Europe March 2004

A definite highlight of our trip to Europe were some brewery visits. Two of them that were particularly good were to Cantillon and Caracole since we had the rare opportunity to see both of these old world breweries in action.
Cantillon is a private family-owned brewery that was founded in 1900 in Brussels where lambic, faro, gueuze and kriek are household names, and where a museum has been established to protect the cultural, historical and scientific heritage of the Cantillon Brewery. You can visit it year round but the opportunity to be a part of the miracle of lambic brewing only comes around twice a year at their open brew days where you get to watch them brew. The brew day starts at 6:00 AM. We showed up mid morning while they were sparging the beer. Normally when you visit the brewery they have a self guided tour, but on open brew days they have guided tours. Our tour guide was Yvan from De Ranke brewery. Yvan was extremely knowledgeable and as I mentioned last week he was extremely passionate about brewing. Cantillon is a steam powered brewery and it was fantastic to see these great big belts turning the old machinery. The cleaning of the oak barrels was also interesting to watch.
Cantillon lambic beers are much different in taste and character then the popular Lindemans lambics. They are mouth-puckeringly sour. They meet at a crossroads where the differences between wine, beer and cider lose all meaning. No added yeasts are allowed. Mother Nature is left to her own devices to turn malt sugars into alcohol, just as the first beers were made several thousands of years ago. Once the beer is brewed it is left in the open air overnight to cool and to let the wild beasties that are floating through the air inoculate the beer and to begin the long fermentation process that takes from one to three years to complete.
I recommend going soon to visit because apparently the Belgian health authorities are having some problems in accepting that the reason that makes these beers so special. I can't figure out why they have a problem with old musty oak barrels, spider webs and holes in the roof since no one has ever died drinking the beer. Hopefully the lambic brewers will prevail and the health department will just go away and let them do what they've been doing for centuries.
The other brewery visit that I thought was great was at the little artisanal Brasserie La Caracole which is located in a small village named Falmignoul. Even though it is a really small brewery over half of their production is sold outside of Belgium. One of the things that make it so unique is that it is the last brewery in Europe that boils the wort by wood fire. They have someone come in the night before brewing to keep the fire going all night in order to heat up the large quantity of water they need. It is truly a farmhouse brewery, they even have old hitching posts inside the brewery where they used to tie up horses.

The owners are former homebrewers who took over the brewery in 1992 after it had lied dormant for 40 years or so. Most of the equipment is probably over 100 years old. I even spied some oak barrels that had a date of 1760 on them. Even though they are brewing on a really old system they do ferment and bottle their beer on some more modern equipment that is probably only 25 years old or so. Currently they are looking for a new grinder because the one they have is 100 years old and it takes them 8 hours just to grind the grain. Old equipment or not, Caracole beer is a better beer than any mass-produced malt beverage from any macrobrewery.

They make five beers, four of which we have at Papago. The beers we have are Troubelette which is a Wit, Saxo which is a blond ale, Caracole which is a amber and my favorite which is Nostradamus which is a strong dark ale. While at the 24 hours of beer fest I discussed with the brewer about the possibility of making a fruit beer especially for us so later that week when we visited he had a number of different fruit syrups available for us to experiment with and while I initially wanted to make a cassis beer, a Kreik (cherry) beer won out. He is going to make a few small batches to see how they hold up but hopefully if everything works out we will have our own Papago Creek Belgian beer later this year.

Prost, Ron