Friday night's beer review #5: Vedett Extra White

I usually prefer strong dark beers, beers which you spend a long broody night over...

But it's still enormously hot here, so for the 4th time in 5 reviews, I will be reviewing a light refreshing beer. In this weeks Edition: the Vedett Extra White: a wheatbeer.

ABOUT THE STYLE
In Dutch this is called a "Witbier", which translates as White beer. hence the name. People believe this is due to the cloiudy nature of these beers. However, even cloudy they do not look anything like white, at most pale yellow.
A more likely explanation is that it was mistranslated from German, where they call these beers Weizenbier, Weizen here stands for Wheat, but was mistranslated as White.

That being said, there is a large difference between German style wheatbeer, and Belgian style wheatbeer: Due to the German Reinheitsgebot, German brewers cannot use anything besides water, hops, malt and yeast. In Belgium (and the rest of the world) we can add other ingrediënts, including spices. Therefore Belgian style is always spiced, and German style is unspiced.

THE BEER ITSELF

This beer has an alcohol content of 4.7% making it a perfect beer for drinking. As you can see, the beer is cloudy, but it is meant to be that way. In fact, if you pour carefully, you can get these beers to be clear, but most bartenders will stop pouring halfway and swirl the bottle around making sure all the yeast gets into the glass. This is an important part of the style. In German they call this Hefeweizen (which roughly translates to YeastWheat)

(I've been writing a lot about German here, if there are German readers, please weigh in on whether I'm right or not)

AROMA

As I wrote before: this beer is spiced. In the aroma you will clearly recognize citrus (courtesy of the curaçao (dried orangepeel)), coriander (the seeds,not the leaves) and ofcourse wheat.

I'm drinking this one at room temperature (25°C at the moment). Whereas the previous paragraph is always present, even straight from the fridge, at 25°C I picked up the unmistakeable aroma of freshly cracked pepper.

MOUTHFEEL

This specific beer has a slightly velvety feel to it. Not like a 10%ABV sweet dark beer, but less watery than an average pilsner.
FLAVOUR

In the flavour the coriander is present, but is well balanced, not as in your face as some other beers. The main flavour is wheat, and towards the finish you will find the citrus taste which we noticed in the aroma.

As you can see, this isn't the most complex of beers, but it is well balanced, and a great beer for when it is hot.
The slightly thicker texture makes that this beer is great at washing thirst away.

AFTERTASTE

At the start of the aftertaste, there is clearly the taste of freshly cracked pepper (there's no hotness) I can't swear as to this specific flavour being noticeable at regular drinking temperatures. besides this there's some citrus when you let this beer through, but that's less or more where it ends, although the citrus in itself lasts for a while.

FOOD PAIRING

This beer is considered a magnificent accompaniment with all white fish dishes, and more generally, anything you'd consider serving white wine with.

ABOUT THE BREWERY

This beer belongs to another Belgian family brewery: Duvel Moortgat, better known for it's world famous Duvel beer.
This brewery has been owned by the Moortgat family for 5 generations. In recent decades they have been expanding enormously, they now operate 4 breweries in Belgium and have further breweries in Czechia and the United States (most notably Ommegang).

LUXURY

Drinking this beer would have been considered a pure luxury throughout much of history. Wheat could only be used for bread production, so the brewing of wheatbeers was only allowed in years of abundance. Drinking a wheatbeer therefore meant that the harvest had been good, and that the entire nation was prospering.

And with that, I leave you untill next Friday (unless I were to do another random review in the middle of the week