Brussels Beer Project's Dansaert Gueuze // An Oral History
Photos: Cliff Lucas
Brussels Beer Project (BBP)’s newest beer may also be its most consequential - if not for the brewery, then at least for Brussels’ wider brewing revival. In December 2021 BBP announced - with a stunt on Brussels’ Grand Place - that they’d become the first brewery in the city in decades to start making Lambic, launching their first two blends. Two and a half years later, their Lambic project has taken its next logical step: the Dansaert Gueuze, the release of which coincides with BBP’s tenth birthday and the latest edition of their Wanderlust festival on 9-10 September.
The Dansaert Gueuze is the culmination of BBP’s mixed- and spontaneous-fermentation Dansaert brewery project, a beer that’s been in the works since January 2020.
But the Dansaert Gueuze - a blend of one-, two-, and three-year-old Lambics made to the Oude Geuze specifications set down in EU law - is not just a milestone for BBP. It’s a landmark beer for Brussels too, because it’s the first of its kind to have been made in Brussels by a new producer for several generations. Lambic, indigenous to Brussels and once one of the city’s dominant beer styles, was virtually extinct by the early 1990s. There were only two lambic breweries left in Brussels, and only one - Brasserie Cantillon - still making beer the same way as previous generations of brewers. In fact, such was the complete eradication of the Lambic tradition in the 20th century that it’s entirely unclear who preceded BBP as the previous newest Lambic brewery.
What is clear is that the Dansaert Gueuze is a generational beer for the Brussels beer scene - before you even consider what it tastes like. Reason enough, when Sam Fleet* of BBP got in touch to let me know the beer was coming out, to sit down with Sam and the rest of the team responsible for guiding BBP’s Dansaert project from uncertain beginnings to the launch of this Gueuze.
So here it is - the oral history of Brussels Beer Project’s Dansaert Gueuze, as told by those who made it.
If Lambic is new to you, here’s a quick précis of the style and its unorthodox production methods.
The following has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
You can listen to a longer version of this conversation at the Brussels Beer City Podcast here and on all the usual platforms.
(*Disclaimer: Sam and I made a collaboration beer together with BBP for the launch of my first book in 2020.)
Part 1 - Origins and Inspiration
Unlike their fellow Lambic and Gueuze producers in Brussels and the Payottenland, the team behind BBP’s Dansaert programme all have (with one exception) foreign backgrounds, from countries with little to no tradition in spontaneous fermentation. But for each of them - English, Portuguese, Brazilian, and American - their discovery of Gueuze was fundamental in shaping the kind of beer they wanted to make as brewers. One Brussels brewery in paticular features prominently in their respective damascene moments.
Sam Fleet (SF), production manager I arrived in Brussels 14 years ago, and I’d heard about this incredible brewery called Cantillon. So the first thing I did was go down and spend two hours walking around and tasting the beer. "What a waste of time," I thought afterwards. I had no idea what I was tasting. I had never tried a spontaneous beer before. I don't think I really knew what Lambic was. But then I was like, there's got to be something more to this. So I persisted, until my taste buds adapted and I realised kind of what a wonderful and complex beer that this was.
Jordan Keeper (JK), brewer My first Gueuze experience was on the porch of Jester King [ed: the brewery in Texas, where Keeper worked] in the summer of 2011. Someone had returned from a trip to Brussels and brought back a bottle of Cantillon Gueuze. I remember it being a ridiculously, ludicrously hot day. And we split this bottle amongst four or five of us. It was mind bending. I had tried maybe one beer that was quite funky and sour before that, but this was something [completely] different and definitely changed the trajectory of everything for me that came after.
“I had no idea what I was tasting. I had never tried a spontaneous beer before. I don’t think I really knew what Lambic was.”
David Santos (DS), brewer I was working for one of the first craft breweries in Portugal, and I think my first connection with the style was Boon Mariage Parfait. When I think about these kinds of beers being all about balance, Mariage Parfait was a perfect introduction for me. It was a balanced beer that didn’t make me run away from a huge amount of acidity. But more important [to me] was Cantillon. When I came to Belgium as a tourist, I was already in the beer industry, so I was already a bit aware of what to expect and I had a bit of the taste for Lambic. But the real immersive experience was doing the little tour at Cantillon and trying Lambic, Guezue, Kriek and getting more passionate about what was coming out of those magical barrels.
Tiago Falcone (TF), brewer For me it was Cantillon as well. For the first time in Brussels in 2010 and visiting the Museum of Gueuze and discovering all these beers. And in 2021, I did a tasting with my dad and my brother, who are also brewers, of a vertical of ten years of Gueuze Boon Mariage Parfait. And that was a fun moment.
Dimitri Van Roy (DVR), BBP’s “Geek-in-Chief”: When you start drinking lambic and Gueuze, the first thing you notice is the acidity. And it's something to get used to. But over time you realise more and more how much of a bitter backbone is important, and that's something that I've come to appreciate. People are always talking about sour, sour, sour. But sometimes when I try international beers that are trying to recreate Gueuze and Lambic I think that sometimes what’s lacking is that bitterness that is quite distinguishable for certain Gueuzes, like those from 3 Fonteinen.
Part 2 - In the beginning, there was Lambic
Before they could blend a Gueuze they first had to brew some Lambic (brewing takes place exclusively in the winter), which they did in January 2020 - before their cellar was ready. It was, for a brewery which had heretofore largely focused on so-called “clean” beers - i.e. beers made through conventional fermentation - and which was not built for the kind of idiosyncratic processes required to make traditional Lambic. The Grappa Lambic they launched with their December 2021 stunt, was the first result of their efforts.
“We knew we had to make Gueuze. If we were going to start a new Lambic brewery in Brussels, this was a requirement. Absolutely, we had to do it. ”
JK Our very first Lambic season began in January 2020 and ended sometime in April that same year. That Lambic did its fermentation in Côtes du Rhône and Bordeaux wine barrels in a small cellar, affectionately known as the “spooky basement”. We had to get our first season off the ground and we brewed ten batches that season, which was pretty amazing to get into all of the barrels we had down in that cellar. The next Lambic season, we transferred all of the liquid from those barrels into Grappa foeders, barrels of approximately 2000 litres sourced from Italy, where it aged for another six months or so before being bottled. There is a very present Grappa flavour to this first Lambic, and perhaps a lot more oak character than you find in most Lambic beers, because of the double barrel ageing.
SF We'd done the research and we'd kind of translated the “turbid mashing” regime onto the system we had, which is not a traditional system for Lambic brewing. We’d designed and built the coolship. We had the lambic recipe, the mash regime. We implemented a few other things like mash hopping, etc., to maximise the hop leaf component, but we didn't really know if it was going to work.
SF We knocked a hole in the wall of the cellar too, and added some fans so we could get a cross flow of air across the coolship. I wouldn't say we were winging it. We knew what we were doing, but we didn't know it was going to work. And we put that stuff in barrels and I remember coming back to it three, maybe four months later, and the character was already super expressive, like actually, "Wow, this is working." I mean, the research paid off. We knew what we were doing. But until you stick it in the barrels, you don't know what's going to happen.
Gueuze was, however, always the end goal for a portion of the Dansaert brewery production. What kind of a Gueuze it was exactly going to be, they found out through experimentation, advice from colleagues in other lambic breweries, and inspiration from what was already on the market. It would be something that respected the traditions, but also paid fealty to BBP’s existing brand identity.
SF If you rewind back, the sour project - which is what we were calling it at the time - was not super conceptually clear. We had lots of ideas. It took a while to narrow down the concept.
DVR All the different kinds of BBP beers would move to this new brewery at Port Sud, especially if they had to be “clean” beers. So it was an easy thought for us to be like, “Hey, can we do this here?” Because there's all this space and we would love to do this project.
SF We looked back through the royal decrees from Belgium for Gueuze and for Lambic, and the EU regulations on what you can and can't call Gueuze. I think we never wanted to call the Gueuze an Oude Geuze, which is protected, but also because that's not necessarily BBP. But if we wanted to, we could. We respected all of those traditions in terms of process, [and] in terms of raw materials.
JK We knew we had to make Gueuze. If we were going to start a new Lambic brewery in Brussels, this was a requirement. Absolutely, we had to do it. That was something that we knew from day one when we decided that Lambic was going to be made on this site, that there was going to be a new Gueuze in town.
TF [But] we don't come from a tradition of generations and generations [of brewers]. We didn't inherit a brewery from somebody else who taught us all these techniques. We do our research and we try to make something out of nothing. How many breweries in Brussels are making Lambic with an American, a Portuguese, an Englishman and a Brazilian? So we had to do our research. We had to talk to other brewers and try to come up with this thing that we didn't know exactly how it would come out. We had a good idea what we would make, and we learned along the journey.
SF If we flashback six years, we knew what we wanted it to be. It would be the first Gueuze from Brussels for I think at least like 50, 60 years. So there was also the element of being the first to release a new Gueuze from Brussels. But I think we did it sensitively. Along the way, we talked to everyone who was involved. Cantillon, for example, Boon. We didn't want to be treading on anyone's toes.
TF The one thing we knew is that we like balance, and we wanted a Gueuze with identity. We tried to aim at that and the first one that's coming out has a lot of experimentation in it, and a lot of learning curve in it.
Respecting Lambic traditions and processes meant respecting the rules around three key aspects of Lambic brewing: grains, hops, and yeast.
SF It’s not just that it's a new Gueuze in Brussels that makes it unique. Raw materials wise, it's [also] quite unique, because of our work with regenerative Pilsner malts. Which is now very popular, but at the time the first delivery was from the back of a pickup truck in unlabelled bags of malts that we'd customised to specs that we had researched and read from brewing records.
JK We worked with a Belgian cooperative of grain growers that grows barley to a particular brewing specification around the Brussels region. We asked if we could have a batch that was malted to our own specifications, which was essentially less modified than the barley we would traditionally go for. This leaves behind more starchy-ness and allows for a wort that is a bit richer. It's harder to brew, but what we wanted was to give some hard-to-ferment sugars [to feed our yeast] for a very long spontaneous fermentation. We could then prolong fermentation so we wouldn't have everything fermented out all at once. And perhaps also, we could have a beer that was softer and rounder, that had a little bit of body to it and perhaps even some head retention.
JK In addition there's unmalted wheat - we were able to find a farmer locally - and we add a small amount of oats as well. That is an ingredient that's maybe not common for most Lambic brewers, but it's something, again, that we thought would add a little bit of roundness, of graininess, of some added interest, and that roundness kind of pillowy-ness that you can find in some really nice soft lambic.
SF It's not like we're heretics. If you look back a hundred years people were throwing whatever grains they could get cheap on the market. So oats weren’t a new idea, and I think that still respects traditional Lambic production. And then of course you need to have aged hops. When we were going into this program we didn't have a [hop-]ageing program. We needed to reach out [and] Frank Boon [of the Boon brewery] became super helpful. He provided us with leaf hops he had been ageing for five or six years. And that adds a whole other layer of character to the beer.
DS I remember when we started to talk about old hops I was contacting some suppliers and just asking them, “What is the oldest hops you have in storage?” And they were like, “What do you mean?!”.
JK There was a hop miracle that happened [too]. We were cleaning out a stockroom and behind a shelf found old bags of hops that had been opened in many cases and were just beautifully oxidised. The previous brewers that worked here, they must have known that someday we would need aged hops because they left us some gold that we used in the second and third Lambic brews. And they're probably still some of those hops around today in our beers.
Certain malts and aged hops are integral to modern-day Lambic brewing. But if we’re talking about spontaneous fermentation, then we’re talking about yeast and other microbes that do the real work of turning freshly-brewed wort into Lambic beer. These come in two ways: from the air and from the barrels used to age the beer. And unlike many of their contemporaries, BBP’s Dansaert brewery was “clean”, and they weren’t altogether sure what kind of microbiome existed in the building’s fabric or in the barrels they’d sourced from Italy and France.
JK We were not sure what we were going to get when we started out. When we first tasted some of the lambics after that initial season, we tried some things that tasted like a Hefeweizen that had a severe brett infection. [Tasting like] pineapple and bubblegum, with a big side of ham sandwich. [But] there were some really interesting barrels too. We clearly saw an alcoholic fermentation that happened initially, with a Brett funk that came on after just a couple of months in the barrel. And then we saw acidification that started happening. This was the hope we had - that we could have this [acidic] bacterial fermentation happen last - so we could restrain the beer’s acidity, so that we could have a really nice development of flavours, and so that we could also have a really healthy fermentation.
“We didn’t inherit a brewery from somebody else who taught us all these techniques. We do our research and we try to make something out of nothing. How many breweries in Brussels are making Lambic with an American, a Portuguese, an Englishman and a Brazilian?”
TF [Ultimately], there is always going to be a component from the air and a component from the barrels [in inoculation] - you’re always going to have a bit of each one in your Lambic fermentation.
JK Tiago found that it's possible that there was even Lambic brewed in [our] cellar or nearby. There was certainly Lambic brewed up and down the canal all around here. So we knew that this area can make Lambic. It hadn't been done in a while over here, but Cantillon is also not that far away. There was an idea that it could be done, but we weren't certain really what existed all around us in this particular space. In that very first season, inoculation was quite organic, in this really [traditional], romantic way. But in subsequent seasons…we were really happy with the many barrels and foeders where we did have fermentation occur, and extremely happy to see fermentation happen again in those same vessels [in subsequent seasons]…It was really cool to be able to build in a little bit of consistency.
Part 3 - “I didn't really know what was going to happen”
Wrangling the microbes in the brewery was just one of the challenges they faced on setting out to brew Lambic for the first time. There was also the small matter of the COVID-19 pandemic, bending modern equipment to old-fashioned techniques, brewing “clean” “and “wild” beers in the same location, and the small matter of a warming climate. Lambic requires very specific climatic conditions to make successful beer, and these can be tricky to achieve as summers - and winters - in Brussels continue to warm.
TF The temperature really makes a difference when you're brewing. The presence of bacteria and yeast in the air varies a lot between summer and winter. In summer you have more bacteria than yeast in the air, and then in winter you have more yeast. If you have a good cellar - which means there's no big variation - that’s important, which we do. [But] on a week in the summer that gets to 35 degrees outside, we notice our cellar can [sometimes] get to 25, 26 degrees. That's not ideal.
DS We had to run a very clean operation, because we were doing pop ups and a lot of [conventional] beers going into cans. There's a lot of risks associated with putting those clean beers in cans when you have a spontaneous environment for these kinds of Lambic beers. We were packaging everything in a different packaging line, everything by hand. We tried to keep things separated as much as possible.
SF The initial [technical] challenges were adapting the Lambic mashing regime and the use of whole leaf aged hops to a [brewing] system that wasn't designed for it. That was tough. Things like learning to bypass heat exchangers, eyeballing volumes when filling the coolship. We experienced lots more evaporation than we expected, for example. [And] I personally had never brewed anything where we boiled it for three hours and left it overnight to cool. I didn't really know what was going to happen. There were process challenges [but] also conceptual challenges, and as soon as you start having barrels, everything gets even more complex.
“We had to run a very clean operation, because we were doing pop ups and a lot of [conventional] beers going into cans. There’s a lot of risks associated with putting those clean beers in cans when you have a spontaneous environment for these kinds of Lambic beers”
JK We had days where we were transferring to the coolship from upstairs while we were doing other clean transfers and brewing at the same time, trying to make sure that we had enough pumps and hoses and little pieces of equipment. And then on top of all that, we built out an entirely new cellar in the midst of COVID. That was a really big, unexpected challenge. We had to turn what was a furniture store into this beautiful cellar. And that was certainly really, really tough.
DS Where we are [in the Dansaert brewery cellar], it is super challenging to put these massive foeders. And I think all of the structural complexities too - the ground beneath us is very sandy [for example]. We had to have a structural engineer to help us to have the right floor, explaining to us that they needed to put tiles that were expensive because structurally they were way better than laying an epoxy layer on the floor. Then there was the massive challenge during COVID of having a team of coopers assembling all of the foeders piece by piece. There were so many challenges we had even before we started, and afterwards, that it's quite nostalgic to think about it. I'm very proud of all we achieved.
SF At the same time, the foundations for Port Sud - BBP’s new brewery - were being placed. With, of course, a whole new team of brewers to help us operate that brewery arriving in September, October, November of 2021. There was a lot going on.
Part 4 - And Then There Was Gueuze (actually, there was three)
After all that, three years later the end result is ready for its big release. A Brussels Beer Project Dansaert Guezue - and not just one. After extensive taste testing and mixing and matching of all the Lambic in their cellars, the Dansaert team settled on three Gueuze blends - each of them, as is required, comprising various proportions of one-, two-, and three-year-old Lambic.
JK We had a few tasting sessions where we tasted through every barrel of Lambic in the building. And then we broke things down, decided whether we thought this barrel or that might be better for certain blends. It was an ongoing tasting exercise that Tiago and Dimitri and Maxfield and myself were actively engaging in on a pretty regular basis. From the very first year we knew that we had to set aside some liquid for the Gueuze, [but] things got a lot more real when we all sat down and started experimenting with blends of different barrels. We did this a few times to think about the different kinds of blends that were possible, and we ended up with three different blends of Gueuze.
“I wouldn’t say we were winging it. We knew what we were doing, but we didn’t know it was going to work.”
TF We tried to learn from [each of the] three different proportions [of Lambic]. To see what we liked the most, what got more carbonation after fermentation, what the final gravity would be after fermentation in the bottle. Because that's something that you find out [only] after learning how to work with your own Lambic. That's [also] why we did three different blends with different proportions [of Lambic].
DVR The three year old proportion is the same in each…and [as] we only did ten brews then, the oldest proportion is the smallest. We're somewhere around 10% in all of the three blends, and all from the same Grappa foeders. As we started brewing more Lambic in the second and third years, we started to have more options. That also meant we could start to play around a bit more [with proportions]. The bulk is coming from the one-year-old Lambic which gives a bit of sugar. The three year old is probably the most complex [Lambic], but the two year old…is probably the most determining factor in the differences of these three blends.
JK From blend to blend, there are going to be Gueuze drinkers that can tell the difference. And I'm not going to pretend like all three are exactly the same. The oldest proportion, the three-year-old Lambic, has the most angular acidity and has probably the most barrel character. It also has some oxidative characteristics as well. Our three year old Lambic was all double barrel-aged, just by the fact of starting the program where we had the “spooky basement” in effect, and we had these reworked Bordeaux barrels and Côtes du Rhône barrels. That [first] liquid went into Grappa foeders. It really needs to be balanced out with some two-year-old Lambic, which has elements of a one- and three-year-old. The two-year-old has an acidity that's softer, but it doesn't yet have the oxidative characteristics of a three year old. Our two-year-old also doesn't have the barrel characteristics that our three-year-old has, [and] it has acidity that is not angular like the three year old, but it's young acidity. The sugars that are left behind by the one-year-old definitely affect the refermentation in the bottle.
JK You can talk a lot about years, but the size of the barrels and different kinds of barrels also had a major influence on the flavours that we’ve generated. Some Lambic did fermentation in Grappa foeders, but it also did fermentation in 600-litre barrels, 500-litre barrels and 225-litre barrels. We saw that even a one-year-old Lambic that was in a 225-litre barrel might be more similar to what a two-year-old Lambic would taste like from a 600-litre barrel. There's so many factors going on here that it's really fun to taste all the different things. But it can be really overwhelming too if you don't stop and slow down and think about how each element affects every other element.
DVR I think we went in very open-minded into the blending of these three first Gueuzes. We knew if we would aim for three quite different profiles, mostly based on those two- and one-year-old Lambics, we would learn the most from the process. All these Lambic brewers have blending experience for many, many decades. But we just wanted to keep things open to see how the blends evolved in the bottle.
Can we already talk about a “house style” from these first three BBP Gueuzes, in the same way you might be able to for the likes of Cantillon, Boon or 3 Fonteinen? Opinions haven’t crystallised on this point quite yet.
DVR I don't think there's a house character completely yet, because can you do that after your first three blends? I don't think so. This is just the start of a longer journey.
“There’s so many factors going on here that it’s really fun to taste all the different things. But it can be really overwhelming too if you don’t stop and slow down and think about how each element affects every other element.”
JK I like Gueuze that has a very particular identifiable house character. Something that, when you taste it, you know what it is and where it comes from. I think that Boon definitely does that… I think that there are definitely some flavours that you can find that are similar [in BBP’s Lambic] from barrel to barrel when you start tasting around in the cellar. There's a very particular honey-like flavour that I was able to identify in many different barrels that I think is also present in the Gueuze itself. The acidity is fairly similar from blend to blend as well. So there are similarities there.
TF We need to constantly put ourselves next to other Gueuze producers. And we try to compare and have a reference to them. We try to taste what we have and try to direct it for the next blend. Because at the end of this year we start all this process again, for Gueuze 2023.
Part 5 - What Next?
Three years in the making, and here it is. The Dansaert Gueuze. But you won’t find the Oude anywhere on the label of the bottles being released at the Wanderlust festival - despite this beer adhering to all of the requirements that appellation entails. It’s a very deliberate decision.
TF We want to bring it to the world as something new, not something old. Our public is looking for something new. We don't need to be attached to the old. It - Oude Geuze - comes from a long time ago, but it has a future as well.
DVR The BBP crowd doesn't understand the [nomenclature], you know? Like, “Why is there Oude or is there new or…why is there a need to put old on that?” It's just Guezue. Like, I wish natural wine could just be wine. We effed things up making these kinds of products in the past, by adding sugar and pasturising so it could go to a wider crowd. I think [now] we just want to showcase what the product is. We follow the rules to make it an Oude Geuze. But we just do our own thing. And that's why this is our Gueuze from Dansaert. Whether it's Oude or not you can do the research, you can ask us, but there's no need for us to put that on the label.
SF My hope is that Brussels Beer Project can do what they do well, which is to help popularise - or repopularise in this case - a style, Gueuze and Lambic. I mean, it's a fantastic style and I hope that we can kind of be a driving force that brings that back to Brussels. Because when I moved here 14 years ago, it was near impossible to drink anything other than Boon from the night shop. So my hope is that we can be a driving force to do that. And the more the merrier.
But the Brussels of September 2023 is a very different place to that of January 2020. The challenges BBP - and their Brussels colleagues - are of a different order of magnitude to stuck mash tuns and sourcing old hops. And keeping an idiosyncratic project like the Dansaert brewery going is more difficult than it was.
SF The last few years have been very, very difficult. COVID was challenging enough. But then of course, there was the kind of perfect storm of inflation, war, climate change - all those things that made it quite difficult to be a brewery. The Dansaert programme has gone from a very broad kind of spontaneous and mixed fermentation programme to a bit more narrow now. But it still has Lambic and Gueuze as part of its core - what we’d call the BBP “all-stars” of the Dansaert brewery. And then there are [still] the [kinds of] blends where I think the Lambic becomes very much more a BBP beer - using new or different kinds of barrels, different fruits, foraged ingredients [and other kinds of experimentation].
“We follow the rules to make it an Oude Geuze. But we just do our own thing. And that’s why this is our Gueuze from Dansaert. Whether it’s Oude or not you can do the research, you can ask us, but there’s no need to put that on the label.”
JK We did [for example] a collaboration with Freigeist that is a spontaneously fermented smoked beer with some gooseberries in it. There's Continental Plates Collide, a collaboration with A Tue Tete from Switzerland, that is a blend of all of the base beers from Dansaert. There are many, many things to come.
And as much as the Dansaert Gueuze is an important milestone for BBP’s Lambic project and for the brewery’s 10th anniversary, it also marks the end of the BBP adventure for two of the men crucial to its creation - Jordan Keeper is no longer working at the brewery, and Dimitri Van Roy’s time at BBP finishes at the end of the Wanderlust festival.
JK Time has compressed in a way that is so surprising. It seems like yesterday that we were cutting a hole in the wall to let the night air in for the Lambic, and we were banging together these foeders down here in the cellar. During the first blends, it seemed like a Gueuze was a far away dream. And today we have it in bottles in front of us. And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I feel incredibly lucky that I was able to come to Brussels to brew Lambic. That's something that is just an incredible opportunity that I never thought in my lifetime that I would have a chance to do. And now, I have [my own] blendery that's in the works, called Rattle Rattle. Products will be out in the market, if all goes well, next year.
DVR It's been eight great years, [with] lots of really cool experiences seeing this company and this team grow. And having no clue in 2015 that we were going to make Gueuze, absolutely not. That was definitely not in the plan. And I think maybe I'm still underestimating that we actually made it and this is going to go out in the world and [I can’t wait] to see people's reaction. For myself, it's just time for something else. I’ve got a young son at home and that puts stuff in perspective. I don't know what's next, but that's also fine.
Brussels Beer Project’s Dansaert Gueuze will be officially launched at the Wanderlust beer festival on 9-10 September in Brussels. Details here.
Listen to the full roundtable discussion on the Brussels Beer City Podcast here.