Hoegaarden

Witbier — the hazy Belgian wheat beer spiced with coriander and orange peel — very nearly went extinct. Hoegaarden is the beer that brought the whole style back, named for the small Flemish village that had brewed white beer since 1445.

By the 1950s the village's last witbier brewery had closed and the tradition looked finished. Then a local milkman named Pierre Celis, who had helped out at that brewery as a young man, started brewing the old beer himself in the 1960s, working out of his hayloft. He didn't just rescue a recipe; he resurrected a style now imitated on every continent.

AB InBev owns the brand today, and in the mid-2000s it tried moving production out of the village — then reversed course amid protest and brewing headaches, so witbier is still made in Hoegaarden. The chunky hexagonal glass is part of the ritual; the lemon slice, the village will tell you, is not.

Pours a milky, pale-lemon haze under a pillowy white head. Orange peel and coriander lead the nose; the sip is light, tangy, and faintly creamy, closing with a citrus snap instead of bitterness. At 4.9% it is a warm-afternoon beer — and the cloudiness is suspended wheat and yeast, not a flaw but the whole idea.