‘Grains Gone Wild!’ Brussels

When it was founded in 1900, the Cantillon Brewery was just one of hundreds of breweries in the capital of Belgium churning out the stanky, wild yeast beers that Belgium’s become famous for. Today it’s the last traditional brewery in Brussels.
So on a recent sojourn through England, France and the Netherlands (guzzling pints and quizzing beer store owners along the way of course, more of that to come) we had to pull off in Brussels to see the white pearly gates where our favorite sour beers come from. We were not let down.

But first a quick beer geek refresher: What are we talking about when we talk about lambics?

Americans know the style best in the form of Lindeman’s, a line of sweet-and-sour beers in pretty, pastoral lollipop flavors (apple, raspberry, cherry, and they’re great for popsicles you’re recall). So it’s tempting to think of them as fruit beers. But the definition is actually simple. Lambics are natural beer. Lambics are brewed from traditional ingredients like wheat, malted barley and hops. The big difference is that the brewers rather than inject selected yeast strains into the mix simply let nature do its thing, by sitting it in open vats that collect the natural yeast from the air.
So lambics are spontaneously fermented beers, which give it a complex and often radically tart taste. The fruit twist is just to make many of them more palatable. Geuze, the other notoriously mysterious Belgian beer, is simply a mixture or compound of selected lambics of different vintages. The Cantillon geuze for instance, is a 1-yar lambic, 2-year lambic and 3-year lambic blended.

Now, Cantillon’s beers have been Hot Knives favorites for a while. Still, the words “spontaneously fermented” printed on the label did not paint a very detailed picture of where this stuff was flowing from. Do these dudes just sit the stuff in buckets in some pastoral Belgian farm? Or are they beer scientists measuring bacteria levels in Petri dishes? We were dying to see the open vats whose loins have birthed many a long night drinking session.
Lucky for us (and anyone backpacking in Europe) the brewery is in a residential neighborhood 10 minutes from the central train station, and is open 9-5 most days except Sunday.
Unassuming outside, the place is even more charming inside. Stacks of clean, empty glass bottles line one side of the hallways. Filled and labeled bottles sit aging on the other. Tiny chalkboards propped up next to each batch remind the brewers how long they’ve been sitting there, if the dust isn’t enough. In fact, cobwebs crisscross everything (the brewery lets spiders keep other critters away from its vast open tanks.)
After taking in a wall of photos that describes the mashing process – where crushed cereals are cooked and hopped for flavor – we meandered back to the hop boilers where the magic of booze creation actually happens. One tidbit we learned along the way: Cantillon uses three times the hop quantities of a normal Euro beer for conservation purposes, so they use mostly dried hops that have been aged for three years in their granary, for a less bitter taste.

After cooking the wheat, malted barley and hops to extract all the sugars, they pull the stuff up to the brewery’s attic where it sits in what’s called a cooling tun, using open windows and lots of surface area to chill it out. The wort sits here overnight grabbing natural fauna from the neighborhood, about 87 different micro-organisms (among them, the famed Brettanomyces bruxellensis and Brettanomyces lambicus).
Now, the wort is pumped into oak and chestnut barrels and aged for months. The first 3 days are the most violent, with the wild yeast and sugar literally slam-dancing inside, and can actually make casks explode like bombs. So, the brewery actually leaves a hole in the side of each barrel and lets it overflow with the carbonation. When it subsides during the first week, they stuff it with a cork.

A year later, it gets filtered and bottled as a pure lambic. Or it might get muddled with local cherries, apricots, or raspberries. Or, if it’s especially barnyardy and kick-ass, it could be picked to be one layer in an expensive geuze. And if it’s really lucky, it’ll then get shipped in a crate to America, where we can exchange a 20-dollar bill for it. We like to think we saw a bottle lining the hallways that will one day end up in our beer cave.
Speaking of price tag, we saw a new reason why we will never begrudge spending $20 on a Cantillon beer, ever. Not only does the brewery lose 20% of their beer sticking to the traditional method (all that violent, carbo barrel eruptions are BEER after all), the brewery is still family run after 99 years. In fact, this year is their centennial! That felt like the most momentous thing we’d heard of while walking the grounds. No better reason to go seek a Cantillon Iris or a Lou Pepe lambic, two of our obsessions.

Better yet, buy yourself a ticket to Brussels.