Beer of the Week – Alexander Keith’s Premium White

A dozen or so years ago, I hit a big milestone along my road to beer geekdom. I was drinking mainly microbrews at the time, but they were still mostly golden lagers or light ales, not too far removed from mainstream suds. But then I read a review of a new beer from Brick called Celis White which was brewed using wheat, coriander and dried orange peel in addition to the typical malt and hops.

Intrigued, I made a special trip to one of the few Beer Store locations that was carrying the beer (Queen's Quay, if I recall correctly), and proceeded to have my mind blown by what I found in the bottles. It was obviously beer, and a very good one, but it had aromas and flavours that I'd never experienced in a beer before. I'd discovered that there was much more to beer beyond the small handful of styles I'd tried up to that point, and I soon got the itch to try as many of them as possible.

It wasn't until a couple of years later, around the time that Brick stopped brewing Celis White, that I learned a bit more about this mysterious and delicious beer that had made such an impact on me. It ended up that Celis was the name of a brewery in Austin, Texas where the beer was originally created, and that Brick had licensed the rights to brew it in Ontario. And Celis, the brewery, was founded by Pierre Celis, a former milkman who had saved the Belgian wheat beer style from extinction when he started brewing a beer called Hoegaarden in the Belgian town of the same name back in 1966.

In the decade or so since then, Belgian-style wheat beer (also known varyingly as witbier, white beer or bière blanche) has become one the most popular specialty beer styles in North America. Hoegaarden is a near-ubiquitous import option at bars and restaurants, Blanche de Chambly is one of the biggest brands for Quebec's Unibroue, and south of the border, Coors Blue Moon is growing in market share year after year while sales of more mainstream Coors brands are stagnant or falling. It's becoming so popular, in fact, that more and more craft breweries across the States have been launching white beers of their own in hopes of riding Blue Moon's rapidly increasing coattails.

Here in Canada, the biggest evidence of the style's popularity may be the 2007 addition of a witbier to the Rickard's line-up of pseudo-craft beers brewed by Molson. If the rumours are true, it's essentially a very slightly tweaked version of Blue Moon, which has been brewed at the Molson plant in Montreal since soon after the Molson-Coors merger in 2005. But regardless of its pedigree, Rickard's White is now almost as common a sight on tap handles as Hoegaarden.

Meanwhile, the folks at Labatt have been spending the last few years building up their Alexander Keith's brand to be their answer to Rickards. Expanding beyond the original Keith's IPA, the Keith's family now includes Keith's Honey Brown, Keith's Red, Keith's Stags Head Stout, and as of a couple of weeks ago, Keith's Premium White (LCBO 127068 - $2.25/473 mL can).

From a market share perspective, the addition of a new white ale to the Labatt portfolio seems like an odd choice given that AmBev, the multinational parent company of Labatt, also owns Hoegaarden, one of the brands most likely to lose sales to the newcomer. But I've never claimed to be an expert on beer marketing, just a curious and occasionally baffled observer. So I'll leave the business analysis to the experts, and just deal with the drinking side of things.

Poured from a fittingly white can (A witbier in a can, eh? That might be a first for me...), it has a murky golden-orange colour (too dark for the style) with no head despite a vigorous pour. The aroma is very mild with notes of toasted wheat, artificial orange and a hint of spice. On the tongue, it's thin and limp, with a fleeting hint of citrus in the front of the flavour, followed by a nondescript spiciness in the middle, and a short, quick finish. A burp brings forth unpleasant flavours of stale malt and wet cardboard, making me dread my next mouthful. I don't dump beer very often, but 2/3rds of this stuff goes down the drain.

Perhaps I'm naïve, but I actually expected more from this beer. While not an exemplary example of the style, Rickard's White is actually a pleasant enough beer that is usually my quaff of choice when hitting my local sports bar for cheap wing night, and I thought Labatt/Keith's would at least come close to that level. I suppose it's technically closer to being on style than their so-called IPA, but compared to benchmarks like Hoegaarden and Celis White, it's an extremely poor example of a Belgian white beer.

Scratch that: It's an extremely poor example of a beer, period.