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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

Lots of breweries. Belgian Abbeys; Grimbergen, Affligem... Can anyone opine on how similar today's beers might taste to how they did "back in the day?" I'm sure some of the beers are based on the original recipes, and with the Reinheitsgebot, it's fairly plausible that all of the ingredients in the German beers in particular are very similar. But I'm not sure how the process might have changed over the years, or how the ingredients might taste different now than they did a century ago.

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The modern Trappist Belgium styles ("dubbel, tripel" etc.) were pretty much conceived by Westmalle in the 1920s-1930s. (https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/how-to-brew/a-brief-h...). Duvel is the template for the Belgium Golden Strong variety of beer -- that also was developed around the 1920s-1930s. (http://allaboutbeer.com/article/belgian-strong-golden-ale-2/)

So, no, the beers back then did not taste similar to today's beer. I would say that lambics might be the closest reflection to a style that is close to "back in the day". (http://lostbeers.com/lambic-the-real-story/) Even then, the link between today's lambic and the past only goes to the 1700s at best, and it's not clear how representative it is (at least what I can see from skimming the linked blog with Google Translate's help -- https://lambik1801.wordpress.com/).

There are also plenty of technical differences between brewing now and brewing then that would make for a different taste. It was probably a bit sweeter (less attenuation), possibly spiced different before the 1600s, possibly smoky until coal drying came into the norm, probably dark until pale malt was developed in the 19th century, probably had more room for sour notes (before pure yeast cultures were developed in the late 19th-early 20th century), etc.

Beers today taste nothing like they did back then. Microbiology aside (today's beer is made with pure-bred yeast, back then it was a wild mix of microbes), pale malt was not produced until the 17th or 18th centre, and the pale lager beers we nowadays associate with traditional German beer were developed as late as the 19th century.

It also would have been warm, flat, made with fire-dried malt (so smoky)[1], and possibly made with bittering agents other than hops, like gruit[2].

[1]https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/all-beer-tasted-like-s...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruit

I did a beer tour of Belgium and apparently all of their beers are very modern (at most ~100 years old), and the dates refer to either the first brewery in the area, or the abbey itself.

Not specific to Belgian/German beers, but I found this interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vo36v/durin...

Doesn't make a sense to include Grimbergen and Affligem there, these are both owned by the same multinational (Heineken) and neither is still being brewed on site in the abbey.

Everything swerner wrote, with a minor interjection: part of a brewery's identity is based on their water source (nuances in chemical composition have a certain influence on the brewing process), so a brewery that stood out due to their well or spring 500 years ago might still do so today. Or not at all, since the interaction between ground water and geology can change a lot in that timeframe.

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