Belgian beers are insidious. Start with a recipe for a delcious beer of 5.5% abv, then add enough sugar to make it 7%. The result is the most drinkable 7% abv in the universe. The truth is that I'll probably never be impressed by Belgian beers as a style any more than I'm impressed by any other style. What really impresses from a brewer is the skill of making the same great beer over and over, not the skill of assembling good ingredients and knowing what you're doing with them to have, once finished, a good beer.

Here's the scheme for a belgian beer: take some pils malt and (if desired) add judicious amounts of crystal, aromatic and some darker base malts and (for the darker varieties) conservative amounts of chocolate malt to make a beer of gravity 10 to 20 less than your desired final gravity. Add sugars (light for light, dark for darker) to make up the gravity. Bitter gently, about 4 IBU for every 10 points of gravity. Ferment with belgian yeast. To ensure that the yeast doesn't go too wild, keep the fermentation around 70 the whole time.

That's it.

My suspicion is that making belgian beer really well at home is more difficult than making other styles because fermentation character is what the beer is all about and controling fermentation requires knowlege and aparatus that the homebrewer doesn't use for other beers. On the other hand, we probably should use such knowledge for brewing other beers, and the aparatus for controling it wouldn't be a bad addition. In an ideal world, I'd live in a place that had an average daily temperature below that of ale fermentation and I'd use that to my advantage in beer after beer.