When it’s time to ring in the new year, most drinkers will probably raise a glass of Champagne, Prosecco, or some other sparkling wine. But if the French brewer Godefroy Baijot has his way, at least a few folks will be toasting to health and happiness in 2025 with his new Champagne-style beer, Gôde, which uses the same méthode traditionnelle as Champagne, though with 100 percent malted barley instead of grapes.
“On the palate, the first taste is Champagne,” he says. “The first sensation you get on your tongue is this finesse, this elegance, this creaminess, and that’s Champagne. And then comes the beer.”
The combination of two distinct flavor profiles might confuse some drinkers, as could its Champagne-like alcohol level of 11.5 percent. And it’s easy to get perplexed even further, since the category of true Champagne-style beers has been somewhat overshadowed by — and mixed up with — at least a couple of other styles over the years.
To clarify, Gôde is not a brut IPA. It is not a wine-beer hybrid, and it has nothing to do with Miller High Life’s claim to be “the Champagne of Beers.” Instead, it is one of a limited number of what was once often called “bière de Champagne,” though the term “bière brut” is now more common (and much less likely to run afoul of Champagne’s geographic strictures, at least in the E.U.), produced according to the time-consuming traditional method of French sparkling wine. With its rich effervescence and fancy packaging, bière brut feels like a natural fit for people who want to try something different the next time they christen a new yacht. But for a number of reasons, the style has never achieved widespread popularity.
Classical Production Methods
To hear Baijot tell the story, Gôde sounds like an inevitability. Seeking a career change a few years ago, the former homebrewer and his wife decided to move to her home region of French Flanders, next to the Belgian border, where a good bière blonde is easier to find than a decent blanc de blancs.
“I’m from Champagne. My family [has been] in the Champagne business for many generations,” he says. “We still have some vineyards and I used to work with my dad and my brother on the production side. Champagne is my earth. It is in my blood. But beer is more something I discovered.”
Gôde combines those two sides quite neatly. Made with pilsner malt from Belgium’s Castle Malting and Saaz-like hops from Flanders, Gôde takes its name both from its founder’s nickname and the name of the town in which it is brewed, Godewaersvelde, home to the Mont des Cats Trappist Monastery. Like many Belgian ales, Gôde undergoes primary fermentation with a saison yeast, using the same charismatic strain as the famed saison producer Brasserie Thiriez. The beer then goes through the steps of the traditional method used to produce certain sparkling wines: refermentation in the bottle with a Champagne yeast, aging on the lees for about six months, and finishing with very little residual sweetness and high carbonation. After that comes the process of remuage, with a riddling machine slowly moving the yeast into the neck of the bottle over the course of about four weeks.
The hardest part, Baijot says, is the dégorgement, or disgorging, which involves freezing the neck of the bottle and removing the yeast and other solids in a block of ice.
“The proteins in beer are not the same as in wine, so the disgorging is really the most difficult part,” he says. “You have a large amount of deposits, three or four times bigger than for Champagne. It’s really sticky. It was a big mess at the beginning.”
The trick, he says, lies in finding a way to control the massive volumes of foam that were initially billowing out during disgorging. He won’t go into any specifics, saying only that this part of his process has greatly improved since his very first — very messy — commercial batch in late 2022.
“The challenge is to define it as a separate category. I’d almost say there’s already a category for it, which is super saison. It’s just a super saison made with a special extra production technique.”
Connoisseurs appear to agree: In 2023, Gôde won a gold medal in its category at the Brussels Beer Challenge, the first such contest in which it was entered. On Untappd, it’s rocking a respectable 3.91, with 175 ratings at the time of writing.
A Challenging Style
That said, Gôde doesn’t have a huge amount of competition. The most famous takes on méthode traditionnelle beers come from two producers in Belgium. The Bosteels brewery makes its Deus Brut de Flandres, launched in 2003 and featured on NPR two years later in a tasting with beer writer Michael Jackson. The neighboring Malheur brewery currently lists two Champagne-style brews, Malheur Dark Brut and Malheur Bière Brut “World Classic,” which first appeared in 2002 and which the brewery claims to have been the world’s first bière brut. Other examples have come from a handful of craft producers in the U.S. as well as from Italy, where Birra Baladin has put out its well-regarded version, Metodo Classico.
Despite over 20 years of history, the category of bière brut that uses the traditional method of French sparkling wine remains small. In part, that might come from being overshadowed by other beer styles that approximate the same dry, effervescent flavor profile, according to Chris Cohen, who runs The Beer Scholar, an online beer training and education company.
“The challenge is to define it as a separate category,” he says. “I’d almost say there’s already a category for it, which is super saison. It’s just a super saison made with a special extra production technique.”
The lack of clear stylistic and production parameters isn’t helping. Versions made using the méthode traditionnelle are lumped onto the same shelf as variants like Gooische Bubbel, which use Champagne yeast but skip the processes of remuage and dégorgement. Versions like Birra del Borgo’s Caos and Side Project’s Blanc de Blancs add wine must or grapes to the mix, creating stylistic overlap with wine-beer hybrids and mixed-fermentation ales.
Credit: Gôde
Another challenge? Price. Baijot says that he’d love to sell his beer more affordably, but it’s simply not possible in light of the processes. Time is money, after all, and aging something on lees for six months before having it spend another month in remouage only adds to the expense, to say nothing of the manual labor of dégorgement. And naturally, luxury packaging plays a role, too. Because he can’t reference Champagne on the label in the E.U., Baijot opted for a Champagne bottle, textured label, and thick gold capsule in order to communicate the concept of high-end French bubbly without saying the name outright, all of which impacts the cost.
Even in gorgeous bottles, expensive beers are a tough sell, according to Christian Albertson, co-owner of the Monk’s Kettle in Oakland and San Rafael, Calif.
“My initial thought about why this style never took off is the price,” he says. “For the most part, there is a price bias in beer.”
Pairs Well With Food
With retail prices approaching $40 or $50, Gôde, Deus, and Malheur might be fairly expensive as far as beers go, but they’re relatively affordable when compared to most Champagnes. That might end up being the key to their survival.
With his background in the Champagne industry, Baijot has pushed to get Gôde on restaurant wine lists, where it has ended up as the only bottled beer at many outlets, he says.
“For me, I prefer wine with my main dish, but I think beer with cheese, that’s the best pairing.”
That also hints at how the style might work with food, as Neil Witte, a Master Cicerone and the owner of draft-beer consultancy Craft Quality Solutions, explains.
“This is very similar to Champagne, with some additional, subtle malt flavors,” he says. Many of the traditional food pairings for sparkling wine — things like oysters, caviar, and their often rich and fatty accompaniments — should work well with Champagne-style beers, with a possible twist or two. “These are Belgian beers at the end of the day, so you’re going to have that ester characteristic. There’s going to be a sense of minerality because of the flavor that you get from carbonation, that actual carbonic bite.”
For pairings, Baijot does see one difference between his beer and Champagne: the ability to accompany sweets, including chocolate, which can be a minefield for dry bubbly. That said, he thinks the high point is a great cheese, like the one made at Mont des Cats Monastery. “For me, I prefer wine with my main dish, but I think beer with cheese, that’s the best pairing,” he says.
Finding the perfect pairing is just one challenge. Actually finding a bottle is another. Witte says that he hasn’t seen many of the Old World bière brut classics like Deus and Malheur around in recent years, while several of the examples that were once produced by American craft makers are now listed as discontinued. It’s clearly a tough style to make and apparently also to sell, but it feels like bière brut has a lot of untapped potential in terms of food pairings, to say nothing of the date at the end of the calendar.
“I wish I had access to it, because now I want to drink one again,” Witte says. “New Year’s Eve would probably be the best time for it.”
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