Sometimes I reflect back on the early days of my journey into the life of a beer geek (my journey into the brew, you might say) and I miss the revelatory experiences. Everything was so new and excitement took hold of me in a way that only comes along a few times in life. I felt so strongly that this was what I was meant to do with my life. Those early moments of revelation still stand out so clearly in my mind. I remember some of those early beers better than what I drank last week. They meant something that most beers now, thousands later, just can’t hope to match. I’ll never have my first Orval or Hop 15 again.
During my recent trip to Belgium, I hustled down to Chez Moeder Lambic as soon as we checked into our hotel in Brussels. It was getting dark by the time we got into town and the Grand Place was filled with hundreds of tourists treating the cobblestones like a grassy field for an evening picnic. My dad and I took a seat at the Moeder bar and perused the draught list. There are a handful of things that make Chez Moeder Lambic one of the greatest beer bars in the world, one of which being that they have six hand pumps of lambic at any given time, including several from Cantillon, which is just a short walk down the street.
I ordered a Cantillon Kriekenlambic and promptly felt my head explode. These are the moments that you chase but seldom capture. Fruit lambic is so present that it’s easy to take for granted. I think Timmermans Kriek was actually the first “lambic” that I ever had way back when I was first getting into beer, and Lindemans Framboise pretty much makes its way to nearly every random store in this country. These sweet beers tasting of fruit syrup and calling themselves “lambic” hint at the possibility of a symbiosis between fruit and beer that they fail to deliver on time and time again. I’ve had many fruit lambics between that questionable Timmermans and this unquestionably great Cantillon, but never has a beverage affected me quite like this one did. I’d actually had a draught Cantillon Kriek earlier in the day at De Heeren van Liedekercke – another wonderful beer-centric restaurant in the Brussels suburbs – but even that paled in comparison to this beer. Apparently, Cantillon makes a special draught kriek for Moeder that has more cherries and a special blend of sweet and sour varieties. From its saturated red color to its seamless synergy of signature Cantillon Brettanomyces earthy, lemony funk, and HD-quality sweet-sour cherry flavor, this was a perfect expression of what fruit lambic can be. Finding a fruit lambic this fresh and vibrantly fruit-forward in the U.S. is nearly impossible. In Brussels, it’s the way of life.
Lambic is a beer that time forgot. In the early 20th century pure cultured yeast, the newfangled invention out of Denmark, was sweeping the continent. In it’s wake, most beer styles that had a mix of wild yeast and bacteria in them either died out or changed into cleaner, acid-deficient versions of their former selves. Some lambic brewers probably saw the writing on thewall and moved on to brewing with cultured yeast, leaving lambic behind. Most lambic brewers simply went out of business as interest in the style waned. Others like Lindemans chased the evolving palate of the drinking public with syrupy, pasteurized fruit beers based on lambic but lacking its defining character. Many drinkers came to know this adulterated offspring as the only lambic they’d ever experience. But some lambic brewers carried traditional methods on through the lean years, with Cantillon perhaps their most steadfast champion.
Lambic disrupts the modern beer paradigm because it is the last beer style to never have accepted the domain of brewer as biological master. Instead of fermenting beer by adding yeast grown in a lab from a single genetically identical colony, lambic brewers let naturally occurring yeast and bacteria in the environment do the work. By letting their wort cool in shallow open copper vessels called coolships, wild yeast and bacteria living in and around the brewery are able to fall in and begin a slow fermentation that lasts from several months in the case of young lambic, to three years for fully mature old lambic. Perfectly brewed and aged lambic doesn’t just happen—it’s the result of generations of knowledge passed down from brewer to brewer, often father to son. The handful of traditional lambic brewers left in and around Brussels are the last to carry on this vestige of pre-biology brewing. American brewers have often approximated this fermentation by making sour ales with a mix of Brettanomyces and bacteria from a lab, but the effect of spontaneous inoculation leads to a complexity and array of micro organisms that can never be recreated from a lab.
Using only one base beer, brewed with a blend of barley malt, raw wheat, and aged hops, lambic brewers and blenders go on to create a whole spectrum of beers. The most popular lambic is created by blending different aged lambics (often one, two, and three year old barrels) into gueuze (or geuze in Flemish instead of French), which then conditions in the bottle to result in a nearly clear, sparkling beverage with a dry, acidic flavor and complex aroma often described as akin to grapefruit skin and barnyard, though every brewer has a unique signature from the microflora unique to their brewhouse and neighborhood air. More rarely, you can try single batches or barrels of lambic unblended, which have singular and sometimes challenging flavor profiles. Young lambics of under a year are often still turbid and slightly sweet, while old lambics up to three years get more acidic, funky, and dry as they increase in age. Unblended lambic is usually only found on draught around Brussels, but some brewers will bottle it on occasion, such as the Broucsella 1900 Crand Cru from Cantillon, which is lambic that has aged for three years and is of the highest quality in the brewery.
Alternately, lambic brewers can blend their base beer with dark candi sugar syrup to create faro, which has to be either pasteurized or served quickly on draught so that the sugar does not ferment and cause the serving vessel to explode. Pasteurized faro from the more industrial brewers can be sickly sweet, but draught faro from the traditional brewers is just sweet enough to cut the acidity of a particularly sour barrel and has a balance similar to a good lemonade, making it very refreshing on a hot Brussels afternoon with no air conditioning.
As I already mentioned, fruit and lambic can come together to form an otherworldly combination of flavor and aroma. I find many fruit beers taste flat and flabby on the palate due to a lack of acid. Acid is a key flavor profile in most of the fruit that brewers put in beer and getting fruit flavor in a beverage that can’t deliver enough acid fails to deliver the whole package of fruit character. Lambic, and sour beer styles in general, fix this issue by adding that acid back from the fermentation through lactic acid bacteria such as Lactobacillus and Pediococcus. Add in the complex array of esters and phenols that Brettanomyces contributes to thearoma and it’s no wonder that lambic so strongly dominates the traditional fruit beer category. Sour cherries have typically beenthe most popular option for lambic brewers due to their tart flavor, deep red color, ease of handling, and availability, but other fruits such as grapes, raspberries, plums, apricots, blueberries, and even Swedish cloudberries have been used as well.
As any sour-lover that has made the pilgrimage will tell you, visiting Cantillon is one of the pillars of beer-geekdom. Cantillon has worked to preserve the history and tradition of lambic and gueuze by opening the brewery to the public as a museum and retaining as much of the original equipment and methods as possible. Wandering through the coolship room, barrel storage cellars, and massive stacks of conditioning bottles is a journey back in time. They even retain the pulp filter that ever other brewery replaced decades ago. Modern craft brewing has brought us a new spectrum of amazing beers now being produced all over the world, but Cantillon gives you a window into a past where brewers in one region made beer like nobody else in the world. With the information age upon us, it’s hard to imagine this kind of tradition developing again anywhere else.
There has been some debate over the last several years (and probably more) over whether you can brew lambic outside of the Senne Valley around Brussels. It has tended to boil down to two schools of thought: lambic is either a geographic definition like Champaign, or a style like IPA. For a long time, brewers thought that because the natural environment was so key to the flavor of lambic, you couldn’t make it outside of its traditional home. This theory was proven at least somewhat false when it was discovered that most of the micro organisms that ferment lambic exist almost everywhere in the world. Breweries like Russian River and Allagash have proven that with the right process, you came make a lambic-like beer in different locations and climates, but they have stopped short of calling their beer lambic. Their general consensus seems to be that they don’t call their beer lambic simply out of friendship and respect for the traditional lambic brewers who feel that reserving the lambic name for beers brewed in their native region and to traditional methods is the best was to preserve the tradition that they have fought so hard for over the years. So whether we call it spontaneously fermented beer, coolship beer, or something else we can come up with, if we are carrying on and expanding upon the rich tradition of lambic brewing, it’s a win for beer drinkers everywhere.