By Dick Cantwell

The Way of the World

De Dolle Brouwers is one of my favorite breweries in the world. I don’t consider this privileged information--there are a lot of us who hold this view; probably many of you would agree. I had always enjoyed their beers--the sturdy and wonderfully sour Oerbier, the pale and wonderfully sour Arabier, the complicated and wonderfully sour Stille Nacht, and the specialties, each of them distinctive and, guess what?, wonderfully sour. And then I visited the brewery a few times, as part of the itinerary of a brewery tour of Belgium and Holland which I led a few times some years back.

Knowing something of their story--peer-judged favorite beer in all Belgium right out of the gate in 1980--and certainly having noticed their unusual graphic sensibility--somewhere between Pillsbury doughboy and Michelin man for the label of their flagship brew--I wasn’t that surprised at the offbeat look of the place. And then out came Chris, the brewer, to give us our tour, wearing red cutaway cowboy boots and a bright yellow jacket graphically populated by a legion of little Oerbier guys. An architect during the week and only a weekend professional brewer, Chris is a man of varied and remarkable accomplishment. His paintings and drawings hang in the taproom---open only on weekends or by appointment--and his family is charming. The beers, as already mentioned, are wonderful.

I visited De Dolle Brouwers a number of times over the next few years and always received the same wonderful treatment. Always the beers were wonderful as well, but the last time I visited, a couple of years ago at this point, there was something missing. The sourness was gone. The Palm Brewery had taken over Rodenbach, Chris’s erstwhile source of yeast, and had forbidden continuance of the arrangement. Try as he might to that point he had been unable to come up with a comparable strain. The flavor difference was notable. The beers were still very good, but it seemed a good deal of their soul had taken flight with the loss of the Rodenbach yeast. Chris himself was philosophical. He seemed confident that the problem would work itself out. He in fact had pointed out the difference to me before I’d had a chance to taste for myself, not to complain but merely as a matter of interest, brewer to brewer.

I’ve been accused in the past (not entirely accurately, I might add) of viewing the collective Belgian brewer in too rosy a light. I’ve praised this attitude of sublime fatalism as a way of dealing with the vagaries inherent in being a small brewer in a world of big business. It reflects an acceptance of the fact that things are often out of one’s control more than it does some kind of idealized state in which one is always able to see a sunny side. In fact I came back from that last trip alarmed not just by the situation I had seen at De Dolle Brouwers, but by the struggle in which many Belgian brewers are engaged. Where our big brewers are producers, for the most part, of bland styles existing separate from most of what we as craft brewers do, theirs are also producers and sponsors of styles sufficiently similar for them to take considered notice, and to act on that consideration. The Palm Brewery is not Interbrew, which has been known to acquire brands and breweries not simply to discontinue competitive production but to destroy specialized equipment in an effort to narrow and further control brewing culture itself. It’s likely, in fact, that Palm has helped save Rodenbach from just plain going away. Yet the Palm Brewery saw fit where Rodenbach (itself one of the brewing world’s treasures) was concerned to narrow production to a single product, their least interesting, in order not to compete with vaguely related products from an indeterminately allied lambic brewery. And of course to hamper arrangements like the one previously held with De Dolle Brouwers.

As great as it is to tour and taste one’s way through the Belgian breweries, it must be difficult to have their concerns. I’m not talking about the corporate machinations already mentioned. Where traditional styles are concerned, they are dealing with a shrinking market within their own country and in many cases a growing demand in ours. Where we agonize over sending beer to a neighboring state with slightly varying laws, they are often faced with the necessity of undertaking herculean logistical tasks in order to get their beer across the water to us. This involves stretching the production capacities of extremely small breweries, getting the beer into kegs which may never be seen again, and charging enough (without charging too much) to make it all worthwhile. All of this combined, of course, with the ordinary risks associated with throwing your beer upon the mercies of freight, weather and indifference and hoping it tastes like something you’d recognize. I admire them enormously, but I don’t envy them.

Which brings me back to Chris. I don’t presume that he needs my, or our, help. He’s been making great beer for over twenty years. Few of us can say as much, whatever our other accomplishments. I’ve heard from friends who have visited De Dolle Brouwers since I was last there that the sourness remains elusive, confined mainly to samples from the days prior to the Palm directive. We all know there are sneaky ways around all this. One brewery I can think of in an unnamed Northwest city has for many years used the yeast of another to brew its yearly barley wine, with the understanding that such is not to be procured unless the head brewer of the latter is, usually by arrangement, out of the room and away from all direct knowledge. Yeasts can also be isolated surreptitiously. Once again, I can think of a handful of Northwest breweries who use a common yeast, itself obtained not entirely legitimately and then quasi-commercially disseminated with strict orders of multiply blind secrecy. But the case of De Dolle Brouwers is figuratively, if not literally, under a microscope. The prohibition is specific, and the longer things stay as they are the more dramatic the potential infraction. Most of us are accustomed to flying beneath the radar of breweries only a little bit larger than ourselves (to say nothing of the empyreal loftiness of the big brewers’ sensitivities), but in Belgium no one is so small as to escape notice.

What’s to be done? Probably just hope for the best, wish Chris well and continue to drink (and praise) his beer. As I understand it help has been offered, but it’s a touchy thing, both in terms of legality and deference to Chris’s accomplishments. Despite the current domestic legislative climate concerning intervention abroad in general we can’t very well step in and interfere from this distance. It’s tempting to try to make it an issue of homeland security, some kind of protection of vital interests abroad, but I doubt our lobby is sufficiently loud as to convince the powers that be to place sour Belgian ales on a par with Persian Gulf crude. We’re always having to write our legislators anyway, as they seek to make up shortfalls with increased brewery and excise taxation. Maybe this would be worth mentioning.