Over the years, I’ve analyzed competitive products, and there are beers out there that use pectin because pectin stays in suspension. There’s nothing exogenous added to Blue Moon.
WITBIER CALIFORNIA BREWERIES HOW TO
We figured out how to brew, and I can’t say exactly how, but we figured out how to do it so those particles stay in suspension for a long time. You’ve got to rely on the really small molecules-a mixture of carbohydrate and protein. That’s why the haze can’t be yeast, because yeast settles out. What you find out is that the bigger the particles, the more they settle out. “It’s difficult to make a brilliantly clear beer, and it’s difficult to make a hazy beer that stays hazy. “Haze is one of those things we struggled with for a while,” says Villa. The result is a beer that’s hard to brew at the commercial scale of Blue Moon, but Villa took a very analytical approach to making sure that the wheat protein produced a stable haze-a necessity for a beer that had to taste great in a variety of challenging storage environments. His recipe spec’d 10 percent oats in the mash bill, and rather than using raw wheat, he opted for malted wheat instead. All the beta glucans gummed up things, so they said ‘forget it’ and stuck with wheat and barley malt, but oats give it a creaminess.” I read when I was doing my dissertation that historically Belgians used oats, but they stopped using them because they were difficult to brew with. “Wheat-wise, Belgians would typically use 30–40 percent wheat and the rest barley malt. That fruitiness was underscored by his use of Valencia orange peel, as it offers less bitterness and more of a classic orange citrus nose than Curaçao orange.
“The coriander that most of the Belgians use is the type with a more vegetal, celery-like smell.” “I wanted a fruity one and found one out of California that when freshly ground smells almost like opening a box of Fruit Loops cereal,” says Villa. To soften the approach and create more familiar and endearing flavors for American drinkers, he searched out a different coriander. That bitterness in the traditional approach is underscored by ingredient choice, too, as Curaçao orange peel and the traditional coriander amplified it. “A true-to-style Belgian wit can be 16–18 IBUs, and while that’s in balance, it would have been a bit much for the typical palate in the 1990s.” But I wanted something that had what I called ‘first sip likeability,’” says Villa. “I wanted to make sure that people liked it from the start, and a true Belgian wit was a bit more bitter than people were used to. For the beer to be palatable to American drinkers, it had to be less bitter and more familiar. Sure, tradition matters, but tradition is only tradition because it appealed to the palates of local drinkers. “I thought we could use Blue Moon to introduce people to Belgian-style beers, and we started with Belgian White.”īut a historically accurate wit was not what he had in mind. “Back then in 1995, were just not familiar with the richness of styles in Belgium,” says Villa. But Villa had fallen in love with witbier while pursuing his PhD in Belgium, and through sheer force of will convinced the execs to fund his foray into this (then-strange) style. Red ales and red lagers were the current rage, and in the days before the term “craft” became a thing, microbreweries tended to focus more on English beer styles and red/amber ales and lagers. It was a tough sell to corporate higher-ups back in 1995 when Villa first pitched the idea of creating an American beer brand around the Belgian witbier style.
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