Phantom for your first car! Start with a
Toyota!

“But I do think
Belgian beers have more of an appeal across the board than
any other,” he continued. “I served Houblon Chouffe to a guy
who only drinks light beer, and at first he said, ‘I don’t
like this much,’ but then he’s finishing the
bottle.”

The idea that
buying Belgians will get folks used to paying more for beer
is one of the main things that you should consider when
you’re thinking about adding or expanding a Belgian section
to your shelves. “One thing I want to point out,” said
Shelton, “is that the reason for [stocking] Belgian
beer is that it builds the market for imports – people
naturally are more confident about imported beer that’s 8%
or whatever, with a shelf-life of 2 or 3 years. They’re
willing to spend more money on high-alcohol stuff, and since
imports are inherently more expensive, we’ve needed that
Belgian wedge to get people to think about spending
more.”

It’s working,
overall, he says. “Belgian beer has done [that] for
imported beer more generally: introduced the idea that some
beer, by virtue of its uniqueness and rarity, as well as the
extra time and skill required to make it, should naturally
cost a lot more money than that merely ordinary beer. It’s
an idea borrowed from the world of wine, of course. It’s
also the latest favor that imported beer has done for
American craft beer. Successful brewers here are making all
sorts of exotic beer now, and charging whatever they want
for it.”

Carrying a good
selection of Belgians is like carrying a good selection of
extreme beers, or a good selection of single malts, or a
good selection of New Zealand wines. Word will get around,
and you’ll start to see new customers in your store, people
who know what they want, are looking for someone else who
knows it, and who are willing to pay for it.

But Shelton
points out that there’s a significant difference between a
good selection and a big selection. “I wouldn’t encourage
beer shops to increase the number of Belgian beers on
display,” he said. “On the contrary, they should cut the
number of Belgians, winnow down to the very best. That means
learning about the breweries that make the beers, and of
course tasting, always tasting. People are willing to pay
more to have the proprietor separate the wheat from the
chaff. People will gravitate to the beer sellers that show
taste and style, because they want to have taste and style
too.”

Blakey was one
of the people who thought it would help if a Belgian
restaurant opened in Massachusetts. “Oh, hell, yes. And give
it a name like Bruxelles,” he said. “Boston would benefit
greatly from a Belgian restaurant or another bar like the
Publick House. Importers and wholesalers are definitely
trying to expand the market. I love Belgian culture and
food, it’s great. There’s a lot more cross-cultural
appeal.”

Dan Shelton
didn’t think it would make much difference; but then,
Shelton didn’t really think Massachusetts was behind the
curve, either. “It looks to me like Massachusetts is ahead
of the curve in fact,” he said. “People here seem to like
good beer, wherever it comes from, and Belgium, like any
other place, has some good beer and some bad. Certainly
Belgium hasn’t cornered the market on good and interesting
beer. I thought that people in most places around the
country were thinking the same way, but I guess some are
still fixated at that early Belgian stage. If Massachusetts
avoided that, somehow, I can only speculate about
why.”

That’s why he’s
Dan Shelton, and that’s why Nick Blakey’s response when
asked what Belgian beers he thought were under-rated and
deserved to sell better was, “To tell the truth, anything
Dan Shelton brings in.”

So ahead of the
curve, behind it, or right in the power band? All depends on
how you look at it. One things for sure: Belgian beer does
provide that price wedge, a justification for the fair
prices that fine beer is finally beginning to command. For
that reason alone, you need to think about your Belgian
selection.