Belgian Wheat Beer: Orange Peel and Coriander [By Spectre] (Marks & Spencers)

Yes… you’ve guessed it… Cinabar’s been at it again. She’s managed to find the weirdest and most revolting sounding beer to date. If the banana beer, raspberry beer and cherry beer weren’t bad enough, this beer has orange peel and coriander added to it during the brewing. Apparently this process brings out the flavour! Okay, so I could give this beer a chance. I know I like fine teas, such as Orange Pekoe and I’m okay with orange in chocolate, but orange in beer! This wheat beer is brewed in Huyghe Brewery, in Flanders, in Belgium. I personally think this beer came about by a fatal error when some Belgian brewer was having his marmalade on toast one morning and tripped over into a beer vat. The result was some other fellow saying, “Hey, this beer doesn’t taste half bad, we’ll sell it and see how it goes. We just need a thousand jars of marmalade and a dead bloke per container and we’re away…”
As you can imagine, I avoided opening this beer for some time. Then Cinabar’s mom mentioned she was cooking salmon one night. I noticed she’d boiled up some eggs for an eggy potato salad, with a green balsamic soaked salad on the side. This meal would be the ultimate fishy taste sensation and needed a full-bodied drink to match it. If this cloudy orange flavoured beer was ever meant to be drunk with a meal, this was it. After sprinkling lemon juice over my fish and pouring the beer in a short glass as recommended on the label, I tucked in. The orange in the beer really complemented the acidic lemon; both flavours seemed to collaborate together to draw out the fresh flavour of the fish. At the same time the edgy coriander taste in the beer worked well with the herbs and balsamic vinegar in the salad. Forget wussy white wine, this beer went so well with the meal that it feels like it was brewed solely for fish dinners. No wonder the label proudly states “Award Winning”. It will most certainly become a stalwart in the fridge for every time I have salmon or some kind of seafood dinner.

By Spectre