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by wickedwillie on January 23rd, 2004

wickedwillie

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What are 'lambics'?

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  • by Tim Webb on November 6th, 2004

    Tim Webb

    Lambic beers are wheat beers that are fermented in a unique way, the yeast used having been derived from the atmosphere, rather than being pitched into the beer. Only one traditional producer still allows the yeast to "fall from the night sky" onto their cooling brew. The other eight trditional producers blow air across the top of (or in one case through) the cooling liquid.

    The key difference then is that the beer is allowed to ferment slowly, usually in massive oak casks, for up to three years. Draught lambic should come stright from those casks untainted. "Young" lambic is six to twelve moths old, "Old" lambic two or three years old.

    The most distinctive form of lambic beer is gueuze (or geuze), pronounced "hers" in Flemish Dutch. This is a blend of these two types of lambic, bottled with a tiny amount of sugar to spark refermentation and ideally then left for a further couple of years before drinking.

    While draught lambic will always be for me an acquired taste, authetic traditional gueuze is one of the masterpieces in the world's collection of alcoholic beverages. At room temperature or lightly chilled it is, as the British beer writer Roger Protz once said: " ... at a bibulous crossroads where the difference between wine, beer and cider blurs."

    By European Union law, to call a beer a lambic it need only to have had some lambic fermentation involved in a part of its production. Some of the better known, more widely available lambic actually contain only a small proportion of true lambic-fermentation beer.

    Tim Webb
    Author, LambicLand (www.booksaboutbeer.com)

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