Super 8, Haacht

Don’t mix the grape and the grape is an old and sage piece of advice – but it’s one that’s widely ignored in Belgium. Fruit beers feature in the remarkable range of beers available in that country.

Adding fruit beer is an ancient form of beer making. It stems from a time when brewers – often farmers – would add ingredients plucked from their fields to encourage a powerful fermentation as well as giving new depths of aroma and flavour to the finished products.

Cherries grow in abundance in parts of Belgium and they are the most widely used fruit in brewing. The varieties favoured by brewers are Schaarbeek and Gorsem that are picked late in the season when they are rich in sugar – similar to the “noble rot” grapes used by wine makers.

The best-known fruit beers are known as Fruit Lambics. They are the beers brewed by wild or spontaneous fermentation, allowing wild yeasts in the atmosphere to attack the malt and fruit and convert them to alcohol.

But a growing number of conventional brewers are now adding fruit to their beers. One of the leading breweries is Haacht, a family-owned business dating from 1898. It’s based in Boortmeerbeek, north of the great university city of Leuven.

In the 1990s the Haacht family bought back the 35 per cent share of the business that had been controlled by Belgium’s  biggest brewer Interbrew, best known for Stella Artois lager.

It was a wise move as Interbrew is now part of AB InBev, the world’s biggest brewer that also owns the massive Budweiser brand. The global giant has a track record of closing smaller breweries it has taken over and concentrating production at a few large industrial sites.

Free from that grim embrace, Haacht is now Belgium’s leading independent brewer and it’s building on its success by opening an office in Britain to increase sales here.

The draught versions of the Super 8 beers are available in outlets run by PubLove, conveniently based at major London train stations. They include the Exmouth Arms at Euston, the Green Man at Paddington, the Rose & Crown at London Bridge, the Steam Engine at Waterloo and White Ferry House at Victoria.

Matthew Langley, who runs Haacht UK, says: “Super Cherry and Super Peach are perfect summer beers and they are best enjoyed drunk chilled.”

Super Cherry is 3.4 per cent and is made with 25 per cent cherry juice. Super Peach is 3.7 per cent and has an addition of 25 per cent peach juice. Both beers are classified as wheat beers, as wheat is used alongside malted barley.

Don’t be put off by the thought of the fruit. The beers are not sweet as fermentation turns the sugars into alcohol. They are rich in flavour with tingling aromas of malt and fruit and they are cleansing and refreshing on the palate.