Americans thirsty for Flemish brews
Every year, the number of US producers of artisanal beer grows bigger, including those who specialise in “Belgian style ales”. The US also has a huge market for imported beer, but Flemish brewers have yet to take full advantage.
As “Belgian style” beer takes off in the US, opportunities for export abound
Walking past the long line of people waiting outside, wearing strings of pretzels around their necks and T-shirts saying “Shut up and drink your beer”, it wasn’t hard to guess what was going on inside the Lexington Avenue Armory in New York City one recent afternoon.
It was the NYC Craft Beer Festival, and locals were gearing up for some serious tasting. Once inside, they were given a shot glass and free rein among 75 brewery stands, each offering two of their finest blends.
The festival is a celebration of “America’s best craft breweries”, according to the organisers, and many of those breweries bear names such as Boulder Beer or Goose Island, pouring such all-American drafts as Mojo Risin’ and Big John. But somewhere in the middle of the room stood a foreign-sounding brewery serving foreign-sounding beer. “Ommegang”, it read in black, yellow and red letters, below an image of a lion. That jogged the memory of this journalist formerly based in Brussels.
Familiar sight “It’s named after some festival in Brussels that started in the Middle Ages,” explained a girl behind the counter while pouring a drop of Hennepin, the brewery’s farmhouse speciality. She was spot on. Ommegang Brewery, based in Cooperstown, New York, is named after the annual procession of medieval folklore in the Flemish capital (ommegang is old Dutch and means a procession).
This Ommegang brewery is owned by – wouldn’t you know it – brewing giant Duvel Moortgat, making it one of the few from Flanders to reap the benefits of a rapidly growing craft beer market in the US. “We are one of the only breweries in the US producing only Belgian-style ales,” says spokesperson Allison Capozza, “and we are the only New York brewery doing so.”
Craft beer, according to the US Brewers’ Association, is beer made by a “small, independent and traditional” brewer. Strictly speaking, Ommegang doesn’t qualify – it’s owned by a bigger company, which itself is not a craft brewer. But figures suggest that the American beer lover doesn’t always make that distinction.
From 2011 to 2012, the domestic US beer market grew by 1%. By contrast, the market for craft beer grew by more than 15%. Similarly, says Capozza, Ommegang’s production has grown by 25% per year over the past four years. Its beers – bearing Flemish names such as Witte (White) and Rare Vos (Strange Fox) – have become a familiar sight in the many bars of the city that never sleeps.
Part of a larger trend of local, organic, more artisan food consumption, people in the US and elsewhere are becoming increasingly interested in beer. Not the stuff they grew up drinking – Budweiser, Miller or even Stella Artois (considered a prime choice by many in the US) – but something different. Good beer. Beer with a capital B. Beer the way beer was supposed to be.
Hot tickets
It’s safe to say Flanders’ many artisanal beers would fit that description nicely. The region has a long and rich history of brewing that dates back to the early middle ages. Three of the world’s eight Trappist beers, made under extremely strict conditions by Trappist monks, are in Flanders.
One is the Sint-Sixtus Abbey in Westvleteren, West Flanders. When last December it decided for one time only to make available for export to the US a limited amount of its Westvleteren 12 – regularly rated number one on the influential ratebeer.com’s annual list and widely considered to be the best beer in the world – it was sold out within 24 hours.
Since January of 2011, “the Belgian beer culture” has been part of Flanders’ Intangible Cultural Heritage, as decided by Unesco. “We owe our exceptional beer culture to … our mild sea climate ... the quality of our water … and the variety of our natural resources,” read a statement at the time from the Flemish culture ministry. “Small, artisan breweries of local beers are becoming ever more manifold and are a good export product to, among others, the US.”
Trappist monasteries are non-profits, but the for-profit breweries in Flanders seem to be taking less than full advantage of the Americans’ unquenchable thirst. Over the past decade, beer exports from Belgium as a whole have doubled, according to the Belgian Brewers Association. In that same period, exports to the US have grown 20-fold, though they remain well below those to the Netherlands, for example, a country with a fraction of the population.
The reasons are not immediately clear, but some say breweries themselves are to blame. “It is incredible how some breweries deal with their exports,” says Peter Boeckaert, a Fleming and chief brewer at New Belgium brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado, one of the biggest US producers of Belgian-style beers. He says that Flemish breweries lack a clear export strategy. “There is enormous potential in the US, but they don’t take care of deliveries. They have no idea where their beers are going or how they are being marketed. They leave everything up to the importer. Export to the US has grown enormously, but if your only selling point is that you’re Belgian, you won't make it.”
In the meantime, beer makers in the US are taking care of themselves. The number of domestic breweries has grown massively, and continues to grow. Last year, almost 400 were added to an earlier total of about 2,000. “There’s a lot of money flowing into the industry, which in these times is exception,” says Boeckaert. “Being a brewer today is paradise.”
Unlike at wine tastings, people at beer tastings drink up. It was only mid-afternoon, but the hall had already begun to resemble one big happy hour. The people at Ommegang were pouring non-stop to keep up with demand, and continued to do so until the last pretzel.
