yummy microbial lambics

After our usual breakfast ful Kirby and I stopped by a small little wine store on the corner of 18th and U today and I smiled. They had some fine brews out among the wine. Including a bottle of Duvel that was the biggest bottle of beer I had ever seen in my life. I think it was 5 liters. Other than the 5 liter bottle they had a bunch of 750 ml bottles about. I was happy to see they had a good selection of Allagash. I picked up a bottle of Odyssey for my beer stock because I don’t usually see that one as much as the other two Allagash barrel aged beers. Hopefully it will be another place to replenish my Victoria and Victor supply along with the Wine Specialist.  

Kirby picked up some Lindemans Framboise and Pecheresse for gifts and it got me looking at the Lindemans website. I forgot lambics are brewed using open-air fermentation. Usually brewers spend lots of time and money keeping all impurities out of their beer so when it is sealed for fermenting bad things don't happen. This is the opposite, from the site…

...lambic's signature event, unique in all of beer making: the pumping of the hot wort into open, shallow cooling vessels (also called a tun) in the attic of the brewery. The brewer throws open vented windows, turns on fans and leaves the liquid overnight to cool and be inoculated by the yeast and other microbial flora, of the surrounding air. This exposure to the air is called pitching. The local conditions are of fundamental importance in pitching. Not only does spontaneous fermentation of wort takes place consistently only in a small area around Brussels, but it does so only from October until April, when outside temperatures remain under 15°C. Some seemingly minute conditions that could affect the balance of microbial flora and the growth rate of the microorganisms would also affect the fermentation sequence and, therefore, the final product.

To brew a spontaneous fermented Lambic, no yeast is artificial added to the wort, but the wort is exposed to the open air. The result of this method is that wild yeast cells, which are always in the open air in the environment of Brussels, come into the wort and start on a natural, spontaneous way the fermentation. This is the reason this method is called "spontaneous fermentation".

The picture above is from the original Lindemans brewery which they stopped using in 1991 when they moved in to the new one next door.  

Can’t wait to enjoy those microbes again.