The Celebrator Beer News - June/July 2000

Long Live Lambic by Stephen Beaumont

Like many industries these days, the beer business seems to be getting simultaneously larger and smaller. On one hand, companies like South African Breweries, Heineken and Interbrew are doing their best to expand by swallowing up their international competitors. On the other hand, breweries opening their doors for the first time in the 21st century are much more likely to be brewpubs or tiny, local operations than regional, national or international brewing concerns.

A by-product of this odd state of affairs is that some traditional beer styles have become snarled in the middle and their futures thrown into jeopardy. I'm thinking about that wonderfully odd and quirky beer of Belgium, lambic.

As aficionados well know, lambics are wheat beers made only in a certain part of northern Belgium, the area roughly surrounding the Zenne river. What makes lambic unique is that it is the only commercially produced style of beer in the world fermented spontaneously by wild yeasts.

To make a lambic, the brewer mashes and brews a wort in much the same manner as would any other brewer -- save for the fact that many of them work with ancient brewing equipment -- and then transfers the liquid to a fermenter best described as a large wading pool. The beer is left overnight to cool and become inoculated by whatever wild yeasts float in through the windows left open to facilitate the process. By morning, fermentation will be in full force.

Once the yeasts have calmed a bit, lambics are typically transferred into wooden casks where they are left to further develop and mature for up to three years. As young beers, they will be sold to local cafes as straight lambics. When slightly older, they will be blended and bottled with beers one to three years of age to produce gueuze, or they will be dosed with whole fruit and left to referment and further age to make kriek (cherry), framboise (raspberry) or other fruit lambics.

As beers for the cognoscenti, they are among the most complex and intriguing around. As popular products, they are duds.

For years now I have been traveling to Belgium and hearing of the perilous future of lambic. Three years ago, Jean-Pierre van Roy, owner and brewer at the Brussels lambic brewery, Brasserie Cantillon, told me that he feared for the future of his brewery and the lambic style. Around the same time, Jean Hanssens, a famed blender of lambics, was busy trying to convince his offspring not to follow him into the family business, so worried was he about the stability of the lambic marketplace. For a lambic lover like myself, it was a troubling time.

But there is good news. On a very recent visit to Belgium, I was delighted to find that lambic now appears to have turned the corner and is actually rebounding in popularity, if not with the Belgian people, then definitely in export markets. Two key individuals convinced me of this fact.

The first lambic producer I paid a call on this trip was Frank Boon. Based in the town of Lembeek, ground zero for lambic production, Boon began blending lambics in 1975, buying supplies of beer from various lambic brewers and aging them in his own warehouse. He turned to brewing in 1990 and, in an interesting turnabout, now supplies other blenders with his own lambics.

Boon is best known for his Mariage Parfait line of lambics, beers that he feels are the products of "perfect marriages" between old and young beer or beer and fruit. While these are indeed extraordinary beers, even Boon's "less perfect" lambics are most worthy and enjoyable brews. On the strength of these beers, Boon reports that business is very good. He was even installing a new bottling line on the day of my visit. Positive sign number one.

More good lambic news arrived about a week later when I dropped by the newest member of the lambic brewing fraternity, De Cam.

Located in Gooik, less than a half-hour outside of Brussels, De Cam is the pride and passion of Willem van Herreweghen, a production manager at the Palm Brewery. Fascinated with lambic, van Herreweghen founded De Cam about four years ago as strictly a blending operation, but since has begun brewing in cooperation with Armand Debelder of the Drie Fonteinen restaurant in Beersel, even closer to Brussels. (A chef and restaurateur, Debelder has himself been blending lambics for many a year.) De Cam still buys lambics from Girardin, Lindemans and Boon, but they are now supplemented with De Cam's own.

Because sales are good and van Herreweghen still works full-time at Palm, he has been compelled to hire on Karal Goddeau. A handsome man with an obvious and infectious enthusiasm for the beer, Goddeau couldn't be a better spokesman for lambic, as the twenty-five-year-old demonstrated when I arrived at the town center location on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Explaining that sales of De Cam's lambics have been outstripping production, Goddeau told me that he works seven days a week, sometimes at the Beersel brewery and other times at the warehouse in Gooik. The contrast between the two places seems quite severe, as Goddeau noted that the Beersel brewery is quite modern and computerized while the bottle-filler in Gooik, for example, is manually operated and painfully slow.

As I stood chatting with Goddeau, three men showed up unannounced to look around the premises. As he had with me, Goddeau cheerfully greeted them and quickly provided generous tasting samples before showing them the wooden barrels -- from the Pilsner Urquell brewery! -- and the rest of the operation. Each man left with a bag of bottles in hand.

Returning to our conversation, Goddeau explained to me that he doesn't expect to get rich off of the lambic business but that he does enjoy his work. When you brew and blend lambics, he said, "you can feel good about what you do."

I, for one, hope that van Roy, Boon, van Herreweghen and Goddeau continue to feel good about what they do for a long, long time to come.