The Brewery Post

So we have visited two breweries/brasseries/brouwerijen (depending on where you live) this week. First:

Brouwerij De Halve Maan

A quick history: The "Half Moon" is the only brewery remaining in the city of Brugge. There has been a brewery on the site (which is right in the middle of the city center) since the 16th century, and the building was bought around 1850 by the Maes family. The business was purchased and shut down "by a big brewery" in the '90s and reopened as De Halve Maan in 2005 by the same family. Today, they brew under the brand Bruges Zot.

We visited the brewery and pub on Thursday afternoon and took a tour. I was pleased with the presentation, because it focused very superficially on the actual brewing process (which I already know something about). Instead, we toured the building, going all the way up to the roof for a panoramic view of the city, and the discussion focused on the history of the company, the building, and the historical brewing process. The building is actually a series of buildings, which continuously expanded as the business grew through the 1900s, and they are full of turn of the century brewing equipment...open air fermenters, a copper cooling pan, and a really interesting copper heat exchanger.

Here is a picture of the heat exchanger. It is constructed of a LOT of copper pipes, about 2 inches in diameter, stacked together. This is really just for exposed surface area...these are really "half moon" pipes. That's also why the whole thing is wavy...more surface area in the same height. The hot beer is (literally) poured in the top, which is open, and it then dribbles down and out a pipe, into a pan at the bottom. All that copper surface area radiates heat like mad.

Additionally, there are fittings on the side for water pipe (one is at the very bottom of the picture). There are additional sealed pipes inside that cold water flows through, picking up even more heat off the beer. This is a really neat piece of old technology, even though it must have cost a fortune to build, because it is exactly the same principle used in every brewery today from my back porch up to the big boys.

About the beer...

The beer was fantastic! They make three varieties here: Bruges Zot Blonde, Bruges Zot Brown (a dubbel), and a dark trippel called Straffe Hendrik. The blonde was light bodied, creamy, a touch hoppy, and had very faint aromas of orange and cardamom. (I'm cheating a little in naming that...they told us in the tour that orange peel and cardamom are in the recipe, but you can still taste it.)

The brown however, wow. It was my favorite beer of the trip until the next day in Ghent, when I had a beer made in that city. The brown is slightly higher alcohol, at 7.5%. (Note that I haven't seen a beer here under about 5.5%. The Belgians aren't scared to kick their beer up a notch.) It is much more complex, without some of the sweetness associated with the blonde. That is pretty remarkable...it is difficult to make a strong beer dry, simply because you are starting with and expect to end with more sugar.

Brewery Cantillon

The day before our visit to Brugge, we went to visit Brewery Cantillon, which is the last brewery remaining in the city of Brussels. Cantillon is also a family business, run by the sixth generation of the same family. They brew a much more traditional beer, but one which very few people outside of Belgium have probably ever had, and which is unfortunately dying off.

Cantillon brews lambic (lam-bik), gueze (gooz), kriek (creek), framboise (fram-bwoz) and a number of variations of those biers (beers). All of these are actually based on lambic, by blending and adding other ingredients. Lambic is a sour, flat beer, based on the way it is produced. I know that doesn't sound too appetizing, but it is quite good.

Lambic is produced by using wild yeast and bacteria in the air, rather than inoculating with a single known strain like modern brewers. After the boil, the beer is poured into an enormous copper pan in the attic of the building, which is exposed to open air. The pan is about 20 feet on a side, and about 8 or 12 inches deep. Leaving the proto-beer there overnight allows it to cool, as well as collect yeast from the air. After several hours like this, the beer is put into oak casks for up to 3 years to ferment. The beer is flat because these casks are not completely sealed...carbon dioxide slowly leaks out through the wood.

At Cantillon, we took a tour of the old building before sampling the wares. This was a really cool way of touring, because they just gave us a booklet explaining the process and set us loose. Really. They sent us down the hall and we got to poke around where ever we wanted. Here is a picture of Dru, hanging out with one of their two big copper brew kettles. From here we checked out their grain storage, old equipment, and wandered around the cellar (see the picture of me, above, with barrels of lambic).

After the tour, we sampled the gueze and the kriek. Gueze is a blend of 1, 2, and 3 year old lambic. Because it has the young beer, there is sugar going into the bottle, which is fermented, which carbonates the beer as it ages in the cellar. It was incredible...it tasted like a dry, sour white wine. The sourness is a bit of a kick when you first taste the beer, but it really grows on you.

Kriek is lambic which has sat on macerated cherries for several months before bottling. There are many other variations, using other fruit like grapes or strawberries, all of which have their own names. The kriek was not sweet like you would expect, because the sugar from the fruit was fermented as well. It was still a sour drink, but the essence of the cheries was quite prominent. Not my particular cup of tea, but Dru was a big fan.

A dying breed

These beers are dying off due to commercial imitators. As brewing technology advanced and the process became more commercialized, people looked for ways to produce more beer faster. However, Belgium does not protect the formula or production method of lambic beers, like you would for a certain variety of wine, cheese, or meat.

A lot of brewers today who produce these beers will simply add sugar and cherry flavor to a modern non-sour beer, rather than taking the risks of wild yeast inoculation and waiting for years before bottling. This means that most people know kriek as a very sweet, sugary, fruity drink, rather than a dry, sour one. I would encourage anyone to seek out and try a gueze or kriek, but you should make sure that it is a sour, traditionally produced lambic beer. While there are a few others out there, I cannot name another brewer besides Cantillon. The good news though, is that they are distributed across the United States, so it should be possible to find it.

That is all I have for now on beer and brewers...was it enough? I will leave you with a picture of Happy-Ben in the courtyard at De Halve Maan, drinking Bruges Zot brown.