Alex Greig, founder of Fuggles Beer Café, explores the beers of this world-renowned brewery…
Founder Luc Vermeersch started what became De Leite all the way back in 1997. I love finding new, interesting and not often seen Belgian breweries, and having drunk their beer in Belgium on occasion, it’s great to finally share this fantastic brewery with everyone.
Having always been interested in brewing, baking and anything ‘crafty’, Luc started out with a small, 30-litre brewing kit (alongside a bread oven located in his garden).
Some 10 years later and after lots of time honing his skills on this tiny kit, the brewery became a reality on a commercial scale in 2008, when De Leite was officially born.
Over the coming years, the brewery expanded and grew, adding more capacity and better kit, and after several years they started to produce sour – or ‘Cuvee’ – beers after the purchase of their first oak wine barrels. Since then their beers – such as Cuvee Soeur’Ise – have become internationally renowned.
Moving forward, the brewery is focused on becoming carbon neutral and is undergoing improvements to help them achieve that goal – from solar panels to using rainwater for beer production.
Located in a town called Oostkamp, just south of Bruges, the brewery offers tours and tastings (if you happen to be in the area). If you can’t make it, I highly recommend checking out some of the beer and food pairings on their website. Let me know how you get on!
Here are my picks from our recent shipment from De Leite:
Cuvee Soeur’ise – To make this beer they age their Enfant Terriple Triple on sour cherries for six months. This allows the beer to naturally ‘sour’. It then spends another year in the French oak barrels, which softens and matures the beer. The result is a wonderfully fruity and refreshing beer, with a fun tartness to it and depth of flavour thanks to the oak ageing.
Femme Fatale – This Belgian Amber ale, at 6.5%, has some really nice fruity notes, balanced out by the complex malts, which offers a hint of spice finished off with some decent bitterness.
Enfant Terriple – Brewed in the Triple style and at 8.2% this beer is blonde in colour, with a lingering bitterness, all made a bit more moreish by the aroma (think apricots and orangey citrus) and the subtle citrus flavour, which is well-matched by the complexity of the malts.
Ma, Mere Speciale – I love a Belgian IPA – it’s a great mix of two of my favourite styles. You get the hoppiness, bitterness and fruity notes from an IPA combined with the fun, fruity compounds of Belgian ale yeast. At 6% it hits all the right notes.
