Cantillon Brewery
Within a few hours of Kiley and Erich's arrival, we were on our way to Brussels, Belgium. First stop, Cantillon Brewery for a self-guided tour and tasting of their Lambic beer. This brewery was established in 1900 and is now considered the last traditional family run brewery in Brussels.
Room 1. Mashing House- Wheat and barley are put into a crushing machine and then pass into a mashing tub (shown below). Warm water is added to convert the starch in the cereals to fermentable sugars and then hot water is added to allow to the extraction of sugar from the cereals. The remaining liquid is called wort.
Room 2. Hop Boilers and Crushing Machine- The hop boiler (made of red copper) mixes and cooks hops and wort. Sugar concentration rises as a result of volume reduction, and later on yeasts convert these sugars into alcohol and CO2 during fermentation. The crushing machine (gray metal machine to the right of the picture below) crushes wheat and malted barley as mentioned above in Room #1.
Room 3. Granary- Wheat, malted barley and hops are stored here during brewing season (mid October-beginning of April).
Room 4. Cooling Tun Room- The red copper vessel is used to speed up the natural cooling of wort once the hops have been cooked and removed. About 7,500 litres of liquid wort are pumped into this vessel and should reach a temperature of 18-20 degrees Celsius through contact with cold air, which explains why the brewing season only lasts from October to April.
Room 5A. Barrel Store- From the cooling tun, wort is pumped into oak or chestnut barrels where spontaneous fermentation takes place in a few days. This means that yeast is not added to inoculate the wort (as with other present day beers), but rather wort is inoculated with airborne wild yeasts which cause fermentation, resulting only in Lambic beer. While all beers used to be made in this way, many breweries now use stainless steel vessels and cooling systems to control the fermentation process. Apparently, fermentation is initially violent and visible- production of CO2 is so violent that barrels cannot be closed for fear of explosion and a whitish foam comes out of the "bunghole." Three to four weeks later, slow fermentation starts and continues for three years. In this time, 20% of liquid will be lost by evaporation. Interestingly, some yeast form a layer which isolates the beer completely from the air in the barrel.
Room 5B. The Making of Gueuze and Fruit Beers- To make Gueuze, the brewer blends 1, 2, and 3 year old lambic. The young beer supplies natural sugars for fermentation in the bottle, old beer contributes to bouquet and fine taste. Beer is pumped into the stainless steel tank (to the right shown below) where a filter filled with cellulose blocks particles but lets sugar into the bottle.
Fruit beers are made by adding regional fruit such as cherries, raspberries or grapes to 2 year old lambic beer. After at least 3 months, the beer has extracted taste, color and sugar from the fruit. At this time, one third of young lambic is added (supplies sugar for fermentation) and the beer is filtered and bottled.
Room 6. Cleaning of the Barrels- Barrels are cleaned manually, with steam, and mechanically.
Erich trying to help out...
Room 7. Bottling- This bottling machine can fill up to 1,200 bottles per hour and a conveyor belt moves the bottles to the cellars.
Room 8. Cellars- Filled bottles are stored in cellars (shown below) for several months, during which time sugars of young lambic cause a second fermentation. CO2 produced by yeasts saturates the beer and turns lambic into Gueuze.
Labeling and Packaging (with a little help from Kiley)
After the tour, we were able to try Kriek (cherry), Rose de Gambrinus (raspberry) and Gueuze beers. Since these beers go through a second fermentation in the bottle, they take on a champagne-like flavor. As a non-beer drinker, I really enjoyed them all!
Prost!
