If there’s one thing that consistently irks me as a beer lover, it’s when brewers overdo their recipes with a lot of ornamentation and fluff that they can get from regular brewing ingredients. If there are two things that consistently irk me as a brewer (if you’re not picturing Steve Martin at Christmas on Saturday Night Live right now, you’re dead to me), it’s the overloaded recipe thing plus beers that are so over-eager to be recognized that they produce a wildly out-of-balance beer that can border on undrinkable. They’re the brewing equivalent of a laugh track.
So it often is, sadly, with Belgian witbier. This is a fantastic beer style, especially for the summer-to-fall transition, but you need to resist the impulse to overload it with spices and fruit! Pick good ingredients, don’t lose sight of the role of malt, and you’ll make something you can drink by the liter instead of making wheat-based perfume.
Style
Witbier is one of those classic beer styles (dating to the eighteenth century, at least) native to the farming regions of eastern France and Belgium. It is, as its name indicates, a wheat-heavy ale (roughly 50 percent of the grist is unmalted wheat), sometimes sweet-ish in flavor, and usually features a significant citrus-and-spice character. You find significant variation in the style, much as we do with saison, but at its core this is a low-ABV pale ale with a noticeable fruity and grainy flavor profile. It isn’t “hoppy,” per se, but there’s no question that it can benefit from a creative approach to hops (as you’ll see in just a moment). And while spices are often used, I am going to strongly encourage you to limit both the number and amount you add to this beer. And by that I mean, “add none.” Having said that, if you’re a huge fan of spice beers, then by all means, swing for the fences here on the peels and petals and spices, so long as you’re balancing them sufficiently with other flavors!