Where are you from? // Brussels Beer Project launches their Lambic brewery
[Disclosure: I have brewed a beer with Brussels Beer Project in the past, and hosted the launch of my book at the brewery in October 2020]
On a Tuesday night in late November, a gaggle of Brussels Beer Project (BBP) employees assemble in the centre of Brussels’ Grand Place. Some of them have worked for BBP for years; others are recent hires from Belgium, the US, Portugal and Canada. They stamp their feet and puff into cupped hands. A few feet away, a giant Christmas tree stands unadorned, but tourists are already arriving for the nightly festive light show that saturates the square’s ornate facades in rhythmic flashes of holiday green and red. Metres-high letters projected onto the front of Brussels’ Town Hall wish the people gathered below a “Joyeux Noël” and flash questions like “Where are you from?”.
The BBP group, separated from the gathering crowd by a ring of metal fencing, has formed a semi-circle around a wheel-mounted rectangular steel tub. The vessel is filled with a dark liquid expelling thick plumes of steam that obscure the pulsing light show. The air above it is thick with the stick-sweet smell of freshly mashed grains, vying for olfactory attention with the tangier whiff of cheesy hops, and burnt sugar from nearby waffle stands.
Someone dips their finger into the steel container and scoops up a fingerful of bitter froth. Across the barriers a pair of pre-pubescent boys look on in confusion at what must look like a kind of bubble bath. But the perfume of wort and hops, the scalding hot liquid, and the tub’s outsized tap clear: this is not a bath. It is a koelschip (coolship), a traditional piece of Brussels brewing equipment. And it’s been rolled uphill from BBP’s brewery and onto the Grand Place for two reasons. To cool down the wort it’s filled with, and to celebrate (and generate content for) the impending reveal of the city’s worst-kept secret: Brussels has a brand new Lambic brewery.
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A week later and the Christmas markets have opened, the big tree is decorated, and the coolship and its contents have been returned to their basement home at BBP’s brewery on Rue Antoine Dansaert.
Formerly a design store showroom, expensive sofas and table lamps have made way for grey hexagonal floor tiling, stacks of barrels (around 80 in total) and parallel rows of 10 upright wooden foeders - two made from chestnut, eight formerly used to make Grappa, and each holding about 200 litres. A red carpet has been laid out between the barrels to welcome the city’s press corps for an announcement by the brewery’s founders. Their Dansaert facility has brewed its last “clean” beer (an imperial dry-hopped saison stout). With BBP’s new Port Sud brewery in Anderlecht going online in a few weeks, they are turning their central Brussels location into a spontaneous and mixed fermentation brewery.
In other words, Lambic - Brussels’ traditional, funky and tart beer, brewed in the winter with barley and unmalted wheat, chilled overnight in open coolships where it is spontaneously inoculated with wild yeast and bacteria, and left to ferment and mature in wooden barrels.
This is the endpoint of a transition that has been underway for some time; 2021 will be BBP’s third Lambic brewing season, and they currently have a production capacity hovering just under 1,000 hectolitres. While it will be a little while longer before they are able to release a Geuze - a blend of one, two, and three-year old vintages - at this press launch they are able to pop open a couple of recently-bottled graduates of their Lambic programme, which go on wider release to the public on 9 December.
One is Grappa Lambic, a 6% ABV blend of Lambic brewed in January and March 2020, likely to be a one-off and fermented in wine barrels before being transferred to the Grappa foeders for ageing. The other is a Cider Lambic, made with a 50-50 ratio of Lambic and heirloom apple and pear juice from an orchard in West Flanders, that have been fermented separately and then blended - although, with the cider portion comprising 70% perry juice and 30% apple juice you would be within your rights to call it a Perry Lambic.
At the launch, BBP’s founders note an important caveat: while they intend to produce Geuze, they are unlikely to release a beer with the name Oude Geuze - which is regulated by strict production requirements protected by European legislation. All of the Lambic they produce would conform to the rules for making an Oude Geuze blend, but oude (old) is not an adjective they are comfortable associating with their idea of the BBP brand.
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Beyond the glitzy presentation, the marketing talk about “making Geuze sexy”, and the grating hyperbole plaguing contemporary beer culture, it is hard to overstate the significance of the arrival of a new Lambic producer in Brussels. But this really is a seismic moment, not only for what it says about the evolving identity and the future of BBP, but also about the maturation of Brussels’ beer scene and the revival of the city’s brewing fortunes.
Lambic, together with its offshoots Faro, Geuze, and Kriek, are ur-Brussels beers. In fact, until the arrival of industrial brewing in the 1860s, they were virtually the only beers brewed in the city and came to be closely intertwined with its folklore and culture. But where it once had dozens of Lambic breweries, since the mid-1990s Brussels has been home to only one - Brasserie Cantillon.
The artisanal traditions that Cantillon have steadfastly kept alive were obliterated in the decades after WWII by the arrival of industrialised Lambic brewing championed by the Belle-Vue brewery in Molenbeek. It has been even longer since anyone started a new Lambic brewery, as far back as Belle-Vue in 1943, or even Cantillon in the late 1930s. Lambic breweries in the Zenne valley to Brussels’ south-west survived this cull better than their city colleagues, but by the time Belle-Vue’s owners announced their decision to move production out of Brussels in 1996, such was the decline in Lambic’s fortunes it must seemed unlikely that anyone would ever join Cantillon in brewing it within the city boundaries.
But in the years since, Lambic has undergone an unexpected revival. A small cohort of adventurous drinkers - many of them foreign - fell in love with its tart complexity. This buoyed the surviving breweries and attracted new producers - a trickle at first, but since the 2010s a relative flood of new breweries and blenderies. And even as Cantillon has played a fundamental part in this revival, all of the new producers - Tilquin, Lambiek Fabriek, and others - that have launched were based outside Brussels.
Brussels has experienced its own, parallel, brewing revival. Brasserie de la Senne arrived in 2010, and the number of breweries in the city has grown to a decades-long high of close to 20 as of 2021. These new breweries focused on conventional brewing - Pale Ales, IPAs and classic Belgian abbey styles. But many of this new generation of brewers have close ties to, or experience working at, Cantillon. They are all Lambic aficionados to a greater or lesser degree, and have a deep respect for Brussels’ beer heritage.
With an increasingly competitive marketplace forcing these new breweries to work harder to find themselves a successful niche, and with the new Lambic breweries of the Zenne valley showing that there was a successful business model for new Lambic breweries, it was only a matter of time before someone in Brussels other than Cantillon would join the Lambic fray.
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Lambic is a space-, cost-, time-, and labour-intensive beer to make. It makes sense that it’s one of the city’s longer-established breweries, and not a new entrant, that is making this move. What might be less logical to some people is that BBP are the ones to take that leap. They have, after all, the mantra “Leave the Abbey, Join the Playground” painted in blocky sans serif at the entrance to their brewery, and were launched back in 2013 with the enthusiastic iconoclasm of an upstart start-up.
Since its creation BBP has always leaned on Brussels in its identity and its branding - famously, to the well-publicised chagrin of some of their Brussels-based contemporaries in Brussels who saw a company contracting beers from Lochristi and Limburg with the words “Brussels” on their label and did not like it. Grudges die hard here, and it’s a resentment that continues to linger, even after BBP opened their Dansaert brewery in 2015.
A company well-known for its branding and marketing - still often dirty words in the world of Belgian beer - there will be people in Brussels’ beer community who might fear that this side of the business will take precedence over the rigours of authentic Lambic brewing. That corners may be cut, and short-cuts taken. But shortcuts are what doomed Lambic in the first place, and in 2021 you cannot open a Lambic brewery and not do it the right way. If you are to have any hope of success, you have to pay fealty to the culture - and the European legal protection - that have made the beers of the Zenne valley so idiosyncratic. Having leaned on Brussels for its success, their foray into Lambic is getting BBP to lean into these Brussels traditions.
To people who have visited Cantillon’s bi-annual public brew days, BBP’s set-up might seem inappropriately modern. But underneath the chrome tanks, shiny piping, and computer displays the brewers who run it have adopted the same laborious Lambic processes as their artisanal colleagues. They brew their Lambic with two-thirds malted barley and one-third unmalted wheat, and they have worked with a Belgian maltings in an attempt to reverse engineer a less modified malt that might ape some of the characteristics of malt used for Lambic brewing in the 19th century.
They employ a turbid mash to unlock the complex sugars and proteins the wild yeast will need during the long fermentation and maturation process. They do a long boil - longer than conventional brewing - and use old hops (American Cascade) aged on-site. They cool the wort in open coolships overnight. And they mature it in wooden barrels and foeders - many of which were previously used to make Grappa, giving their Lambic a signature warmth. And they are waiting the requisite number of years before they can bottle and release an Oude Geuze.
They have invited in the éminences grises - and not so grises - of Zenne valley Lambic brewing for advice and feedback. It has been a collective effort, with the experienced Dansaert brewery team dialing in their brewhouse and setting up the barrel store. They have been joined by Jordan Keeper, formerly head brewer at Texas’ Jester King, and Tiago Falcone, who ran London brewery Beavertown’s barrel-aging programme and was head brewer at Copenhagen’s Broaden and Build, people with deep knowledge of European and US spontaneous and mixed fermentation brewing and brought in to oversee the project.
And, right up until the stunt on the Grand Place and this week’s press launch, they've done it in a relatively atypical and under-the-radar Brussels Beer Project approach.
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It’s a big moment for Brussels brewing, but it’s also a big moment for BBP. As a business it has always had a bifurcated identity - with core beers made off-site and experimental and limited-run beers made in Brussels for the local market. Now, though, with the imminent opening of their new, purpose-built, 35,000hl “Port Sud” brewery in Anderlecht, they are merging these twin threads as the brewery centralises its conventional, or “clean”, brewing.
And just as they are about to embark on that challenging project, they are bifurcating once more - this time with one side of the business concentrating on conventional brewing, and the other brewing the most Brussels of Brussels beers. This will bring challenges. The Lambic community, for one, is instinctively cautious. Brewers still bear the scars of the culture’s lean years, and often reserve judgement on new producers until they see that they are not diluting Lambic’s identity by putting out beer they consider below a certain quality threshold.
BBP may also have to overcome a scepticism of their business model and identity that is deeply ingrained in a certain section of Belgian beer drinkers. And brewing Lambic - and getting it right - is hard. The breweries of the Zenne valley are good at what they do not because of some magic spores floating in the air, but because many of them have been doing it for decades, and some significantly longer.
For Keeper, Falcone and their colleagues, these challenges - at least the brewing ones - almost seem part of the point of the whole project. They’re involved because there is little more challenging for a brewer than building up a Lambic brewery from scratch. And anyway, a wag might argue, what is more iconoclastic for a business like BBP, that still sees itself as an upstart almost a decade in, than to set foot on the hallowed turf of one of Belgium’s most sacred beer traditions?
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For now, with the night’s chill drawing in on the Grand Place, the thoughts of the assembled brewers are on other concerns. As curious onlookers lean in and lob questions - and solicitations for a beer - corks are relieved of their crowns, and cans are cracked. People inch closer to the coolship in an effort to conduct some of its heat into their stiffening limbs.
There’s a restless energy hanging over the group, and a giddiness at the ease by which they have negotiated themselves this spot of prime Brussels real estate. There’s exhaustion too, the fatigue of a day’s Lambic brew working through their muscles. And there are nerves, and uncertainty, as eyes dart towards the coolship and heads begin to wonder how - and when - they are ever going to get it back home. Above them the neon lights flash in red around letters and words on the Town Hall again, asking the question: “Where are you from?”
