Object #38 - Zwanze 2009

21st century

Brewery Life

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On Saturday November 7, 2009, Brasserie Cantillon launched a new beer. Christened Zwanze 2009, it was a very limited-run Lambic aged with hand-picked elderflower. A brewery releasing a new beer is nothing exceptional - even if said brewery is Cantillon, makes Lambic, and works on a timescale of years rather than months and weeks like conventional breweries. This wasn’t even the first Cantillon Zwanze, that honour having been given a year previously to a rhubarb Lambic. But 2009 was an auspicious year for Cantillon, and 2009’s Zwanze an auspicious beer - one prefiguring a decade of Lambic growth, experimentation, and covetous-bordering-on-obsessive fan culture. 

Zwanze is a child of Brussels’ working-class neighbourhoods, a bawdy and knowing sense of humour, sometimes impenetrable to outsiders. Zwanze 2008’s label gives an example, of sorts: “A Lambic with vegetables? That’s true Zwanze!” Jean Van Roy, Cantillon’s owner, wanted to experiment with some Lambic heterodoxy - hence the rhubarb and elderflower - and Zwanze was useful shorthand. “The idea of this [beer] is to do…fun tests around Lambic without taking ourselves too seriously,” he said when launching 2009’s Zwanze. (Zwanze would later also land them in trouble for a crude and ill-judged cabaret performance in 2018, parts of which the brewery later said were a “huge mistake”.)

2009 saw the 40th anniversary of Jean-Pierre Van Roy taking over Cantillon from his father-in-law, and marked 30 years since Jean’s joining him. It also witnessed Van Roy père mashing in for his final Lambic brew. That Van Roy fils was now able to flirt with Lambic zwanzen was down to Jean-Pierre’s hard graft. He rescued the brewery in the late 1970s, spent the next decade keeping it solvent, and subsequent years nurturing it to profitability. 

Jean inherited a business that, having skirted oblivion, was entitled to indulge in a little frivolity. So there was rhubarb and elderflower Zwanze Lambics, and later a spontaneous witbier and “Wild Brussels Stout”. However experimental they were, they were no less successful than the brewery’s standard fare. Zwanze 2008 and 2009 would become semi-regular fixtures in Cantillon’s line-up as, respectively, Nath and Mamouche. There has since been more experimentation, under the Zwanze appellation but also in the brewery’s deepening exploration of, and comingling with, viniculture.

By Zwanze 2010’s release, bottles were leaking onto the black market, causing Jean to complain, ahead of Zwanze 2011, that “[u]nfortunately, there are those…who couldn't care less about spontaneous fermentation beer but who do care a lot about making easy money.” His response was Zwanze Day: a now-annual, synchronised worldwide release of that year’s beer celebrating Lambic’s phoenix-like revival from the 20th century’s deathly ashes, with the businesses who helped it happen. 

But a shift was underway in Lambic. As the Zenne valley’s spontaneous fermentation beers gained a global following, Lambic was becoming decontextualised from its heimat, from the anachronistic traditions that spoke to drinkers’ unarticulated yearning for a pre-modern idyll. Slowly, a new culture was emerging, identified by an acquisitive obsession with rarity, the influence of which was no joke.