Is this heaven? No, it's Belgium.
HAVERHILL -- Dann Paquette's eyes shine and there's an almost reverent tone in his voice when he talks about Belgium. That's because Paquette is a brewer, and brewers and beer geeks talk about Belgium the way kids talk about Disneyland and certain computer nerds talk about Macworld. For the beer enthusiast, Belgium is a combination of wonderland and promised land.
What makes the beer so interesting is partly the sheer variety of brews produced and the number of different ways the Belgians go about making them. They employ a range of techniques, including brewing with indigenous and exotic herbs and spices -- citrus peel and flowers; brewing with fruit; brewing with sugar; fermentation in open tanks; fermentation by wild yeast or bacteria; fermentation and lagering in oak casks; and even blending of aged and fresh beer before bottling to produce traditional Belgian beer styles, according to brewer and beer writer Horst Dornbusch.
What was once the province of the brewers of Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Leuven, and Liege is now being explored by many North Americans, from Brewery Ommegang in New York to
The beers offer something for everyone: complex, malty, lightly hopped Trappist ales, so called because they are made in Trappist monasteries; abbey ales, which are patterned after the Trappist ales but are brewed in secular breweries; slightly sour, lightly hopped lambics, brewed in open vessels to allow fermentation with airborne yeast, aged in wooden casks, and often flavored with macerated fruit (krieks and framboises are perhaps the best known of these); malty, slightly sour Flanders brown ales; and witbiers (Belgian wheat beers), with a distinctive fruity, spicy flavor that comes from special yeast strains, wheat, coriander, and Curacao orange peel.
Paquette is the brewmaster at the Tap, a warm and welcoming brewpub housed in an old shoe-factory building in Haverhill. In 1997, when he first went to Belgium, he was the head brewer at Northeast Brewing Company in Allston, which has since closed. Before that, he had never brewed an abbey-style ale or a Flanders brown. ''When I came back," Paquette says, ''we did [an abbey-style] tripel, a kriek, a framboise. We tried to do everything because we were so excited. For a while, all I wanted to do was make Belgian beers."
The brews have been quite well received. ''A few months after I came to Haverhill, I made Golden Slipper [a Belgian-style tripel], and it turned out to be a huge success," Paquette says. His Scheherezade, a complex, malty, toasty Flanders brown with a refreshing sourness at the finish, is on tap now and has also been very popular. ''All beer lovers, all people who get into beer, end up [appreciating Belgian beer]," Paquette says.
Others brewers began making the beer because they had tasted it close to home. Rob Tod, founder of the Allagash Brewing Company in Portland, Maine, didn't need to go to Belgium to fall under the spell of its beer. Tod began his brewing career cleaning kegs at Otter Creek Brewery in Vermont in 1993. At the end of the day, he and his co-workers would sample different styles of beer, and when Tod first tasted Belgian beers, he fell in love with their uniqueness and complexity.
Tod started Allagash and in 1995 released his first beer, a Belgian-style witbier called Allagash White. The beer was a big success in the Portland area, and the brewery began producing other Belgian-style ales, including Allagash Double Ale and Allagash Tripel Reserve, but it took time for the beers to catch on.
''The first five years or so were hard, because beer drinkers didn't really know what Belgian ales were. We had to spend a lot of energy educating people," Tod says. These days, Allagash is broadening its horizons, brewing more experimental styles such as Allagash Four, a strong, malty brew with flavors of raisin and date that uses four yeasts, four hops, and four sugars and goes through four fermentations. The company also sponsors a Cookin' With Allagash contest at the Institute for Culinary Education in New York to promote beer as a versatile accompaniment to food and as an ingredient in food.
Beer writer Dornbusch, who will be giving a talk at Saturday's festival, says it's no wonder brewers who make pilgrimages to Belgium want to brew their own Belgian-style ales at home. ''You have heirloom tomatoes, heirloom potatoes. Belgian beers are the heirloom beers."
