Cantillon

"Le temps ne respecte pas ce qui se fait sans lui." --A sign at Cantillon

For those of us who love lambics and guezes, visiting Cantillon is something of a pilgrimage. When I told beer-lovers in Pittsburgh that I was headed to Brussels, the number one follow-up question was, "Are you going to Cantillon?" And the follow-up question to that question was, "Will you bring me a bottle?"

On the morning of my visit, I woke briefly, early, and had that little-kid-on-Christmas-morning flash of excitement when I remembered that today was Cantillon day.

Most tours at Cantillon are self-guided. After a brief introduction, you're handed a brochure written in your native tongue. You follow little plaques with sequential numbers and the Cantillon drunken-man logo, then read the corresponding numbered information on your brochure.

Once a week, though, Cantillon offers a fully guided, 90-minute tour in French. My French is far from fluent, but I figured that gleaning 75% of the French tour would still leave me with more information than the English brochure could offer. So I booked the French tour.

Rose de Gambrinus, Cantillon's frambroise.

Before it began, I enjoyed a glass of Rosé de Gambrinus, Cantillon's framboise (raspberry lambic), and scoped out my fellow pilgrims. I heard a whole lot of English being spoken in the brewery's tiny taproom. I saw someone wearing an Ohio State t-shirt (Columbus is my hometown). In another corner, I spotted someone in a Pitt t-shirt (Pittsburgh is my current town). How odd to feel like I was in the Midwest while I drank my first Cantillon.

The photo to the left doesn't do justice to the Gambrinus's appearance - it is electric pink. So much raspberry on the nose - along with some deliciously overripe cherry and strawberry aromas. The taste is a little funky, but with the tartness of the berry overpowering everything else. (It'll even make you think of those pink or red Starbursts that you loved as a kid). Super dry. Super delicious.

The tour began, and our guide started by teaching us the fundamental steps of brewing: heat the grist (whatever grains you'll be using to give the yeast sugar), lauter (separate the wort from the grains), boil and add hops, filter hops out. He then noted that we were all of us brewers, actually - because anyone who had ever made a cup of tea or coffee, he contended, had mastered the process of brewing by adding coffee grounds or tea leaves to water, boiling them, then filtering out the grounds or leaves. Ha.

Note that he didn't get to what most of us consider an absolutely essential step of brewing: pitching yeast (which we definitely do not do when preparing a cup of tea or coffee). Because at Cantillon, they don't pitch yeast. This is what makes a lambic a lambic. They simply put the wort into the beauty of a coolship pictured below and leave it to cool over night. Sixty-some kinds of yeast, attracted by the sugary water, find their way through the windows and cracks in the roof and settle in to the liquid to do their job of converting its sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

Cantillon's coolship. Ain't she a beaut?

Outside the room that houses the coolship, our guide talked about which months of the year allow brewing (I think he said something about stopping before cherry season begins) - conditions that are either too cold or too hot will ruin Cantillon's delicate process. He noted a recent winter during which it stayed too cold to brew for an entire month. Most breweries use glycol to cool their beer, or gasoline to heat their breweries to allow year-round brewing, but Cantillon remains subject to nature's whims.

Because nature is so important to Cantillon's beer, they don't mess with it. All around the brewery you find cobwebs, dust, and spiders. When I showed a picture of the wall next to the coolship to the head brewer of Hop Farm (the picture all the way to the right below), he chuckled because our assistant brewers had just spent the weekend scouring and sterilizing every inch of Hop Farm's brewery. To most brewers, this kind of uncontrolled environment spells disaster for their product. At Cantillon, though, each spider-web is cherished.

After the tour, we enjoyed a couple more tastes: a 15-month lambic and then a gueze. The lambic was golden clear, with zero head. In the barrel-aging room, our guide called our attention to bubbles frothing out around the stopper on the top of a barrel. He even let us dip a finger in the bubbles and take a taste. (Many mutters of "Ah, degoutant!" surrounded me at this point, though everyone was smiling. That froth is one of the bitterest things I've ever tasted.) At Cantillon, the yeast expel all their carbon dioxide in the barrels, and because Cantillon gives them no more sugar to eat in the bottles, Cantillon's finished beers pour flat. The lambic was quite dry, with that lovely funk that you expect from a lambic (barny, woody, oaky). It was a little sweet in its sourness, which I loved.

As I enjoyed the kriek, I had a nice chat with a beer-lover from Montreal, whose recent travels convinced me to return to Belgium to explore the northern part of the country, especially Ghent and Antwerp.

Brasserie l'Érmitage

Down the street from Cantillon is the nanobrasserie l'Érmitage, which couldn't be more different from Cantillon. L'Érmitage is also highlighted in the Beer Advocate article that I linked to in my notes on the Brussels Beer Project, "Leave the Abbey, Join the Playground: The Crucial Influence of Foreign Breweries on Belgian Beer" (May 2017). The lead photo for that article, in fact, features the brewers of l'Érmitage:

François Simon, Nacim Menu, and Henri Bensaria, founders of Ermitage. Photo credit: Natalie Hill for Beer Advocate. — François Simon, Nacim Menu, and Henri Bensaria, founders of Ermitage. Photo credit: Natalie Hill for *Beer Advocate*.

Henri, the guy on the right in the photo above, was behind the bar when I visited, along with an adorable little blonde girl whose parentage I never could place. She really wanted to practice her English while she poured my beer, assisted by another bartender and a little step-stool that allowed her to reach the tap-handles. Having just visited Cantillon, and about to enjoy some Simcoe and Citra hops, I was already pretty happy, but this little beertender made me even happier. I asked her if she wanted to be a brasseuse when she grew up (you can make brasseur ("brewer") feminine like that, right?), and she nodded enthusiastically. Get it, girl.

It's hard to be anything but happy at Brasserie l'Érmitage. To enter, you walk through a grey, industrial courtyard. But once inside the taproom, you are treated to walls covered with cheerful colors and tons of sun pouring through warehouse windows that cover the front wall.

I tasted two Érmitage beers and a Citra Pale Ale from Kernel Brewery in the UK. Hands-down, my favorite beer was Érmitage's IPA de Papa, a session IPA (4.2%). As I raised it to my lips, I smelled so much of those juicy Citra and Simcoe hops I mention above. The mouthfeel was light and bubbly, those bubbles all the more refreshing after sipping Cantillon's purposely flat lambics. The IPA de Papa tastes more bitter than the aroma would lead you to expect, but the beer still reminded me of home in all the right ways.

And with that, my time in Brussels was up. I had to get down to Strasbourg for some French lessons that I had arranged.

Christian and Ana did not climb into this for me: photo credit: Jean-Francois Badia.

While in Strasbourg, I popped over to Bières Artisinales Perle to visit with its owners, Christian and Ana, who were nice enough to show me around their brewery, which is usually closed to the public. I tasted their delicious whiskey-barrel-aged black beer, and Christian scooped me on the up-and-coming craft beer scene in France. There are now 1,200 breweries in France, he tells me, with hotspots especially around Lille, Lyon, and Marseilles. So I've already started to sketch out my future beer-trip to France, in addition to my return trip to Belgium.

But first, I think I need to visit some of America's own great beer scenes: maybe Asheville, NC and Portland, OR to start. Seriously, what a time to be a beer lover.