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The sweet, sweet sours of Beersel
by Willard Clarke, 01/07
It's a long, steep clamber up from the railway station at Beersel to the small town with its moated castle, built early in the 14th century by the Duke of Brabant to aid the
defence of Brussels. When you reach the centre of Beersel you can refresh yourself with beers that form a style - lambic and gueuze - that may be older than even the sturdy,
brownstone castle.
To call lambic and gueuze beers "medieval" makes them seem a trifle sudden. The town of Lembeek in Payottenland - from which it is thought the name lambic derives -
had a guild of brewers as early as the 15th century. But the style is certainly older. It is a rural one, confined to Payottenland and the valley of the River Senne, with roots
that go back to the dawn of brewing 3,000 years BC, when a life-enhancing drink made from sodden grain was fermented by wild, air-born yeasts.
Remarkably, in an age of identikit global lager brands, lambic and gueuze are enjoying a revival. If you offered the average drinker a beer with the warning that it was sour,
cidery and vinous, with no detectable hop character, he might decide to stick with Stella. But he would be missing something delicious and memorable.
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What is lambic?
Lambic and its blended form of gueuze are beers protected by both Belgian and EU laws. At least 30 per cent of the mash must be made up of unmalted wheat, with the
rest of the mash comprised of malted barley. Only aged hops are used. The sweet extract is attacked by wild yeasts in the atmosphere: research at Leuven University has
found that as many as 35 different strains of yeast in the air and in the wooden casks ferment and re-ferment the liquid. The main strain of yeast is known by its scientific
name of Brettanomyces.
Lambic is normally served on draught while gueuze is a bottled blend of young and old lambics. When cherries are added to lambic the beer is called Kriek from the Flemish
for cherry. Raspberry beers are known as Frambozen or Framboise. The use of fruit starts yet another fermentation in cask.
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It is fitting that in a place called Beersel the lambic revival is in full swing. The Debelder family has been blending and maturing lambic since the 1950s, buying in beer
from such respected brewers as Frank Boon, Girardin and Lindemans and storing them for years in wooden casks.
Blending lambic and gueuze is an art in itself and Gaston
Debelder achieved a fine reputation as a result of his ability to skilfully marry more than one brew and bring it to maturity. He taught his son Armand to follow in his footsteps:
the results of their labours were available in the family restaurant Drie Fonteinen (Three Fountains) that stands on the small square called Teirlinckplein.
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The square is named
after the local poet and playwright Herman Teirlinck who drank in the caf? and encouraged Gaston to continue to blend lambic when the style was under threat of extinction
from the onslaught of lager after World War Two.
Ten years ago, Armand Debelder (left) decided to brew himself. The family business was divided into the brewery run by Armand while the restaurant, with acclaimed Flemish cuisine, passed
to his younger brother Guido. Launching a new lambic brewery is akin to opening a whisky or cognac distillery: it takes several years for beers to reach maturity and Armand
has continued to buy beer for blending from other breweries.
When Armand started to brew in 1999 it was the first new lambic brewery in Belgium for 80 years. Willem Van Herreweghen, the brewing director of the respected Palm ale
brewery and a passionate devotee of lambic, advised Armand and assembled a mash tun and copper bought from InBev's Jupille lager plant.
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In the fashion of lambic brewers, Armand has used casks from the Cotes de Nuits wine region of France to store his beers, but more recently he has acquired wooden
vessels from the Pilsner Urquell brewery in the Czech Republic. The iconic lager brewery in Pilsen is now part of the global SABMiller group, which has phased out
fermenting in wooden vessels in favour of modern stainless steel: it is fitting that these historic casks, that made the world's first golden lager have found a new home at
Drie Fonteinen.
Armand has a 10-hectolitre brewhouse. The mash for each brew is made up of 37 per cent unmalted wheat, with the rest comprised of malted barley. The wort or sugary
extract is then boiled for an astonishing four hours in the copper, more than twice as long as a conventional copper boil. This leads to some caramelisation or charring of
the brewing sugars that gives a burnished copper glow to the finished beer.
Hops are added during the boil. As bitterness does not marry well with the lactic sourness created by spontaneous fermentation, lambic brewers use aged hops that have
lost their bitterness: they are used primarily for their anti-bacterial ability to keep beer free from infection. Armand uses a 1998 harvest of the Challenger variety grown in
Poperinge, close to the killing fields of Ypres during World War One.
In the classic lambic tradition, the hopped wort is pumped to a large open cooling pan, known as the cool ship, in the roof of the brewery. One thousand litres of wort fill the
pan. Louvred windows are left open to encourage wild yeast spores in the atmosphere to enter and attack the sugars in the wort. The transformation of sugary wort to beer is
underway and the liquid is transferred to casks in the cellar where fermentation continues with the aid of wild yeasts both in the air and locked in the wood of the vessels.
The beer will remain in cask for months or even years. The skill of the blender is to judge when to take two lambics - one young, one aged - and marry them to produce the
spritzy, foaming version of the style known as gueuze. As with the name lambic, there are many theories for the origin of the name gueuze, one being that it comes from
geyser, as the beer tends to foam and gush when a bottle is opened.
Armand produced a year-old lambic that had an aroma of nuts and bitter oranges. It was fruity and sour in the mouth and had a long, dry and quenching finish. Suitably
refreshed, we walked to a second building in Beersel where Armand has additional casks for storing and blending his beers. He also keeps 1,000 litres of cherries there for
his kriek or cherry lambic. He uses only whole fruit and won't touch sugar or juice: in common with all traditional lambic brewers he has no time for the bigger commercial
versions of the style that make do with canned juices. His Kriek is formed by taking a lambic from Frank Boon and refermenting it with cherries, using the local Schaarbeek
variety grown in a suburb of Brussels: these are small, black grapes with an acidic character.
The Kriek (6% alcohol, in common with most of Armand's beers) is superb with a rich, sour cherry and almonds aroma. It is tart and mouth-puckeringly dry on the palate,
followed by a refreshing fruity and delicately sour finish. The almond note in many kriek lambics is the result of yeasts attacking the pips in the cherries.
We drove the short distance to the town of Halle where Armand has a warehouse to store his bottle-fermented gueuze beers. These include his Millenium Gueuze, which
he feels will be at its best in 2007 but is already deeply impressive with a tart, lemony aroma and palate, and a finish of enormous length: sour, acidic, yeasty.
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Armand has
made one beer using Italian grape juice and a straight lambic. It is 8 per cent, has a champagne-like toasted aroma with tart fruit, with fruit and nuts in the mouth and a dry,
refreshing fruity and toasty finish. His Oude Kriek (6 per cent), using aged lambics, is perhaps the finest of his beers, with the classic "horse blanket" mustiness on the nose
created by wild yeasts, a fruity and nutty palate and a long sour, fruity and almonds finish.
On the drive to and from Halle, Armand explained the upheaval in the lambic industry in recent years. Health inspectors had descended on breweries in 2002 and 2003,
demanding they be cleaned up. Brewers of lambic traditionally encourage wild yeasts to grown on walls while spiders spin webs between casks in order to catch and kill fruit
flies. At first the inspectors wanted completely sterile conditions, with scrubbed, whitewashed walls. A compromise was reached: walls can be left unpainted but the spiders
and their webs had to go.
Shocked by the attack by the health brigade and alarmed by the spread of sweet, sticky commercial lambics such as InBev's Belle Vue, the traditionalists formed HORAL,
which translates as High Commission for Artisanal Lambic Beers. In a sense, the true brewers of what they called Oude or Old Lambic, which must contain a proportion of
three year-old beer, are attempting to protect their heritage in the same manner as the Belgian Trappist monks have done to distinguish their ales from commercial "abbey
beers".
It was the health inspection that forced Beersel's other lambic producer, Henri Vandervelden, to give up in disgust in 2002. At the age of 80 he was due to retire, having
worked in his family's Oud Beersel brewery since he was 25. His beers were greatly respected and were widely available in bars throughout Belgium as well as in his own
caf? (now closed) next to the brewery.
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HORAL
HORAL is attempting to protect the heritage of true lambic beer and to distinguish it from the commercial beers made by such large groups as InBev, St Louis, Timmermans
and Lindemans, some of whom have made "fruit lambics" with such horrific additions as banana and peppermint,
The recommended lambic and gueuze producers are: Boon. Cantillon, Drie Fonteinen, De Cam, Girardin, Hanssens and De Keersmaeker, with Oud Beersel to come.
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Henri's mantle has been taken up by two young lambic enthusiasts, Roland de Bus and Gert Christiaens (pictured right) from Molenbeek and Sint-Pieters-Leeuw respectively. Their
enthusiasm was underscored when Gert bounded out of the delivery bay to greet me and then the two of them took me on a rapid, breathless tour of the 45-hectolitre
plant. They said Henri received thousands of messages begging him to restart brewing and they plan to meet that demand.
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The stock of lambic was sold to Frank Boon and Gert and Roland, who took over the plant in 2005, have had to start from scratch. They drank lambic from an early
age and when they graduated in 2005 decided to run the risk of restarting Oud Beersel.
"We tried to get loans from the banks," Roland said, "but their answer was that they couldn't support a business where it takes so long to produce anything. Finally we
found a regional bank that was willing to help and we also had to invest our own money."
"Henri passed on his knowledge to us," Gert added. "But first we had to use a lot of money to renovate the buildings."
It is a classic lambic brewery with a mash tun and copper feeding the cool ship in the attic. The cellars are packed with giant wooden casks where their beers will stored.
They are currently conducting trial brews and are selling an Oud Beersel Kriek at 6.5 per cent using beer bought from another lambic producer. It has a deep, burnished
red colour, a massive aroma of almonds and tart fruit, dry, nutty but not sour in the mouth, with a dry, tart and fruity finish.
They hope to have Oud Gueuze ready to taste by 2007. In the meantime, to help them survive while they perfect their own beers, Gert and Roland are selling a 9.5 per
cent beer called Bersalis, using the old Roman name for Beersel. It is brewed for them by the Huyghe brewery near Ghent. It is the Belgian style known as Tripel, a strong
pale ale with, in this case, the addition of spices. It has a big fruit gums and hop resins aroma, with rich fruit, juicy malt, spices and hops in the mouth, and a long finish that
is bitter-sweet with creamy malt, tangy fruit and bitter hops.
"It is bringing life back to the brewery," Gert said. We'll all drink to that.
Getting to Beersel: eight kilometres/six miles from Brussels, E19 exit 19. The town is on the Halle to Mechelen train line (weekdays only), with trains from Brussels.
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