Lambic

Lambic is not brewed so much as left to happen. In the rolling farmland southwest of Brussels — the Pajottenland, a small corner of Belgium anchored by the villages of Lembeek, Beersel, Lot, Huizingen and Boitsfort — breweries cool their wort in shallow open vessels called coolships, and the night air does the rest. Wild yeasts and bacteria, including Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus floating in the Zenne valley breeze, settle into the warm liquid and start the fermentation. The result is a beer of startling sourness, dry as chalk, with hay, lemon zest and a faint barnyard note, and no hop bitterness to speak of. After a year or two in oak, the lambic may be bottled straight — a still, cloudy gueuze-like pour — or it may be blended with younger lambic and a touch of candy sugar to make a sparkling gueuze, or steeped with fresh sour cherries for kriek, or with raspberries for framboise. The Cantillon brewery in Anderlecht, the Boon brewery in Lembeek, and the small lambic blenders of the Senne valley are its custodians. Drink it from a heavy tumbler, never a flute; the wine-glass ceremony is for champagne, and lambic is anything but.