Balance is an important concept in every beer style, though it is found in various and sometimes surprising ways. A brewer always has to consider how the various ingredients and techniques used to create a beer will play off one another to create a harmonious whole. Malt and hop flavors, sweetness and bitterness, alcohols and esters, all fight for an impression on the palate. Belgian blonde ales are a style that often miss the mark. Bereft of hops, they end up cloying and fruity, even with modest alcohol and residual sugar contents, not unlike many macro American lagers. Beers like Leffe Blonde and Grimbergen Blonde target a drinker decidedly against bitterness in their beer. Luckily for the lupulin-faithful, there are a number of breweries that embrace the balanced, even hoppy side of this style. When you get Belgian yeast character and hops together and get it right, it’s a beautiful thing.
Hops and Belgian beers have often had a rocky relationship. Lambic brewers are perhaps the most abusive, leaving bales of hops to age warm for years before finally begrudgingly adding them to their wort kettles to take advantage of their preservative qualities, even after all of their bitter alpha acids have degraded to nothingness. Luckily, this still makes for some amazing and unique beers, and most other Belgian brewers are much kinder to their hops. The more typical Belgian approach is to treat hops as a subtle seasoning to balance the sweetness of the malt and maybe add a touch of aroma.
Even though hoppy beer is far from the norm in Belgium, there were always a few Belgian brewers that weren’t afraid to use hops in a bolder fashion. Brasserie Orval is one brewer whose eponymous beer packs big bitterness — about 50 IBUs — and is dry hopped in secondary conditioning tanks before bottling with Brettanomyces yeast to add more complexity with aging. If you can find a bottle of Orval fresher than a few months old it still possesses a formidable hop aroma and bitterness, though many like to let it age to bring out the Brett character, which also mellows the hops. Tripels such as Chimay White sometimes have a noticeable hop bite, but it took the reimagining of the style by brewers like Achouffe with their Houblon Chouffe, which melds a tripel with an American double IPA, to really show what hops can do in the style. Closer to home, many an American brewer has taken a stab at fermenting a standard IPA or DIPA wort with a Belgian yeast strain, though these beers typically lack the character of real Belgian examples, and true American IPA bitterness levels often overwhelm.
When I first seriously got into homebrewing, I was fascinated by the intersection of hops and Belgian yeast and played with many combinations in both pale and dark beers. I found something that many other brewers have also settled on: rounder, fruitier New World hops (think Amarillo, Nelson, and Citra) can play beautifully with the fruity and spicy character of many Belgian yeast strains. On the other hand, heavy doses of Continental hops like Saaz, Hallertau Saphir, and Styrian Goldings also work beautifully, amping up the character already inherent in many Belgian styles while staying true to their roots. In that lighter intersection of the blonde, single, extra, or whatever-else-you-want-to-call-it style of beer, brewers have taken both of these paths to achieve hoppy goodness.
Belgian blondes generally follow a simple recipe of pilsner malt with maybe some wheat and a little sugar to lighten the body a touch. Starting gravity is usually in the 12-16 Plato range, with 1.048-1.065 original gravity, but can also go lower to get into traditional table beer or saison range. Get much stronger though, and you are making a golden strong ale or a tripel by most measures. In a more traditional, less hoppy approach, you might add about 15-25 IBUs worth of Continental hops total, with some added toward the end of the boil, for just a touch of aroma. Ferment this wort with a Belgian strain and you have the basic model.
Where things get interesting is when you dial the hops up a couple of degrees. Since 1999, Westvleteren Blond has proudly carried this torch for the Trappist brewers. At 5.6% alcohol and 41 IBUs, it is decidedly balanced on the hoppy end of the spectrum, but with a spicy, grassy Continental hop character that keeps it decidedly Belgian. Westvleteren 12 may be the beer that garners the St. Sixtus abbey their most praise, but the Blond is a true gem that has few peers. Going even hoppier, De Ranke XX Bitter shows what can be achieved by adding copious amounts of fruity and spicy Brewers Gold and Hallertau hops to a 6.2% blond ale. Bringing things down to a more refreshing strength, Taras Boulba from Brasseries de la Senne in Brussels packs a fruity, citrusy, spicy punch in a beautifully drinkable 4.5% alcohol by volume package.
Local favorites like The Harlot from Societe, and Devotion from Lost Abbey both find that elusive balance that the best examples of the style hit. (Editor’s note: The Lost Abbey’s new satellite tasting room “The Confessional” held a media soft opening yesterday in Cardiff; doors open officially to the public tomorrow [Wednesday] at 11 a.m.). The Harlot is a great example of the intersection of European brewing traditions in that the recipe is essentially the same as a Czech pilsner until it is fermented with a Belgian yeast strain. Societe credits Moonlight’s Reality Czech pilsner as an influnce for The Harlot, alongside Taras Boulba and the wonderfully balanced and refreshing Redemption from Russian River.
Looking over the recipes of styles like Belgian blonde, saison, pilsner, kölsch, and even some English golden ales, you can see how the same basic model of pale malt and classic hop varieties comes together with different yeast strains to create a myriad of styles. Saison Dupont, one of the classics of the saison style, is really just a hoppy blonde ale as well, and their special annual Cuvee Dry Hopping release adds another layer of hoppy complexity that puts it firmly in the realm of other hop-driven Belgians.