Brown ale—does any name generate less excitement? Of all the adjectives one might use to describe a beer, “brown” does not exactly ignite drinkers’ passions. Brown is staid, conventional, boring. These impressions are, of course, subjective, cultural judgments rather than iron law. Brown ales aren’t popular now, but what happens if we look backward?
It may surprise you to learn that in a different time and a different place, the color brown represented the pinnacle of brewing, the highest achievement of the art.
That place was Belgium, and the time was not so long ago. If we go back into the first half of the 19th century, brown beers were so well regarded that they dominated Belgian brewing. In the 1840s, a brewer and engineer named Georges Lacambre began cataloguing some of Belgium’s major styles in his Traité Complet de la Fabrication des Bières (Complete Treatise on the Manufacture of Beers). Of the fifteen or so types he described, more than half were brown. Four were amber or, as he described the Peeterman style, “deeply amber.” Only four were pale, but all these were wheat ales, known as white or blanche—and even one of these, Blanche de Louvain (literally, Leuven white beer), had a brown variant.