Lambic Land

Lambic is a vestige of a time when all beer was fermented at the behest of nature. This method endures because the unique population of microorganisms around Brussels infuses the wort with flattering characteristics over time. According to brewing documents, lambics are essentially unchanged in the past 500 years. They are brewed from roughly one-third unmalted wheat and two-thirds very pale malted barley, use aged hops and, of course, employ wild fermentation.

True lambic is intimately brewed in Brussels, and the Pajottenland-Zennevallei to the west. This largely rural area is still home to many modest traditional breweries. Farmhouse brewers relied on farmers for wheat, barley and often labor. Lambic was, and still is, only brewed between October and May to optimize desired, and minimize undesirable, conditions and organisms. The seasonal tempering ensures that fermentation will progress at a subdued, steady rate. During this period farmers were less busy and more able to assist in the brewery, and compensated with beer. The fallow summer brewing season was actually part of the maturation cycle of the beer.

Etymologically, the word “lambic” itself is either a corruption of Lembeek (Flemish) or Lembecq (French), the lambic-brewing town located on the Senne river; alambic, an old type of distilling apparatus; or lambere, the Latin word meaning “to sip.” At any rate, this uncertainty would be in keeping with the somewhat mysterious and charming nature of Belgian brewing itself―part legend and part indisputable.

The Méthode Lambic

It would be easy to assume that a spontaneously fermented beer requires little shepherding, but lambic production requires as much skill and attention as beers made under the most tidy and modern conditions. Each step is somewhat unusual, entirely adherent to old methods, and rather involved.

Though the appellation for lambic has been somewhat loosely protected over the years, the past 45 years have seen a winnowing of the guidelines through periodic legislation. The salient criteria for lambics are that they must be made with at least 30 percent unmalted wheat, undergo spontaneous fermentation, have an original density of 11° Plato and be cooled naturally. To further protect those produced by traditional methods, the words Oude, Vieille or Vieux must be found on the label.

Lambic wort is produced from pale malted barley and locally sourced unmalted wheat. Wheat chaff, or kaf, may be used in the mash tun to aid in filtration. Both infusion and decoction are used to take the mash through its three-step schedule. The mash is quite turbid, due to the unmalted wheat, and the liquid portion is known as milk or slime. Some of this is pulled off, boiled and returned to the mash tun (decoction) to aid in conversion.

The wort is then drained into the kettle as usual, and aged hops (one to three years), known as surannés, are added when the boil commences. These hops have lost their bittering properties, but not the antiseptic potency. Hops from the Alost and Poperinghe regions of Belgium have largely been replaced by Kent Golding from England. The boil lasts from three to six hours, an eternity by usual brewing standards.

After boiling, the wort is not flash cooled, but instead embarks on the adventurous journey that sets lambic apart. The hot wort is pumped into shallow vats, known as coolships, in the highest part of the brewery, where it is allowed to cool naturally overnight and into the next morning. During this period the magical inoculation takes root. The windows are opened to the wafting air of the surrounding countryside and the native microscopic residents enter the wort.

Once cooled, the wort is drained into wooden casks to start fermentation, where yet another populace of inoculants awaits. The wood casks are oak or chestnut from the Porto, Sherry, Madeira or Cognac regions. Old casks are preferred because detrimental tannins have leached out. The casks are left open; the oozing foam forming a barrier to excessive oxidation and warding off additional micro-invasions.

The organisms responsible for fermentation and maturation are staggering, numbering between 80 and 100, with five main groups. The process is a multi-phase, months-long trip where different groups of yeast and bacteria take turns preying on the wort and microbiological residue. The first seven days are dominated by acetic acid-producing strains. They relinquish duties at one to two weeks to Saccharomyces types, fermenting the wort in normal fashion for the majority of wort attenuation.

Most beer drinkers fall into two broad categories: hop heads or malt mavens. We have all been taught from our earliest brewpub visit, order an IPA if you crave hop bitterness or go for a doppelbock if you want some sweet malt. There is now a growing subculture of beer fans that want to pucker up: call them the sour patch kids.

Oud bruin, Flanders red ale, lambic, gueuze, gose, saison and Berliner weisse are styles that have been around for centuries so how can these be considered “new?” How can something that emerged during the seventeenth century be your Next Beer? Start counting the barrels. The corners of some breweries are starting to look more like Napa wineries or Kentucky rackhouses.

“We’ve been looking for something that people tired of getting slammed with hops might enjoy,” says Ron Gansberg, the talented brewer at Cascade Brewing in Oregon, pointing out that his sour beers are a unique northwest style and don’t try to mimic Belgian sours. “The thing about these beers is they provide an intense sensory experience that is something other than hops.”

That “sensory experience” emerges in the form of an acidic sourness that comes from a spontaneous source of fermentation that in most beers would be considered a major defect. Under normal circumstances the presence of Lactobacillus, Brettanomyces or Pediococcus in a brewhouse is a cause for concern. But for makers of oud bruin and Flanders red ale these organisms are welcome guests.

Keith Schlabs, food and beverage director for the 13-location Flying Saucer Draught Emporium chain, says his locations are selling more of these beers as they become available from importers and craft brewers. Most of the time it is in the bottle, since these beers still don’t sell consistently well enough to move kegs at the peak of freshness.

“Sour ales require a hand selling process, because there is a bit of ‘shock factor’ to the flavor. It is difficult for some people to get their arms around the taste of these beers. Until recently only serious beer connoisseurs really sought them out,” says Schlabs. “There is a time and a place for these beers, and there are some pretty good ones on the market. We see people sharing bottles quite often.”

Of course, we ate the mussels and frites and we tasted the chocolates and waffles. But you know the real reason for our trip. We, too, had watched Michael Jackson’s “Beer Hunter” video in which he visited Father Theobold at Chimay, one of the country’s largest Trappist breweries.

At the time, America’s craft brewing revival was still young, and the only Belgian-style ales we’d enjoyed were from a limited bottle selection at a local store. We knew the trip would be an adventure, but had no idea it would uncork, so to speak, an entire new world.

We think it’s worth a trip by itself, but even if you’re visiting London or Paris, extend the trip and take the train to Belgium. You won’t regret it. Trust us on this one.

Belgium—the Source

In Brussels, we got a fascinating peek into brewing history at the Brasserie Cantillon and their Gueuze Museum. Since 1900, the Van Roy-Cantillon family has carried on the tradition—and art—of wild yeast brewing.

Yes. You read that correctly—wild yeast, the homebrewer’s worst nightmare. At Cantillon, they literally open the louvers after they fill wide, shallow cooling tuns with wort. Then they let Mother Nature take over. The result is lambic, one of the world’s oldest beer styles, and the aged, blended or flavored variants on lambic.

The self-guided tour explains lambic as you walk through the working brewery. Then comes the sampling. We were served from traditional stone pitchers in the intimate tasting room. Gueuze (aged lambic) and kriek (lambic flavored with cherries) are only the beginning. We got lucky, and were offered some faro, a lambic sweetened with sugar or caramel. It was the most popular drink in Brussels a hundred years ago.

Not into touring? That’s O.K. too. There’s an abundance of beer bars to visit. Imagine looking at a menu of 350 or 400 beers, all brewed in Belgium. And every one of them is served in a glass specially designed to match the beer. It’s reading material for beer lovers, and tasting fit for the gods.

Luckily, the fine art of brewing Belgian-style beer has spread to this side of the Atlantic. Not long after our first visit, America’s craft brewing community began to fill the void. For that we can thank intrepid brewers who stepped up to the plate with new beers, and took on the daunting task of educating consumers about these novel styles. A tip of the hat as well to grass-roots groups that successfully challenged silly laws about bottle sizes and alcohol content, making distribution possible in even more states.

Belgium—the Inspiration

Whether or not you’ve made it to Belgium, visiting local Belgian-style breweries is a great experience. Join us at a few of our favorites…

Brewery Ommegang in upstate New York is just a few miles away from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Now owned by the Belgian company Duvel Moortgat, the 136-acre property was, fittingly enough, a hops farm in a previous life. A century ago, 80 percent of all hops grown in the United States were cultivated within 40 miles of there.

The brewery can be a little tricky to find among the winding county roads, but your effort will be rewarded. As you approach the door to the reception area, notice the wrought-iron strap hinge in the form of a hop plant. It was hand-forged by a fourth generation Dutch blacksmith who lives nearby. It’s just one example of the handiwork inside.

If you take the tour, you’ll be led through a rambling two-winged building that’s reminiscent of an old French farmhouse. A highlight of the tour is the open fermenters, where you’ll learn how the yeast is skimmed off the top and re-used to ensure consistency. Afterwards you’ll be offered samples of the exquisite beer along with some complimentary Belgian snack items including pretzels, mustards and malted milk eggs. Your admission ticket can be applied as a credit towards a purchase.

The brewery produces five year-round brews: Rare Vos, Ommegang, Hennepin, Three Philosophers and Witte, along with seasonal brews for special occasions. The most recent offering was their 10th anniversary ale, Chocolate Indulgence

In 2004, when a local brewer named Ron Jeffries set up his own shop, we couldn’t have been happier. Along with his wife and partner Laurie, Ron opened Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales in Dexter, MI, a quiet village outside Ann Arbor with plenty of charm.

Buzz about the beer is anything but quiet however. Jolly Pumpkin won a gold medal at the 2004 Great American Beer Festival—with Ron’s first batch, no less. Oro de Calabaza won in the Belgian- and French-style category and, in 2005 won a bronze.

The name says a lot about Ron and his brewery. “Jolly Pumpkin” is the fun part of the name. Everyone loves Halloween, Ron told us, and the smiling jack-o’-lantern that symbolizes it. And yes the name, like the beer, brings a smile to our faces. But the rest of the name, “Artisan Ales,” is the serious part. Even the bottle labels, which feature the fantastic, almost surreal, work of the illustrator Adam Forman, are part of the brewery’s artisanal bent.

Ron open-ferments and then barrel-ages his beer, bottle-conditioning it before it leaves the brewery. There is no taproom, but there is a retail area. The decor, as you might expect, is fun. Ron’s GABF medals hang from a monkey-themed tapestry, not far from the plastic palm tree decked out in Christmas lights and the stuffed parrot in an open cage.

In addition to Oro de Calabaza, there are three year-round beers: La Roja, Bam Bière and Blanca Calabaza, along with a long list of seasonals. Production for 2007 was less than 1000 barrels, but Jolly Pumpkin finds its way into most states—perhaps yours if you look carefully.

Belgium—the Name

At New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, CO, husband-and-wife team Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan have been front and center in the American craft brew industry. Twenty years ago Jeff bicycled around Belgium with Michael Jackson’s book in tow. Jeff enjoyed what he found there so much that after returning home, he homebrewed Belgian-style beer.

In 1991, Jeff’s basement operation went commercial, and New Belgium has grown steadily. The brewery moved to new and larger quarters in 1995. Today it’s one of the largest craft brew operations in the country. It’s an environmentally friendly operation to boot; the electricity, for instance, is generated by wind power. It’s a sight to see: an aesthetically pleasing building, modern brewing equipment and row after row of oaken barrels.

Look carefully, and you’ll see just how far they’ve come. Jeff’s original brewing equipment sits in one corner of the brewhouse, dwarfed by one of the Steinecker brew kettles. Those first galvanized steel containers look like toys in comparison.

There are seven beers plus seasonals in the lineup. Fat Tire, the largest seller, is named after Jeff’s epiphany trip and the mountain bike he rode in Belgium.

Do all their beers fit into what some purists say are true Belgian-style guidelines? No. But the spirit of fruits and spices, wild yeast strains and oak barrels are predominant in all of them. Don’t forget, this is New Belgium. It’s a subtle, yet important, point.

New Belgium Brewing will always be special for us because that’s where we had the privilege of meeting Michael Jackson. We tasted Chimay from several different years that evening, while listening to Michael impart his wisdom and tell fascinating stories. And yes, one of them was about Father Theobold.

Land of Lambic

To say that lambics are brewed non-traditionally would be erroneous. It is quite the opposite, as no other beers are as ensconced in tradition. Unusual or extraordinary are adjectives that better befit the style. Lambics exhibit so many different personalities that they may be hard to embrace, but to the lambic smitten, they are beloved.

The historical and current stronghold of lambic is the city of Brussels, Belgium, and the area immediately to its west and south, Payottenland, where the landscape quickly becomes rural. To the south along the River Zenne is a small town named Lembeek, just one of several local villages or words that may be responsible for the beer’s moniker. Today’s lambics are little different, if at all, from their ancestors of 400 years ago. No other beer style can lay such bold claim. A look at the lambic method divulges its agrarian and anachronistic charm.

Bushels, Bugs and Barrels

Indigenous beers are, of course, made from locally available raw materials. In Payottenland, that would be a brew based on barley, but also a fair amount of wheat. Raw wheat is preferred over malted. Anywhere from 30 to 40 percent is used, with 30 percent being the decreed lower limit for the style. Malted barley offers a surfeit of the magical enzymes needed to convert the starches in the wheat. Due to the floury nature of the raw wheat in the grist, the lambic mash is turbid. This necessitates a method to break down the proteins and starches. The milky liquid is drawn off, boiled, and returned to the mashtun to raise the whole to an enzyme-friendly temperature. Mashing then continues in a more familiar way.

Even the simple act of boiling lambic wort is novel. It is boiled for 3 to 6 hours, at least twice that of other beers. This aids in breaking down the wort components. There is yet another deviation in the hopping of a lambic. Hops that have been aged for a couple or more years are added in staggering quantities. Over the aging period, the labile nature of hops causes them to lose almost all of the properties that make them desirable in most beers (bitterness, flavor and aroma), but retain those characteristics important to all beers (preservative and antioxidant). Little or no hop character is detected in a lambic. The wort has a gravity of between 12 and 14 degrees Plato, so, only in that respect, is it rather modest. This will produce a beer with 4.5 to 5.5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV).

The schematic gets especially divergent at this point. Lambic fermentation is the most interesting and significant step in the production, and the single most important contributor to the profile. The wort is cooled, not by induced chilling, but by the implementation of “cool ships.” These are large, shallow vessels in the attic of the brewery that are open to the environment. The wort is pumped to the cool ships, where it eventually equilibrates to match the ambient temperature. The configuration allows more surface area for heat dissipation and exposes more of the wort to the resident microflora.

While every other brewer on the planet would consider this practice tantamount to beericide, lambic brewers welcome the invaders. The microorganisms may come from hiding places within the brewery’s attic, or from the surrounding landscape via opened windows or louvers. As the native “bugs” are critical to the character of the beer, things are left pretty much undisturbed within the walls, lest the wonderful effect of nature be made imbalanced. Centuries of spontaneous fermentation have rendered the microfloral ecosystem so stable that the wort:organism symbiosis is incredibly consistent, with inevitable minute variations manifested in the brew. No two beers are alike. Both wild yeast and bacteria compose the amalgam. The most important macrobiota are spiders, which stand sentry against intruding flies.

When cool, the wort is transferred to wooden casks, which come from various wineries and house another sub-population of organisms within their pores. The variety of influential organisms is mind-boggling, sometimes numbering over 100! If this seems like haphazard brewing, it is not. Lambics are not made in the warm months because an abundance of unwanted bugs abounds at this time of year. Crazy as it may seem, they would spoil the beer.

An Acquired Taste

The initial fermentation in the barrel is allowed unfettered, such that the foam spews forth from the bunghole. After the primary fermentation has abated, the hole is sealed with a porous cloth that acts as a functional barrier. It is at this stage, which may last months, that a lambic undergoes its enchanting metamorphosis as the myriad organisms metabolize the wort. Yeast labors in the usual fashion, and the bacteria metabolize other components into a complex mosaic of flavors that are most often associated with wine. Two such bacteria, Brettanomyces bruxellensis and lambicus, are named for the city of Brussels and lambic beer, respectively. Some Brettanomyces strains even work on the residual unmalted wheat.

To say that the beer that arises from this mystical, yet controlled fermentation is complex would be a gross understatement. Lambics are an acquired taste. What initially may seem like a crass assault on the palate becomes a mélange of discernable flavors and aromas to a perceptive beer drinker. Lactobacillus strains produce a cidery and sour character. Brettanomyces strains contribute the musty, horse blanket, and earthy notes. Hints of fruit, vinegar and cheese are perceptible, too. All of this character with a minimal wisp of hops. Even the barrels contribute some woody and winey notes. Lambics are as dry as any beer. The color is gold to amber. Often they gain color and complexity with age, and they can age for a few years.

As recently as 1900, there were as many as 300 lambic breweries around Brussels; today there is a dozen. Straight lambic is most often served from a cask with virtually no carbonation. Some lambics are bottled. Cantillon makes a straight lambic, but most are blended from different vintages, an artisanal endeavor it its own right. In fact, blending is really what lambic is all about. The various blends give rise to different styles of lambic known as gueuze, fruit lambic, and faro, as well as simple “blended lambic.”

Gueuze

Gueuze—the most widely available member of the lambic family—is at first study simply a blend of old and young lambics. Gueuze differs from straight lambic in that it presents itself with a good measure of carbonation. The young lambic contains a bit of unfermented sugar, which is subsequently used to produce the carbonation in the bottle. The ratio is left up to the blender; anywhere from two to seven lambics are blended, and the corked bottles are laid down for a period of time to carbonate. One then gets all of the complexity of a lambic, with the pleasant effervescence of champagne.

Fruit Lambic

Fruit beers can be gimmicky, but not lambic versions. The most common fruit lambics are kriek (cherry), pêche (peach), and framboise (red raspberry), but macerated black cassis (black currant) and Muscat (grapes) also find their way into the maturing beer, kick-starting the fermentation. The amount of fruit added to the beer is quite liberal, on the order of 1 kg per 5 liters. The marriage is harmonious, the honeymoon lengthy and lusty, being anywhere from a few weeks to several months. The fruit is also a vehicle for more wild yeast, which further paints the palette of the beer. The preferred cherries are the sour Schaarbeek variety, though others are used extensively. The pit adds a touch of almond essence to the character.

Faro

Young, blended lambic sweetened with dark candi sugar is known as faro. The extra sugar requires that the blender pasteurize the brew to arrest fermentation and retain the sweetness. Though uncommon, several are still produced in Brussels and Payottenland, the most available being Faro Pertotale from Brouwerij Frank Boon.

Locating Lambic

To get an authentic dose of lambic culture, one need only to travel to Brussels and just another 10 miles beyond. Of the area’s dozen or so lambic venues, most are actual breweries, but a couple are just blenders who purchase lambic and ply their craft. They are mere miles apart. The numerous cafes in the area serve up the area’s offerings, too, with Le Bier Circus in Brussels a favorite of lambic seekers. The Cantillon Brewery is home to the Gueuze Museum, as well as being a world-class brewery. Other notables in the domain are Brouwerij Frank Boon, Belle-Vue, Drie Fonteinen, Girardin, Hanssens, Lindemans and Timmermans, among others.

Many of these breweries export their exquisite products. In the United States, the French Broad River Brewery in Asheville, NC, makes a well-aged and perfect example of a blended lambic. New Glarus Brewing in southern Wisconsin makes Raspberry Tart, spontaneously fermented in oak barrels, that is heaven in a glass.

It’s hard to say exactly how we got ourselves into this predicament, but technology, marketing, taxation and war have all played important roles. In this country, anti-German sentiments stirred up by WWI followed immediately by Prohibition shredded much of what could be termed “beer culture” in America. Lacking a richer social context, beer followed the model of soda pop, a commodity product in branded packaging. In this form it utterly dominated much of the 20th century.

But, like the desert, if you peer into the cracks and crevices, the beer scene teems with life. Specialty shelves in American liquor stores now bulge with a variety of characterful and delicious products. And when one squints into the depths of the past, a nearly psychedelic profusion of startling beers appears out of the mist.

Peering into the Past

As early as ancient Sumeria, 6,000 years ago, many varieties of beer existed. We have written references to strong, weak, sour, sparkling, aged, fresh, black, red and light (whose name, ebla, literally means “lessens the waist”) beers. A profusion of medicinal and culinary plants was available, but the ancient brewers, like modern ones, were reluctant to give up all their secrets. We will have to wait for some future chemical discovery to flesh out the recipes.

Early beer is unquestionably connected to religion, ritual and even spirituality. It is no fluke, for example, that one word for alcohol is “spirits.” Everywhere there was beer, a god—or more likely, goddess—was attributed to it. In Sumeria, Ninkasi was her name. In ancient Egypt, the legend of Sekhmet tells the story of how a beer saved the world of humans from destruction. The Goddess of Destruction was on one of her rampages, but a timely swig of a beer laced with the stupefying narcotic root, mandrake, calmed her rage. Never mind that this beer would have reeked of garlic; such psychoactive beers were widely used for ritual (and possibly medical) purposes in the ancient world.

In 1957, archaeologists digging in the region of ancient Phrygia (now Macedonia) broke through a shaft and discovered an intact royal burial, complete with the remains of a grand funerary feast. The occupant of the tomb turned out to be no less than King Midas himself. The profusion of elaborate ware used for the drink attested to its central role in the ceremony.

Traces of food and drink recovered from these ancient containers remained mute for decades. Then, in 1997, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, Patrick McGovern, submitted some of the scrapings to chromatographic analysis. Chemical markers for honey, grapes and malt were all in evidence, the makings of a strange and wonderful beverage.

McGovern teamed up with Dogfish Head Brewery’s Sam Calagione to produce a beer to serve at a celebratory dinner recreating the king’s funeral banquet. The resulting beer was such a success that Dogfish Head continued to produce it as a specialty product. A pale orangish gold, with a perfumy nose of aromatic grapes, honey and a wisp of exotic saffron, Midas Touch has a delicate crèmant champagne quality.

What you failed to appreciate is that too many women equate the word “beer” with god-awful bland, fizzy, yellow stuff. You blew it because you didn’t mystify her, plus you offered her the worst thing imaginable. Women want class, and “beer,” as we all know, has no class.

Women are prone to like wine. And what beer group is closest to wine? Think! A hint: art students are forced to draw horrible still lifes of it. Another: it starts with an f.

Fruit beer?

Got it in one!

Do It with Class

Try this the next time you’re down at the pub on your regular stool at the bar, and Salma Hayek—yes, the Mexican-born actress of incomparable beauty—walks in.

Both men and women drop their jaws. A barracuda strikes, but she unmans him with a glance. Looking about, she spots the only empty seat in the joint, which just happens to be beside you. Whoa!

Turn and smile. Don’t glance down, even for a second, at her, ahem—just don’t look down! And, for heaven’s sake, ditch your half-finished pint of whatever. Slide it aside as though it were someone else’s.

You must subtly baffle her and sow curiosity. Ask which is her favorite: cherries, peaches, or raspberries. Perhaps Salma replies, “Raspberries.” She’s hooked but doesn’t know it yet. She’s both intrigued and confused by your question because she expected a pick-up line.

Now, gently reel her in by planting a seed of expectation.

Take charge. Turn to the beertender and order a corked bottle of framboise lambic and two proper glasses. Sniff the cork, as though it were from a wine bottle. Then pour for both of you. Women love shared experiences. Offer her the first glass, but don’t blow it by gulping down half of your glass. Rather, act the connoisseur. Subtly sniff round the rim, then pronounce it an excellent vintage. Let it flow from there.

See, women are attracted to men who are experts on stuff other than repairing toilets and breaking things. Play your fruit right, and you might usher out Salma Hayek on your arm. The rest is up to you.

Fruited Beer

Let’s examine several constituent members that comprise a group of beers called fruit beer, or fruited beer, whichever you prefer.

So far (my research continues), I’ve identified 18 styles in the group, which places it third after the bock and the wheat groups, each with 22 styles.

There are several points to remember when discussing fruited beer. First, the term fruit—like cats, dogs, and horses—defines a group. We must look within to see all the species—apricot, boysenberry, cherry, et al. Second, each species has its own distinct characteristics that, when the species is used in beer, makes each beer different. Out of these differences spring individual beer styles. The Belgians are quite right to classify each beer made with a different fruit as its own style. Third, we must also include in the stylistic mix the base beer to which fruit is added. For example, gueuze, lambic, and old brune (brown) are three Belgian styles. When cherries are added to each, the result is not cherry fruit beer, but cherry gueuze, cherry lambic, and cherry old brune.

Furthermore, the number of styles within the group will continue to grow as adventurous craft brewers experiment with other fruit—currants (red and black), elderberries, gooseberries and blueberries come to mind. Apples and oranges have recently been used with good results. The total number of combinations of base beers and fruit is staggering.

The fruited beer group currently consists of Belgian fruited beers based on old brown ale, gueuze and lambic; North American variants of Belgian styles; fruited lager; North American fruited porter and stout, first developed by homebrewers (thank you!); fruited wheat beer; and generic North American fruit beer.

Of particular interest are the Belgian substyles, North American variants, and generic North American fruited beer.

Lambics—whether straight lambics, faro, gueuze or fruit based—are a Belgian specialty. They’re beers produced only in one particular area of Belgium, the Senne River Valley, south and west of Brussels. Most important of all, they’re beers that are spontaneously fermented by the airborne wild yeasts and bacteria present in this valley and nowhere else on the face of the Earth.

Lambic is more than an appellation. It’s a work of nature—and of nature specific to only one spot on the globe.

It’s safe to say that traditional lambic—real lambic, if you will—is an acquired taste, as perhaps are all wonderful new flavors in food and drink. It’s equally true to say that all other lambics—the non-traditional lambics that are not necessarily mass-produced, but produced for the masses—are most certainly not an acquired taste. If you like Coca-Cola, you’ll like these lambics.

That’s not to say that they taste like Coke. Certainly not. But many lambics are sweetened almost as much as Coke. This is a great lament of lambic makers, both the died-in-the-wool traditional producers, who may use the Flemish or French equivalent of an English four-letter word to describe sweetened lambics, and also of those who sweeten their beers.

Almost each and every lambic producer bemoans the fact that the current generation demands sweet lambics, if they’ll drink a lambic at all. Heard over and again, is: “What can we do? We now have at least two generations raised on Coke and other sweet drinks. If we make only traditional lambics, they won’t drink them. So we sweeten them, and we have sales.”

And how can one blame them? They must stay in business. Food on the table, a roof over the head, clothes on the back and all that. At least two current lambic brewers are responsible to corporate owners, who in turn are responsible to shareholders. A lambic maker’s gotta do what a lambic maker’s gotta do.

However, traditional lambic—unsweetened and unpasteurized—is considered the top of the craft. All the producers agree with this. And there are several lambic makers who refuse to give in to the tastes of the masses. A few are purists and make lambics the old way. These traditional lambics are wonderful—if you’ve acquired the taste, of course.

At the same time, by no means discount the lambic makers who sweeten their beers for popular appeal and increased sales. Each of these producers makes at least one—and often several—traditional lambics. For these brewers, it’s a point of pride and honor to include the classics in their portfolio.

The Senne River Valley

The lambic-producing area of Belgium through which the Senne passes is called the Payottenland and is part of Flemish Brabant. A highway named the Ring surrounds Brussels and marks a clear line of demarcation. City becomes country almost immediately, unlike the slow blending-in of suburbs found in many US cities. The Payottenland is flat farmland, with the occasional gently rolling hill. It’s land that has historically provided food and drink for the citizens of Brussels.

The Senne starts north of Brussels, then passes underneath the city, reappearing to the southwest as a small river. In times past, many lambic brewers could be found on both sides of the Senne, both in Brussels and in the countryside. There were even lambic brewers on the eastern side of the city, but these have long since disappeared. In 1900, there were at least 300 lambic makers in the region. Today, only 12 remain. One is in Brussels, on the western edge of the city. The others are in the countryside. Ten of these are brewers; two are blenders.

Making Lambics

Spontaneous fermentation is the major difference between lambic and other styles of beer. Another important difference is that lambics are wheat beers using unmalted wheat, rather than the malted wheat found in German and American wheat beers. Lambics use anywhere from 30 to 40 percent wheat, with the remaining grain being malted barley.

Another difference between lambic and traditional beer production is the mash method employed, the process by which the grains are steeped in hot water before the boil. No English-style infusion or German-style decoction mash for lambics. These beers utilize a turbid mash, in which a milky-white froth caused by the unmalted wheat is pulled off the top and heated separately before being added back at the end of the process.

After the brewer drains the sweet liquid created by the mash and rinses the grains, a lambic beer undergoes a three- to six-hour boil, much longer than for other beers. Added to the boil are hops, as in beer making all over the world, but here the lambic maker takes another twist. He uses massive quantities of aged hops, often three years old. No fresh aromatic hops for these beers. The old hops retain the necessary preservative qualities, but they impart no bitterness, aromas or flavors. There are plenty of those to fill the bill during the fermentation and aging periods.

At the end of the boil, the wort, as it is now called, is pumped into coolships—broad, shallow open vessels of copper or stainless steel—on the top floor of the brewery, which is often an attic or gable. The windows are opened and perhaps louvered vents are also opened in the roof. Here, overnight, the wort has maximum exposure to the air and is inoculated with the yeasts and bacteria unique to the Senne River Valley: the yeasts Brettanomyces bruxellensis and lambicus, saccharomyces (cerevisiae, globosus, dairenis, pediococcus, suvarun bayanus), candida, torpulpis, hansenula, kloeckera, and bacteria (entero, lactic acid, acetic acid).