Lambic beer — which is “startlingly sour, like plain yogurt, and full of musty and meaty flavors” — used to be the only kind of beer:
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.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.
It’s not just the sour taste that led brewers to emphasize other styles of beer:
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.”