The country which taxes car
radios, is famous for its incontinent statue and produces
some damn fine beers is now just a few hours away by train.
If you’ve got the £99 fare, do what we did and leap on
the Eurostar via the Chunnel to Brussels.
Round the corner from Midi station is the Cantillon
brewery-where Monday to Saturday you can walk through the
door, hand over 70F (£1.60) and have the run of the place.
You don’t get to drink it dry but you do see an amazing
piece of working history.
Cantillon is one of the last remaining gueuze manufacturers,
a local style made from blends of lambic beers.
Lambics were once the most popular beers of Brussels. They
ire created using wild, airborne yeasts which descend
overnight through louvres in the brewery’s roof onto the
exposed liquid which will then ferment in oak barrels. Once
fermentation has died down the huge barrels are sealed and
the beer left to mature for up to three years. We tasted a
two year-old and agreed that it was a beer equivalent of
scrumpy.
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Eventually this flat beer is
blended with younger lambics and bottled. Sugars in the
younger beer promote a secondary fermentation and therefore
some sparkle. Even so, the bottles are left racked on their
side in the cellar for another two years.
Ours being a summer visit, there was no brewing in progress.
Cantillon’s lambics are not artificially cooled so use the
colder nights from October to May for the process. We did,
however wonder through vast rooms piled high with dusty, oak
casks and around cellars walled with horizontal green
bottles, all containing silently maturing beer. Surely no
British brewery could offer such sights!
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Often described
as Belgian champagne, when you do eventually get to drink
it, you may, as we did, struggle to finish a glass.
Fantastically sour and a little acid tasting, at home
you’d take it back to the bar, but here in this
cobweb-ridden old building you grit your teeth and
persevere. After all, this is a classic beer style you’re
drinking and the brewer and his family are watching you
sample their wares. We were also offered some kriek, gueuze
fermented with cherries, but declined. Call us cowards, but
stomachs were rumbling and Brussels’ fine culinary fare
had yet to be sampled, along with hundreds of other Belgian
beers!
Cantillon Brewery can be found at: Rue Gheude 56, just 10
minutes walk from Brussels Midi/Zuid station, the Eurostar
terminus.
Beer Warriors in Belgium were
Chris & Steve
Oct. '95
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