“They’re the Zen monks of the beer world,” I whispered to Sarah. She nodded silently.
Through the open top half of a Dutch door, I saw a flat, open-topped rectangular copper vessel—the coolship, or koelschip in Flemish—where the magic of fermentation begins. The gurgling sound of water filled the room, and steam rose to the ceiling; it was like a beer spa. Hot wort was filling the coolship, and as it cooled to between 18 and 20 degrees Celsius (64 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit), natural yeast and bacteria from the air would drop into the wort and begin to consume the liquid’s sugars. Scientists have found up to two hundred different strains of yeast and bacteria in lambic, including acetic and lactic bacteria, which produce the acids that create the beer’s legendary tartness.
Before 1857, when Louis Pasteur discovered yeast, brewers and bakers certainly saw the effects of the invisible (to the naked eye), single-celled organisms: bubbles in rising dough and alcohol in beer. Back then, all yeast was “wild.” It thrived in certain places, including fruit skins and human skin. Even though they didn’t understand yeast as we know it today, brewers figured out how, at the end of fermentation, to harvest the yeast that had made good beer so they could reuse that yeast in subsequent batches of beer. So began the split between wild and domesticated yeast.
These days, “wild” yeast has a few definitions. In one sense, wild yeast is something that hasn’t been cultivated for human use, making it the Alaskan salmon of the beer world. In the scientific treatise The Yeasts: A Taxonomic Study by Kurtzman, Fell, and Boekhout, wild yeasts are called “contaminants from the environment, or genetic variants of the cultivated strain.” It goes on to say that the most problematic wild yeasts are those that are similar to “industrial” yeasts but able to overtake the cultivated strains and spoil the product.
I’d been seeing beers described as “wild” even though they had been inoculated with cultivated microbial cultures. While scientists might get away with describing cultivated yeast as “industrial,” brewers never could. (Who wants to drink something made with “industrial yeast”?) When I asked Ben Edmunds about the discrepancy, he said many “wild beers” were simply beers that used yeast strains other than Saccharomyces, the genus of fungi that includes all ale and lager yeasts, cultured or not. “It seems like there’s just no better nomenclature that anyone has come up with yet,” he said.
It’s a gamble to rely entirely on the yeasts that naturally land in wort. At Cantillon, one hundred years into production, the gamble is less risky. Jean Van Roy knows that the right yeasts and bacteria will land in the wort, the ones that will make his lambics, lambic. Mixing yeast strains, cultivated or wild, creates uncertain outcomes; brewers who inoculate their beers using cultivated yeasts rarely use more than one strain in a single beer.
The first time I had thought about this fact was at Logsdon Farmhouse Ales (now Logsdon Farm Brewery), outside Hood River, Oregon, under the glare of Mount Hood’s glaciers. Brewmaster David Logsdon is one of the founding fathers of the American craft brewing scene, mostly because of the yeasts he’s harnessed. In 1986 he and his then-wife Jeannette Kreft-Logsdon opened Wyeast Laboratories, which has become one of the most respected suppliers of brewing yeasts in the country. (I dare you to find a home or commercial brewer who hasn’t made a beer with at least one of Wyeast’s yeasts.) When he opened Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, he decided to brew beers fermented with a palate of yeasts he had personally developed by “borrowing them” from certain European beers.
He told me this fact as we lingered in the sunshine outside the brewhouse listening to his cows bay, and I immediately imagined a Mission Impossible–style heist, complete with laser-beam security systems and black-gloved yeast thieves. In reality, David flew to Europe then tucked his favorite bottles of beer between sweaters in his luggage for the trip home. He developed the yeasts contained in those beers, and started using them in his beers in Oregon. Because of his experience as a yeast wrangler, he knew how to combine certain yeasts in a single beer while avoiding mutations and contaminations. But David is the exception.
Through the thick steam, I saw fading daylight and the rooftops of Cantillon’s neighbors through louvered horizontal vents, which were open so that the city’s air—the provenance of the invisible life that would inoculate the wort—could enter the room. Among the wood and dampness, I’d forgotten we were in gritty Brussels, a humming city, another kind of organism that shaped the decay and life of Cantillon’s beers.
At Cantillon, the wort rests in the coolship overnight. In the morning, the liquid is transferred to wooden barrels, where the porousness of the wood helps the bacteria and yeast thrive. While Alberto Cardoso told us the barrels didn’t contribute yeast and bacteria to the wort (the barrels are steam cleaned, then filled with hot water and chains and shaken vigorously on a machine that Sarah said looked like something used to train astronauts), it seemed impossible that the cleaning would remove every single organism from the wood. Brettanomyces, a genus of wild yeast that naturally appears in lambics, gueuzes, and sour brown ales, thrives in wood. The yeast imparts earthy, savory, and funky flavors, which have become increasingly popular with American craft beer drinkers. While the beers at Cantillon are naturally inoculated with Brettanomyces—making them truly wild—many brewers intentionally ferment with “Brett,” a calculated risk that has the potential to destroy an entire brewery.
Russian River Brewing intentionally adds Brett to many of its beers. For vintners, Brett is considered a menace that creates off-flavors in wine and permanently infects barrels, so a few local wine-makers refuse to give Russian River any barrels on principle and won’t even step foot inside the brewery. The brewery has a set of additional equipment that’s used to make beers that contain Brett: a separate tank and separate pumps, hoses, valves, gaskets, and bottling equipment. And if a brewer works on the Brett side of the brewery one day, he or she is not allowed to wear those same clothes to the brewery the next day, in the hopes of preventing contamination of non-Brett beers and equipment.
Brettanomyces infections have happened at major breweries, a mistake most brewers hesitate to reveal to the public. In 2009, after customers began complaining, Deschutes Brewery went public with the news that a batch of Mirror Mirror, an oak-aged English barley wine, had been infected with Brett. Now the brewery flash-pasteurizes all beer from wooden barrels to kill any potentially present Brett before the beer is blended with unpasteurized beer from the tanks.
The yeasts in Cantillon’s worts change the liquid during one, two, or three years in the barrels. After the beers age, they’re combined with fresh whole fruit, which is shoved through bungholes, except for apricots, which are cut in half so they can fit. Sarah and I walked past rows of barrels filled with beer and stacked three-high, to the ceiling. On one support beam, a round barrel top nailed to a beam read: LE TEMPS NE RESPECTE PAS CE QUI SE FAIT SANS LUI. Time doesn’t respect what happens without him. The hairs on my arms stood up, like the first time I saw the Duomo in Florence. I felt awed by this sacred space filled with art, liquid art.
Eventually, we made our way back to the tasting room, where Alberto was waiting to give us the end-of-tour beer samples. With a steady hand, Alberto poured a sweetened lambic called faro from a blue ceramic pitcher. The first sip was bracing and tart, but it gave way to an earthy mustiness that encapsulated the brewery: a mixture of the life of tiny spiders, mold spores, and dank wood—the ingredients a witch might throw into her kettle to make a magic potion.
“People who visit Cantillon don’t always like the beer,” Alberto said. “For the first time in human history, we have children eating sugar every single day of their life since they were born. The result: their taste buds are calibrated on sweetness. So people today hate two flavors: sourness and bitterness.”
We moved to the tables where the bearded guys had been drinking, and he produced a bottle of kriek, a two-year-old lambic fermented with sour cherries, that had just been bottled. At two years, a lambic is considered you
ng. The beer glowed a mesmerizing ruby color, and a soft layer of pink foam reminded me of strawberry frosting on a cake. The kriek tasted purely of cherry, only without any sweetness, like an eau de vie without the hot alcoholic heat. If Alberto decides to wage a war on sugar, this beer should be his weapon.
Brandon arrived for his postwork beer, a spectacularly enviable way to end a day of labor, and Jean Van Roy appeared out of nowhere. In one hand he held an empty glass and, in the other, a bottle of lambic made with carignan, a black-skinned wine grape native to northern Spain. Later, I’d find out the beer was only available in the brewery, but right then its rareness meant nothing. After taking a sip, I wanted to preserve the moment so my future self could return to this first taste of its tart acidity, hay, animal funk, dark cherries, and sweet grapes. The beer brought together the wild and unkempt nature of the brewery, a place I felt infiltrating my skin, as though I was a porous wooden barrel, with a fruit from a place I’d never been. I was tasting two terroirs, and although the flavor of grape wasn’t lost, it had been assimilated. For a moment, I was so focused on the beer, I forgot Jean Van Roy was leaning against a wooden support beam with his arms crossed, holding his glass with his pointer and middle finger. He sipped with a crisp sense of propriety.
“We produce the most specific beers in the world,” he said with the staccato of someone in a hurry. “Yet we are totally alone here in the city.” Belgian beer drinkers had lost interest in lambics. Of the 45,000 people who toured the brewery the previous year, 60 percent were there independently, like me and Sarah, and not on an organized tour. Only 7 percent of those visitors were Belgians.
As the brewery shut down for the night, Brandon and Alberto invited me and Sarah to join them at Moeder Lambic, a famous Brussels beer bar. Part of me didn’t want to drink anything else that night, so I could hold on to the taste of the carignan lambic like a souvenir. But I understood the possibility that I could drink something even better, the type of greed that can lead to sloshy nights or delightful discoveries. The four of us walked outside into the dusky evening. Somewhere beneath our feet, the water of the Senne River seeped through the city’s manmade barriers, evidence of the natural world’s persistence.
“Looks like Brooklyn,” Sarah said. We were facing the empty lot across the street.
“It actually looks pretty good today,” Brandon replied. “Usually it’s filled with trash.”
Jean Van Roy appeared, again, with the quiet stealth of a ninja. He was straddling a bicycle so shiny it must have been fresh from the box. Unlike the common upright commuter bicycles nearly everyone in Brussels seemed to be riding, Jean was on what looked like a mountain bike. After Jean gracefully hopped the curb and pedaled down the street, Alberto said, “That bike came from the Americans.” Before I had developed a full vision, of an American tourism board, maybe, gifting Jean a bike to thank him for making such special beers, Alberto added, “Americans are buying all the beer.”
As we walked through a whole city pressing home from work, the lambics, gueuze, and kriek Sarah and I had bought at the brewery gently clinked in our bags, the glassy music of beer lovers leaving a world-famous brewery. Before we turned the corner, I glanced back for a final glimpse of Cantillon, and I considered taking another picture. After all, I was just your average American.
UNBROKEN CHAIN
When a language dies it is a vision of a world that disappears.
—KOICHIRO MATSUURA
SARAH AND I stood under a sable sky, huddled around a crackling fire pit with a group of Belgians we’d just met. “We have a saying,” said a robust man with a swoop of highlighted hair. “A proper gueuze is like an angel pissing on your tongue.” I wasn’t prepared to endorse this metaphor, because the beer tasted too tartly electric to have been spewed from a sweet, celestial cherub. But after a hairy day of driving across the small country—which took us from a tour of De Dolle Brouwers in West Flanders, where we met some boisterous college-aged Boy Scouts clad in shorts and neck scarves, to some outstanding truck-stop frites and, finally, Klara’s traverse of a narrow dirt road elevated above fields of rice paddies—the gueuze tasted like salvation.
The man was Dimitri “Dimi” Cockaert, a hair stylist and bon vivant I’d met through Kris Schamp, a Belgian native who lives in Portland and leads bike tours in Belgium. His brother, Jan, had kindly invited me and Sarah to his house for a cheese and beer tasting, and Dimi was part of a welcoming cast of forty-somethings who liked to eat and drink well and ride bicycles. I felt at home. The evening unfolded into an elaborate spread of national cheeses and beers, including the Westvleteren Blond, a Belgian pale ale from the Trappist brewery that made the Westvleteren 12, which is consistently voted “Best Beer in the World” on community beer sites and by media. I savored each sip of the Blond, which would rank as my favorite beer that evening, knowing I wouldn’t be visiting the brewery and tasting the 12 on this trip. Dimi arranged to introduce us to Armand Debelder, the man who’d crafted the angel piss. Armand was a famous lambic blender at Drie Fonteinen (also known as 3 Fonteinen, because drie means “three” in Dutch).
The following evening we met Dimi in Beersel, a small town thirteen kilometers south of Brussels in the Senne River valley. For decades, Beersel has been known as a hub of traditional lambic making. I’d heard of Armand, and I sensed his beers were as culturally significant as those from Cantillon, but I wasn’t sure why. And even though I’d had a thorough lesson in the magic of spontaneous fermentation at Cantillon, I wanted to learn more about the art of blending. Outside Drie Fonteinen, Sarah, Dimi, and I shivered in the bitter wind as the sun unceremoniously sunk below the horizon. Inside, a videographer was interviewing Armand for a documentary. We waited our turn.
Eventually, the three of us were allowed to enter the brewery’s gift shop. In the back, a small kitchen—complete with sink, dishwasher, and transparent shelves of floating glassware—also functioned as a tasting room. Armand Debelder sat on one side of a red kitchen table, light reflecting off the taut skin on the top of his head. He wore a crisp dress shirt, button-up sweater, and a large-faced watch with commanding hands, an ensemble that made him look distinguished, like a French CEO on holiday. A plate of cheese made with the brewery’s gueuze appeared on the table alongside slices of dark, chewy bread.
Armand took over the business from his father, Gaston, who bought the brewery in the 1950s. His purchase was ill-timed: the fifties marked the beginning of the demise of lambic brewing. The elder Debelder was a steker, the Flemish word for someone who blends the lambics aged in barrels then sells the beer as gueuze. In 1953 Beersel was home to fourteen lambic blenders, most of whom bought lambic wort from nearby breweries. Drie Fonteinen blended exclusively until 1999, when Armand used new equipment to brew lambic on-site for the first time ever. According to Jef Van den Steen, the De Glazen Toren brewer I’d met on my first afternoon in Belgium, by 1990 there were only six blenders in Belgium. In subsequent decades, their blending operations closed, creating a wake of tanks and coolships as the ship of modern, mass-produced lagers forged ahead, as it had been doing for decades. Today, along with Jean Van Roy, Armand is one of just a handful of brewer blenders in Belgium.
“I’m not a brewer, I’m a brewer blender,” Armand told us defiantly.
As a child, Armand worked with his father, moving bottles of beer and developing his palate. “Armand, you have to smell this, he said, and then I’d take a sip,” he remembered. The elder blender was always tasting something. When Armand was eight years old, the family decided he was old enough to serve gueuze. But he wasn’t tall enough to reach over the counter in the café his father had added to the brewery. So Armand stood on a wooden crate filled with bottles of gueuze and waited for an adult to remove the corks from the beers, so he could pour the drink into glasses. At a young age, Armand was allowed to drink a common beverage for Belgian children: two fingers of beer mixed with three fingers of water.
“I hate those people who take alcohol out of a ch
ild’s life,” he told us. “That’s not an education.”
Maybe because we hadn’t yet proved we were worthy of even a child’s education, I had become acutely aware that there was no beer at the table, aside from what was in the cheese. But I wasn’t about to ask for a drink; my mother had taught me manners. Besides, I didn’t want to interrupt Armand, who was recounting stories from his childhood, the kind of tales I knew would forever alter the taste of Drie Fonteinen beers for me.
When Gaston recognized lambic was in decline, he told his son, “You’re crazy, it’s over.” But Armand wasn’t about to abandon tradition. In 1997 Armand helped found the High Council for Artisanal Lambic Beers (HORAL), a group of brewers and blenders who sought to protect and preserve the dying beer style. In 2004 the future of lambic making was called into question when the European Commission, a subset of the newly formed European Union, began a campaign to end production of the beer, claiming the use of barrels is unhygienic and therefore a health hazard. Armand fought the mandate, but he credits the beer for presenting the most compelling argument for its existence. Because the finished beer has a pH of less than four, dangerous bacteria, including salmonella, will not form in the liquid, a fact that convinced EU officials to keep the beer alive.
“That’s why the beer is so exciting,” he told us. “It protects itself. Don’t ask me why. You don’t have to explain everything.”
I’d perceived a tension among Belgians, who, despite sharing what in many ways appeared to be a harmoniously blended linguistic and cultural heritage, constantly self-identify according to their primary language and familial and geographic origin. “I’m a Flemish guy, and in Belgium, that’s important,” Armand said. “Being Flemish means drinking lambic.” The beer style had given him a sense of purpose. “You can be a top sportsman and have the best bicycle,” he continued. “When your chain is broken, she’s broken. I’ve tried to be that small part of the chain. Not the best bicycle, just a part. The history’s not broken.” He paused. “That’s my life.”
My Beer Year Page 17