This comes from a Website entitled Belgium’s Beer Paradise. You can find it at www.bestbelgianbeers.com
The story of Hoegaarden white is as fascinating as the beer itself.
It starts around 1445 when the Begaarden monastic order came to Hoegaarden, a little village in the province of Brabant. The region is blessed with heavy clay soil where the wheat grows tall and strong.
Taking local grown wheat, working by hand and following a secret recipe using nature's purest ingredients, the villagers developed the original white, unfiltered, wheat beer characterized by its very pale, cloudy appearance.
The village developed into a center of the brewing industry over hundreds of years-by the end of the 18th century, Hoegaarden boasted 34 separate breweries-and its long-term prosperity looked guaranteed. But the world outside was moving on. Industrial production techniques, new refrigeration techniques and the irresistible rise of the new clear lagers all took their toll. By 1920 only five breweries were left. The final blow fell in 1957 when the last white brewery, Tomsin, closed its doors. Our story would have ended there-in tears.
But Hoegaarden was saved.
During the record hot summer of 1965, villagers missed the cool, refreshing taste of their unique, local drink. The village milkman, who lived next to the original brewery and who had worked there in the past, dug out the age-old recipe, got his inspiration, and, with a couple of vats sawed in half, an old copper kettle, pure spring water and natural ingredients, began brewing Hoegaarden white beer..
Within weeks business took off. As news of what he had done spread, visitors and beer connoisseurs (from Belgium, Germany, Holland and France) flocked to his brewery.
Hoegaarden white was born... stronger and even more popular than the white beers of the past
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