Counting down to Tour de Geuze 2013

For those hooked on sour beer not much comes up to the high standards of the Belgian lambics, those spontaneously fermented beers that have been brewed in Pajottenland and the Zenne river valley, just outside modern Brussels, for centuries. Lambics can be enjoyed young but they really prove their worth when blended across several vintages to create geuze or when steeped with berries, such as cherries and raspberries, to create kriek and framboise. Bottles of geuze can be cellared for decades and will often still come out sparkling and fresh.

3 Fonteinen / De Cam Millennium Geuze from 1998
- still sparkling and fresh after 15 years!

A visit to a lambic brewery is like walking back in time (the Cantillon brewery in Brussels even doubles as a museum!), with brewing equipment and traditions unchanged for generations. In most cases, it's next to impossible to get inside a working lambic brewery, the aforementioned Cantillon brewery being a notable exception, because the brewers fear anything that can possibly upset their local flora of wild yeast strains. But on one Sunday, every second year, the members of HORAL open their doors to visitors: It's time for Tour de Geuze!

HORAL and Tour de Geuze
HORAL or Hoge Raad voor Ambachtelijke Lambiekbieren is the "High Council for Artisanal Lambic beer" and consists of members from Pajottenland and the Zenne valley in Belgium. This organization was the brain child of Armand Debelder, the owner of 3 Fonteinen, who initiated HORAL with five other lambic breweries, including Boon, De Troch and Timmermans, on January 10, 1997.

Armand Debelder of Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen
- founder and leader of HORAL.

A member of HORAL must either be a traditional lambic brewer or a "geuzestekerij", a geuze blender - using real lambics to produce geuze. There are currently 11 members of HORAL: Brouwerij Boon in Lembeek, Geuzestekerij De Cam in Gooik, Brouwerij De Troch in Wambeek, Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen and Brouwerij Oud Beersel in Beersel, Brouwerij Girardin in Sint-Ulriks-Kapelle, Geuzestekerij Hanssens Artisanaal in Dworp, Brouwerij Lindemans in Vlezenbeek, Brouwerij Mort Subite in Kobbegem, Gueuzerie Tilquin in Rebecq-Rognon and Brouwerij Timmermans in Itterbeek

Three of these, prefixed Geuzestekerij or Gueuzerie, only blends geuze, using lambics bought from the other members or from Cantillon, which is not a member of HORAL.

As mentioned in the introduction, every second year HORAL arranges a special tour to allow ordinary people to visit its member breweries and blenders. The first Tour de Geuze was held back in 1997, the next one - the 9th so far - will be held this year, on Sunday April 21st, 2013.

Tour de Geuze 2013: April 21st
On the Tour de Geuze visitors are free to come by car, scooter, bike or any other means of transportation to visit those breweries that are open for the tour. The following 8 HORAL members are open this year and can be visited between 10 am and 5 pm on April 21st:

- Brouwerij Boon, Fonteinstraat 65, 1502 Lembeek
- Geuzestekerij De Cam, Dorpstraat 67A, 1755 Gooik
- Brouwerij De Troch, Langestraat 20, 1741 Wambeek
- Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen, Hoogstraat 2A, 1650 Beersel
- Geuzestekerij Hanssens Artisanaal, Vroenenbosstraat 15/1, 1653 Dworp
- Brouwerij Oud Beersel, Laarheidestraat 230, 1650 Beersel
- Gueuzerie Tilquin, Chaussée Maieur Habils 110, Rebecq-Rognon
- Brouwerij Timmermans, Kerkstraat 11, 1701 Itterbeek

Giradin, Lindemans and Mort Subite will not be open to visitors on this Tour de Geuze.

The route this year, connecting all breweries and blenders, is 62 km long - so you really need transport to get around. If you don't have your own wheels, you can sign up for one of the HORAL buses. Tickets for the HORAL buses will be made available for orders on the Tour de Geuze website, on February 21st.

Here's a Google map showing the route of Tour de Geuze 2013, with each of the stops clearly marked with a letter:

Map of the stops at Tour de Geuze 2013

The stops marked on the map are A) Tilquin, B) Boon, C) De Cam, D) De Troch, E) Timmermans, F) 3 Fonteinen, G) Oud Beersel and H) Hanssens.

2013-02-21 update:
Tickets for ten different bus tours have now been posted on the HORAL website, at €15 per ticket. No single tour covers all 8 breweries and the De Lambiek museum in Beersel, so you will have to decide which places you prefer to visit and then choose the relevant tour. But be quick, some of the buses are almost booked full (#2, #3 and #6 have just a couple of tickets left) only a few hours after the tour alternatives were posted!

After some reflections I booked a seat for myself on bus tour #3 because two of my favorite lambic breweries - Boon and 3 Fonteinen - will be visited on this tour. And it skips the lambic museum, which I plan to visit on a different trip anyway. Bus tour #3 will depart from Halle railway station at 10:15 am on April 21st and visit Tilquin, Boon, De Oude Cam, Timmermans and 3 Fonteinen before returning to Halle railway station at 5 pm.

Sunday at de Grote Dorst

Back in March 2012 I made my first visit to the lambic café In de Verzekering tegen de Grote Dorst in Eizeringen in Pajottenland, Belgium. It was a special BBQ event on a cold Friday evening. At the end of May I again found myself in the Belgian capital, now on a warm and sunny Sunday, so I decided to make another visit to see what the café was like on a church Sunday.

Café In de Verzekering tegen de Grote Dorst in Eizeringen.

In de Verzekering tegen de Grote Dorst or just de Grote Dorst is located on the town square in Eizeringen, opposite the Saint Ursula church. It's only open from 10 am to 1:30 pm on Sundays and church holidays, because it is run in their sparetime by the brothers Kurt and Yves Panneels.

Because it was a Sunday, with few buses going from Brussels to Eizeringen, and I was accompanied by three friends, we opted for a taxi as our means of transportation (making sure it would pick us up again later). Eizeringen is about 15 km west of Brussels, but traffic and small roads means you should set aside at least half an hour in getting there.

Kurt Panneels behind the bar at de Grote Dorst.

We arrived a little after 10 am to find one of the brothers, Yves, busy bringing scooters out of the garage. It turned out he was renting out scooters, for 50 Euro per day, and was taking a group of visitors to the open day at geuze blender Tilquin. I politely declined the offer to join the group as I already had plans for the afternoon and also wanted to spend some time at de Grote Dorst before leaving the Brussels area.

Inside the café I found the other brother, Kurt, manning the bar, and plenty of vacant tables. So my friends and I sat down at a smaller one, and started ordering rare bottles from the cellar of de Grote Dorst.

A rare beer we got to try was a geuze the brothers had blended themselves, just like lambic café owners did a hundred years ago: Geuze tegen de Grote Dorst. This 5% abv geuze, a blend of 11 different lambics, had been bottled in December 2008, so it was three and a half years old when we got to taste it. It was a well made blend, not very complex, but with a nice lemon sourness, hints of oak and with a mild bitter finish. Refreshing and drinkable.

Eylenbosch Guzuze 1990 - still so fresh.

A more exciting entry on their beer menu was the twenty-two year old Eylenbosch Gueuze 1990, one of the last vintages made by this old brewery in Schepdaal. Eylenbosch, which had been making geuze since 1851, was acquired by the Keermaeker brewery (known for the Mort Subite brand) in 1989 and closed down in 1991. Since then Keermaeker has ended up in the Alken-Maes group who now owns the Eylenbosch name but without actively using it. Anyhow, the 1990 Eylenbosch Gueuze was the real deal. It poured a clear golden color, it smelled of ripe apples and sherry cask and the flavor was harmonic and sour, with notes of dry leaves, lemon, apples and sherry. A delicious and surprisingly fresh sour ale.

When church service ended at Noon, a number of the faithful crossed the small square and entered de Grote Dorst for a glass or two of kriek, gueze or lambic. It was interesting to watch this mixture of locals, often in their 70s or 80s, and the young, foreign beer geeks who had already been at the café for a couple of hours. It's no doubt the Panneels brothers have struck a chord in the local community with their old style Flemish lambic café, just as they have in the global beer community - the users of RateBeer ranked de Grote Dorst one of the best beer bars in the world both in 2011 and 2012. So, the future of de Grote Dorst is looking good.

Speaking of beer geeks. A couple of tables away from ours sat three German sour ale fans, including Ulrich "Uli" Kremer, a well know geuze blender from Duisburg who blends geuze under his own h.ertie label. I keep running into him at breweries, bars and beer festivals all over Belgium. It's a small world and at de Grote Dorst you will meet them all.

At 1 pm the taxi was back to pick us up and I said my heartfelt farewells to Kurt Panneels, promising to come back to this peaceful and great lambic café in the heart of Pajottenland very soon.

Geuze blender Uli, left, and Yves Panneels on the scooter.

Photos from my two visits to de Grote Dorst: March and May 2012.

21st Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation

Belgium is well known for a wide variety of beer styles and for its many beer festivals, one of the more special and longest running festivals is the Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation which was held for the 21st time on May 26-27, 2012.  This is an account of my second visit to this unique sour ale festival.

Kerk Sint-Gerardus Majella in Opstal, Buggenhout

How to get there?

Opstal is a small village on the outskirts of Buggenhout in East Flanders, about 25 km or 40 minutes drive north west of Brussels. It is not necessarily easy to get to Opstal, I don't know about the buses but you can either share a cab or take a train to the nearest train station and walk from there. Taxis are rare to find in the countryside, so don't count on finding one if you get off at a small railway station.

Feestzaal Beukenhof on Broekstraat 18

The nearest train station to the Feestzaal Beukenhof on Broekstraat 18, where the festival is held, is the one in Heizijde - a little over 2 km or 20 minutes walk away. If you're in Brussels, go to the Bruxelles-Nord train station where you can catch several trains an hour to Heizijde. From Heizijde start by walking north along the Klein-Antwerpenstraat which changes into Kakemanstraat, follow this road until it ends and then turn left onto Varentstraat. Follow this road into Opstal and finally turn right on Broekstraat where the festival area is located just past the church, on the other side of the road. The train ride should take a little over half an hour, so all in all it will take you close to an hour to get from Brussels to the festival.

I ended up sharing a taxi with three friends, to cut the travel time and expenses. It still took us a good 40 minutes to get there, because of outdated GPS data and a confused driver who failed to read the road signs (taxi drivers in Brussels seem lost as soon as the leave the city, so always be alert). We arrived a little later than planned, almost half an hour after the opening, for a grand total 60 Euro. 

So, even though taxi is the fastest and easiest way to get to the festival, always make sure to have plenty of time to get there for the 3 pm opening.

The Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation

Weekend der Spontane Gisting, as it's known in the local Flemish dialect, or The Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation is an annual beer festival arranged by an organization called De Opstalse Bierpallieters - "the beer tasters of Opstal" - in Opstal, Buggenhout. This 2-day festival is always held on the last weekend of May, 2012 being the 21st time it was held.

Casks of young lambic and kriek lining the wall.

What makes this festival so special is that it focuses exclusively on one of the most remarkable beer styles that exists in the world today, a type of beer that has died out in most other countries, that of spontaneous or wild yeast fermentation. 

Spontaneous fermentation is actually a pretty wide category and not really a beer style. The common theme is that you don't use a regular "tamed" yeast culture, such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae (for top fermented ales) or Saccharomyces carlsbergensis (for bottom fermented lagers). Instead, the brewer relies on the ambient air of the brewery to provide the untamed, wild yeast to start the fermentation. This is a much less controlled way of fermenting beer, with many potential problems such as infection due to the open cooling vats (coolships), but it also produces some of the most amazing beer styles you can immagine:

• Fruit lambic: Usually dry, fruity and colorful beers.
• Most often made with cherries (kriek) or raspberries (framboise / framboos).
• Other fruits used may be peaches, currants or strawberries.
• Some brewers sweeten their fruit lambics to make them easier to sell.
• Faro: This is a type of geuze with brown sugar added for sweetening.
• Faro was very popular in late 19th century Brussels but is now almost gone.
• Geuze / gueuze: A blend of several years, refermented in the bottle.
• Many geuze blenders use a blend of 1, 2 and 3 year old lambics, where the young lambic provides sugar for the bottle refermentation and the older character.

The geuze, in particular, has made a revival thanks to its dry, fruity and often sparkling - Champagne like - character. Thanks to its production and long maturation, the geuze is known to cellar well for up to 20-30 years!

The Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation 2012.

The atmosphere and the beers

In 2012 the festival was held on May 26-27 at the Tapperij Beukenhof in Opstal. Like the year before, the entrance was free, so you only had to pay for what you tasted - and the prices are really reasonable, with twenty year old bottles of geuze going for only 15-20 Euro!

This has to be one of the most relaxing festivals in the world, every visitor is seated by one of the many tables and all orders are placed by holding up the hand, just like in school, so that one of the staff notices and comes over to your table. The beer menu is numbered so you just have to point to the items of interest and indicate if you want more than one glass, in case you want to share a bottle. It works really well, as it removes the concept of queues and gives plenty of space on the floor, allowing guests to pass freely to the restrooms or in and out of the festival.

Parallel tasting cask lambics from four different breweries.

The visitors to the 21st Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation were treated to a great mixture of young and and old sour ales. Like last year most of the lambic brewers of Belgium and some of the blenders had sent in casks with lambic and kriek.

In all there were 12 different lambics served on cask, including very nice ones from 3 Fonteinen, De Troch, Hanssens, De Cam and Cantillon, as well as 8 kriekenlambieks.

It's smart to start out with the young lambics as they tend to be simpler and less acidic than some of the aged oude geuze bottles. As for the amount of alcohol, don't worry - most lambics are just 5% abv and the tasting glasses are 15 cl - so take your time and do parallel tastings to see how the lambics differ in fruitiness, sourness, bitterness, woodiness and other characteristics. It's both fun and educational to compare notes with table neighbors.

When through with the cask ales it's smart to gang up with some of your table mates to share bottles, many of them are 75 cl and best shared with 3-4 others. There are some 37.5 cl bottles too, but that is still a lot to drink if you want to get through a large number of beers in one sitting. So, sharing bottles is a great way to get through more beers and to make new friends.

One of the older bottles I tried was the 1993 Sélection Lambic Gueuze from Belle-Vue, a beer that hasn't been made since 1999 (probably because Belle-Vue was bought up by InBev). Unfortuanetly, this 19 year old geuze was way over the top, oxidized and with a strong lemon acidity making it almost undrinkable. 

Cantillon Zwanze 2010 - still a winner.

A far better choice was the 2004 vintage of Boon Oude Geuze Mariage Parfait, still fruity and fresh and really well balanced sour ale for just 10 Euro. 

Among the younger sour ales, the Cantillon Zwanze 2010 is always a winner with its wonderful floral (elderflowers) sourness - a refreshing beer I can drink bottles of alone. 

Another bottled highlight was the Girardin Fond Gueuze Bierpallieters 2009, the official Jubileumbier for the 2011 festival. It combined lemon sourness and a mild brettanomyces character with mild oak and dry leaves in a wonderful way. Too bad we were not allowed to buy any bottles to bring home this year.

For those who can't drink sour ales for an entire day, the festival has made an exception to the rule of only having spontaneously fermented beers on their menu: The two local Buggenhout breweries, De Landtsheer and Bosteels, are both represented with their world class beers. De Landtsheer with their Malheur series - including the 10, 12 and Malheur Bière Brut - while Bosteels come with Kwak and Tripel Karmeliet. 

Finally a few words on the food. The festival doesn't serve warm food or any large dishes of cold food, so it's common to bring snacks and food on your own, but they do have a very nice cheese and salami platter and also some sort of sandwiches (which I haven't tried).

Conclusion

After my second year at The Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation I feel stronger than ever that this is one of the best beer festivals on the planet, it's small, it's quiet and it has the best selection of young and old sour ales you could ever dream of trying. Thus, I have already reserved the last weekend of May 2013 for another visit to Opstal. 

Photos from the festival can be found at Flickr: 2011 and 2012.