Documentary Conditioned

Beer documentaries are always welcome to me which is why I hope the year in a Lambic life movie, Bottle Conditioned is on my list to find. Below is the blurb from the production…

“This film chronicles an entire year of lambic production, while getting to know the brewers and blenders in the Zenne River Valley of Belgium. Bound by a common passion for lambic beer, their approach and ideologies differ when it comes to upholding traditional methods of brewing and protecting this heritage. Moreover, with the recent rush in demand for this beer, new lambic brewers and blenders are emerging- something inconceiveable ten years ago- and they’re pushing the bounderies of tradition. This leaves the question: what does the future hold for this community, in a region defined by its traditions?”

Zwanze Day 2021

Two things for you to do…

  1. Mark September 25th down in your calendar
  2. Find the nearest official Zwanze Day brewery/bar

Check HERE for locations. And if nothing else, make the 25th your reminder to pop open a bottle of Cantillon.

Make a Beer Wish

Who doesn’t like a good raffle? And you can win some serious beer too. Follow this LINK Whale Hunters and buy a few tickets to help the Make-A-Wish foundation. Personally, I went for the Cantillon package.

Zwanze 2016

Zwanze-Day-2016
Amongst the dedicated beer days on the calendar, Zwanze Day gets special marks for selecting breweries and bars to pour a special Cantillon beer each year. For us in L.A., driving will be involved because the two closest for the October 1st celebration of the 2016 Framboise are:
Bagby Beer — Oceanside, California
Beachwood BBQ — Seal Beach, California

You can of course celebrate at home with a bottle or find a bar with a good list of Belgians and create your own Zwanze.

Cantillon-line

Capture
Iconic and lauded Belgian brewers Cantillon and Drie Fonteinen have added their calls to action regarding the re-selling of their rare and special beers and have called on the government authorities to do something about it. Barring the ability to take down websites or at least tax the bejesus out of these sellers who really mark the prices up, the pair may try to institute online sales.

All in an effort to get these limited bottles into the hands of the people who will drink or cellar them instead of the scalpers. Maybe the Anonymous Collective needs to be called in too.

Cantillon Bulks Up

No, no steroids here just more capacity for the beloved Belgian blender, Cantillon.

Screen Shot 2014-08-02 at 12.08.23 PM

They have apparently been in the market for additional space since last year and have found a new space in an old blender building that held Brasseries Limbourg up until the sixties.

Due to the lengthy process of aging, you won’t see an immediate impact but once 2 to 3 years/vintages pass they will eventually be able to double their production.  Which is great news for those who can’t get enough of their stellar line-up.  Soon they will brew the wort at the main brewery before transferring (after cooling) to mature at the new location.

 

a little sourness


As great as the new tap room is at the Bruery’s brewery, I miss picking up beers at Provisions but now there is an excuse to return….
“SOUR WEEK!!!! Running from next Monday, August 13th and lasting until Sunday, August 19th, we will be featuring daily flights of very rare and delicious sour ales. Cantillon, Cascade, Lost Abbey and The Bruery, just to name a few of the amazing breweries that we have lined up. Be sure to follow us on facebook, twitter and instagram to find out what is being released each day!

Can’t wait? Come on in today and pick up a bottle of The Bruery’s Sans Pagaie, a sour blonde aged in wine barrels with cherries or Otiose, a sour brown ale aged on guava. Both are $20 for a 750ml bottle and will age gracefully for several years. We also have a selection of sour ales from Belgium, Switzerland, Norway and beyond, so get in the Olympic spirit and try them all!”

This will be an excellent chance to try those great Cascade beers and some classics from Cantillon and compare them to the Bruery offerings.

Great Article on Lambics

From the Wall Street Journal

Tracking an Ancient Belgian Beer
Lambic, a rare, sour brew, uses techniques dating back to man’s first beer. Reporter Charles Forelle visits one of the few remaining breweries

BRUSSELS — Beer is usually not a morning pursuit.

But it was still dark one day last month when I lumbered out of bed and over to the tiny Cantillon brewery, located in a scruffy neighborhood not far from the main train station here.

Industrial brewers can be as secretive as defense contractors — good luck getting inside the mashing room of Diageo PLC’s Guinness brewery in Dublin — but a couple of times a year Cantillon opens its doors to the public.

I had risen early because I wanted to see how to brew lambic, a Belgian specialty so retro its origins go back thousands of years. The early-morning start was necessary because there are no refrigerated tanks or cryogenic chillers at Cantillon; the boiled liquid that will become beer cools in the open air, and it needs a whole, cold night to do so. Thus all the mixing, cooking, filtering and boiling must be completed well before sunset.

Lambic brewing is “a process that has become so rare around the world, but that was once the universal method of making beer,” says Jean-Pierre Van Roy, the patriarch of the family that has owned and run Cantillon for a century. “As with everything rare, we need to be watchful, we need to be able to show this type of industry to our generation and future generations.”

Take sips of two dozen different beers and the lambic will be the one you remember. A traditional lambic is startlingly sour, like plain yogurt, and full of musty and meaty flavors.

Lambic is brewed only in Brussels and a few towns on the city’s western edge — and only a dozen breweries make it. Cantillon makes around 32,000 gallons a year; Anheuser-Busch InBev pumps out more than 1.3 billion gallons of Bud Light annually. Bottles are easy to find in Brussels, but it’s likely to take a committed search anywhere else. (See sidebar, below, on where to find it.)

All beer starts out roughly the same: Some sort of grain is cooked in water to turn its starches to sugar. The brewer then adds yeast to turn the sugars to alcohol.

Brewers of lambic skip that last step. At Cantillon, the cooked grain-broth — wort, it’s called — is pumped up to the attic, then dumped into a giant, copper tub beneath the eaves that looks like a children’s splashing pool. It cools there overnight, picking up the wild yeasts and bacteria floating in the Brussels air.

This is the same method the first human to concoct beer most likely used thousands of years ago. Like true sourdough bread and natural yogurt, lambic is resolutely pre-industrial and is fermented with whatever bugs happen to be nearby.

Belgian scientists have deconstructed lambic and found scores of different species of micro-flora. Two important types are lactic-acid bacteria, which make lambic sour, and yeasts of the genus Brettanomyces, among them B. bruxellensis, which give lambic its characteristic aroma. “Horse blanket” is the term favored by beer cognoscenti. This is not a terribly useful olfactory cue for those of us who dwell in cities, but the scent is of hay and must — and also of something very much alive. It is a weird concept for beer, no doubt, but strangely compelling and astoundingly complex. Needless to say, sour mustiness is a tough sell — don’t look for commercials of sweaty young things dancing to reggaeton and taking swigs from bottles of lambic.

“People have a taste for anything, but their palates have been deformed,” Mr. Van Roy says. “Industrial producers get people used to eating and drinking in a certain way. And when you explain to people what the product is, when you let them taste it, they come to realize that this sourness we have in our products is really a popular taste.”

To at least a small slice of beer fans, it is.

Despite the early hour, professional brewers on a pilgrimage, home brewers with a sense of curiosity and a throng of committed drinkers mingled over croissants and coffee at the Cantillon brewery. The coffee was weak, and by 9 a.m. or so most everyone switched over to beer.

There is nothing modern about Cantillon — no blinking lights or beeping electronic temperature monitors. Barrels are steamed clean by hand in a low-ceilinged, Dickensian basement. A system of flywheels, belts and gears powers what needs powering and turns what needs turning.

The mash-tun — the heart of the brewery, where wheat and barley are mixed and cooked — is a 19th-century model in heavy iron. To fill it, a worker one floor up shovels grain down a chute.

Lambic brewing as done at Cantillon would drive the bean-counters of a big brewery mad. Cantillon can brew only in the colder months, when the weather is right; the brewery gets in about 20 working days a year — if the weather turns suddenly warm, a batch can be spoiled. Most of the product sits in inventory for years before being sold, and the long aging in wooden casks means about a third of what’s brewed is lost to evaporation — the “angel’s share,” as it’s known.

“The angels of Brussels are great gourmands,” the elder Mr. Van Roy says, standing in the attic amid sacks of grain, an orange scarf knotted at his throat.

“The big brewers can’t work like us,” he says. “It’s impossible. They have staff and other expenses.” At Cantillon, “there are no directors or administrators. There’s a father, a mother, children and now grandchildren.”

Around mid-day, Jean Van Roy starts drawing tumblers of wort from the mash-tun, passing around samples in plastic cups. It is warm and sweet. Eventually he is satisfied, and he pulls more levers to begin pumping the liquid upstairs into vats for boiling.

A few hours later, he deems the boiling complete. Visitors crowd up to the attic, clambering on creaky wood stairs for a glimpse of the cooling pool. The wort gushes in, and they give a cheer. Soon the whole, chilly room fills with a warm, beery haze.

Only a few more years, and you could drink it.
What to Drink

Lambic refers generally to sour beers of the Brussels region fermented with wild yeasts. Gueuze is a blend of old and young lambics. Fruit flavorings are common — Kriek is lambic brewed with cherries; framboise, with raspberries.

But a word of caution: Many larger brewers of lambic — and, particularly, kriek — add sugar or fruit syrup to the finished product to appeal to those put off by lambic’s sourness. Beer snobs recoil in horror at this practice. Truth be told, the bigger problem is that the underlying beers tend to be thin and cheaply made. But even good lambics are flattened by sugar. My advice: Avoid. Some breweries will label their unsweetened bottles oude (old, in Dutch). Mort Subite Oude Gueuze is an unsweetened lambic; Mort Subite Gueuze is sweetened.

Cantillon’s beers are uncompromisingly sour, but they reward the patient drinker with deep and perplexing flavor — there are notes of lemon and must and wood and hay. The fruit beers are bracingly tart.

Other names to look for: Girardin (1882, black label); Boon (Mariage Parfait); De Cam (Oude Gueuze); Drie Fonteinen (anything, frankly).
Where to Drink It

Brasserie Cantillon
Rue Gheude 56
+32 2 521 49 28

The Van Roy family will show you around; tours are €5 and include a drink. The current line of beers is sold at excellent prices; we paid around €44 for an assortment of six 750-milliliter bottles that included some rare varieties. If you are looking to take a few bottles home in your suitcase, you could do far worse than the Grand Cru. It is a three-year-old lambic that can age for another 30. Public brewing days are announced periodically; see www.cantillon.be.

Le Bier Circus
Rue de L’Enseignement 57
+32 2 218 00 34

The lighting is too bright and the decor too kooky for this sedate bar — with attached restaurant — to be intimate. But you don’t come here for romance; you come for beer. The list is full of lambics, including old vintages and rare bottlings. Beyond lambics, there are dozens of well-chosen Belgians in a variety of styles. (Try anything from De Dolle Brouwers or Brasserie Ellezelloise, to pick two among many worthy producers.)

Chez Moeder Lambic
Rue de Savoie 68
+32 2 544 16 99

A serious beer bar that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is out of the city center, in the branché commune of St. Gilles. On a warm night in summer, when the hazy light lingers past 10 p.m., take the 3 or 4 tram from downtown and find a chair outside. The bar is tucked behind the St. Gilles town hall, a delightfully over-the-top Neo-Renaissance castle. Excellent selection of lambics, including some Cantillon beers on tap.

In ‘t Spinnekopke
Place du Jardin aux Fleurs 1
+32 2 511 86 95

Excellent renditions of Belgian classics (waterzooi, carbonnade, rabbit braised in kriek) anchored around food that is cooked with beer. Boulettes à la gueuze — meatballs in a rich gueuze sauce — takes the cake. It has dark and cozy rooms of an old house; in nice weather, there’s a pleasant terrace outside.

Overseas:

Traditional lambics are exported in fairly small quantity. Shelton Brothers imports Cantillon and Drie Fonteinen to the U.S.; see www.sheltonbrothers.com for distribution. Availability can be spotty — several places we called were out of the beers. Prices vary widely, but expect to pay $14 to $20 for a 750-milliliter bottle of Cantillon’s gueuze, and generally more for the more unusual varieties.