I HAVE sat in stunning Brussels bars, snow falling beyond the church like stained glass windows, while a beer sommelier has brought me a list of some 40 different beers - and discussed with me the merits of which might go with roast wild boar, which with sole meuniere.

In Belgium they revere beer and treat it with the respect it deserves, as a skilful blending of malt, yeast and hops by a craft brewer into a drink offering a magnificent complexity of flavour and texture, not just "a pint of the usual" in the public bar.

This is also the country where beer truly meets wine as a sophisticated tipple to sip alongside the gourmet food Belgium is famous for, and all of this is apparent in The Great Beers of Belgium, the latest book from one of the UK's leading beer writers, Michael Jackson.

"No country has so many individualistic, idiosyncratic beers. Some are so unlike conventional beers as to shock the unwary consumer," he writes in his introduction.

Certainly Belgium has around 120 brewers producing about 500 different beers, and you will find the story of most of them in this book.

There are also chapters on each style - the lambic beers, wine-like in their impregnation with wild yeasts, the glorious Belgian fruit beers, especially the cherry and raspberry beers where the fruit is macerated in the beer before it is conditioned in barrels, the dark brown Flemish beers used for cooking beef carbonade, and my own favourites, the towering Trappist beers.

There are seven Trappist monasteries brewing beer, and six of them are in Belgium. At this time of year I love to indulge myself with the great Chimay, brewed at the Abbey of Notre-Dame and taking its name from the nearby town.

I love to have the great Chimay Grande Rserve with Christmas dinner; in its wine sized bottle with wired, foil wrapped champagne cork it is truly manna from heaven.

I have found the big bottles locally, and the smaller bottles of Chimay are readily available. But one fine beer you will find easily in local supermarkets for a sparkling Christmas aperitif is a wine sized, wire corked Hoegaarden.

It gets a big mention in Jackson's chapter on White Beers - beers with a high wheat content traditionally served cloudy because the sediment forms part of the drink.

*The Great Beers of Belgium by Michael Jackson is published by Prion price £20.

December 19, 2001 12:30