George Carlin: A Comic Philosopher of Hope and Despair for the Trump Era

By Eric Van Vleet

The election of Donald Trump is still shocking. Upon returning to the US, we have met many people still visibly shaken by it. The most troubling moment will be when we cease to find it so. We need to remain vigilant so that the unceasing avalanche of disturbing news does not become all too commonplace and normalized.
In order to cope with the ongoing shitshow, sometimes Lili and I binge watch videos from comedians/satirists like Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and others who seem to offer an almost unlimited supply of send ups and takedowns of the Old Fat Orange One. Yet the comfort they offer is only fleeting. Though funny enough at the time, their work is often far too superficial and impermanent to offer any real and lasting relief.

Times like these call for a visionary comedian; they call for George Carlin. Even though he died in 2008, long before the shocking election of Donald Trump and even before the historic election of Barack Obama, Carlin’s comedy all but prepared us for Trump. Listening to him will make you laugh far deeper than today’s ‘political’ comedians, because of the way that he is chasing truth with a kind of boundless, free-flowing, biting stream of logic that is art, even if Carlin himself calls standup comedy a “small art”. Above all, Carlin has an amazing detector; nobody’s got a better detector than him, for that all-pervading facet of American life-- bullshit. It is his piercing logic and ceaseless quest to uncover bullshit that makes Carlin’s comedy so vital.

Carlin’s true genius comes from his outlook as a comic philosopher that does not focus on a single issue but instead on America as a whole, which he describes like so:

“I sort of gave up on the human race; I gave up on the American dream and culture and nation and decided that I didn’t care about the outcome. And that gave me a lot of freedom from a distant platform to be sort of amused… to watch the whole thing with a kind of combination of wonder and pity and to try to put that into words....Not having an emotional stake in whether this experiment with human beings works. I really don’t care. I love people as I meet them one by one. People are just wonderful as individuals. You see the whole universe in their eyes if you look carefully. But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot…they begin to change, they begin to sacrifice; they sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group. I decided that it was all under control of the group now whether it’s business, religion, political people or whatever, and I would distance myself from wishing for a good outcome. Let it do what it’s going to do and I’ll enjoy it as an entertainment.”

Led by such a worldview, Carlin is not digging through the minutiae of a single political race, but through a wide-angle lens that captures a critical and original view of America as a whole. I did not realize when I used the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” in a previous Biencuits blog piece about the unofficial Trump Diet that it was not my own coinage, but is actually the incisive phrase with which George Carlin describes an oblivious US citizenry who elect terribly corrupt politicians. As Carlin says “if you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you will have selfish, ignorant leaders.” “Draining the swamp” is not exclusive to Washington DC, but to America as a whole.

It is not merely that the choices presented to us are unseemly and that we actually accept such paltry choices by voting, but terrifyingly, that these are the ‘best’ candidates the country could produce from its failing institutions. These politicians reflect the quality of the public that they represent. Changing these circumstances is not simple because as Carlin says, “this country was bought, and sold and paid for a long time ago.” According to Carlin, the fact that this ethos of “garbage in, garbage out” persists is no accident considering who the real “owners” of the country are. Therefore, the situation is far more complicated than merely voting for good politicians and driving out the bad ones. Carlin says that by voting, we are consenting to what they do once elected, whether your candidate wins or not. When you don’t vote you are not lending legitimacy to an often ludicrous process. With such terrible choices, Carlin stays home on election day.

It is through Carlin’s powerful logic and his massive linguistic power that he can convincingly make an argument against voting. In fact, Carlin is an ever astute observer and lover of the English language. For him it is not only through bills and executive orders alone that politicians wield power but through language as well. His most famous monologue was his dissection of the seven words you could not say on television, which was very much itself an explicit and powerful free speech manifesto.

For Carlin, it is not that there are intrinsically “bad words” but “the context that makes them count, that makes them good or bad… You can’t be afraid of words that speak the truth, even if it is an unpleasant truth.” It is our current inability to understand nuance and the context of speech that allows many to somehow excuse all of Trumps many egregious insults.

Ever in search of truth and clarity, Carlin is horrified by the prevalence of euphemisms, which reflect how “Americans have a lot of trouble in dealing with reality.” Carlin then dissects such evasions of reality in how the word for psychologically wounded soldiers became increasingly bloodless through time. He states that after WWI the word used was “shellshock”, which captures how violent and unsettling of a phenomenon it is. Yet such proportionally strong language for such horrible effects waned through time. The very same condition in WWII was called “battle fatigue.” By the time of the the US war in Korea it was called “operational exhaustion”. After the War in Vietnam and onto today the US military has calls it “post-traumatic stress disorder”.

As such euphemisms drift further from the truth, Carlin notes how “the pain is completely buried under jargon.” Provocatively he argues that the way in which politicians use language itself is a political act because it helps to shape material reality: “I’ll betcha if it was still called ‘shellshock’ some of those Vietnam veterans might of gotten the attention that they needed at time.” Such language according to Carlin “takes the life outta life.” Similarly in using words like “redundancies” instead of firing, Carlin argues that “smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal its sins.”

Here political correctness is not, as conservatives like to claim, some liberal conspiracy to quell straight talk and free speech but instead a way for the powerful to evade the real damage that they inflict on the weak. Conservatives have managed to invert reality in claiming to be the defenders of freedom of speech, or at least the kind of limited freedom from speech that offends everyone but themselves. Their claims of defense are actually disguised attacks. Or as Carlin says: “Pro-life is anti-women!”

These days, the refusal by conservatives even to utter the phrase “black lives matter”, while stating instead that “all lives matter” is yet another pernicious example. This phrase creates an alternative reality where black people have not been disproportionately impacted by violence at the hands of the police. They are using nefariously twisted pseudo-PC notions of unification and equality to maintain their positions of power while not actually doing anything to try to stop the very real violence taking place. I can only imagine the blisteringly funny tirade Carlin would launch against their “all lives matter” bullshit.

With such phrases, bullshit has in no way diminished since Carlin’s passing. We need to follow his example and make sure that we have turned on and tuned up our bullshit detectors. We will need them in order to peel back the euphemisms that deny help to those most in need. We need to demand dramatic improvements made to our institutions, abandon ideas that one day an amazingly virtuous politician will emerge from a broken system and that “resisting” against a single politician is enough. Yet, all the while we need to laugh. We need the kind of deep and enduring laughter that listening to George Carlin brings, while adopting his uncompromising view of the problems of America. Only then can we continue to call out bullshit and begin to dream of and demand something new, something far more different than we have ever demanded.

It's a Wonderful Brexit?: Tales from an American Itinerant Farm Volunteer in Britian

By Eric Vanderrama

The UK has done it. They have invoked Article 50 and started the two-year-long process of leaving the European Union. Instead of making amendments to Brexit that would have allowed EU citizens to stay in Britain and their own citizens to remain in Europe, they decided to use the reciprocity of these millions of people as a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations with Europe. Leave voters forced everyone to gamble everything, while hoping that Europe will bow down to their every demand. They likely did not realize how Brexit would affect nearly every facet of their lives. Soon, when the actual outcomes of Brexit become clearer, many surprises await them.

Instead of taking such a complicated situation as Brexit on all at once, I will regale you with my experiences as a vendor at the Chester Christmas Market, a market where often neither the products sold nor the people selling them were British. As an American involved in this Christmas market, I could not help to think about a Christmas classic from my homeland, It's a Wonderful Life. For anyone who has somehow missed it, the film is a dark Christmas fable where everyman George Bailey from the idyllic small-town of Bedford Falls contemplates suicide on Christmas Eve, but is saved by a guardian angel who shows George how his actions protected his town from Mr. Potter whose greed would transform it into something entirely different-- a monopolistic dystopia called Pottersville. I began to wonder if it would be a wonderful Brexit. I wondered how even the few city blocks like those of the Chester Christmas market change without non-British products and people, resulting from a hard Brexit? Would it remain Bedford Falls or would it degenerate into a Pottersville? I further realized that the leave and and remain voters could not even agree on who exactly was the protagonist, George Bailey, and who was Mr. Potter, the antagonist.

Walking through the Chester Christmas Market showed how un-British this British Christmas market really was. First of all, the idea behind such Christmas markets belongs to Germany, not Britain. The busiest stalls sold prepared foods, which were staffed by Italians and Spaniards, whose tan skin and violent shivering bespoke of balmy Mediterranean origins. They sold everything from Nutella pancakes to American-style hamburgers, to Colombian coffee laced with French Cognac. The stall to our right was staffed by a surly British lady who sold a horrible mish mash of Chinese made tchotchkes that ranged from faux-American “dream-catchers” to poop emoji plushies, which all should have been Brexited long ago.

Her neighbor was a Dutch hipster lothario who used his charming smile to sell Spanish garlic graters to the usually ‘invisible’ 50-year-old female British set. Across from our stall, a sausage man with a thick German accent would incessantly shout “no soya, starches, or fillers... in Bavaria we don’t do funny business.” Customers seemed overjoyed to learn that their Debreceners were made in Bavaria and not Britain. They eagerly scooped up these insipid industrial links, seemingly because they came in bicep-building quantities and with a free plastic bag all for a tenner. When one little boy yelled “These smell like dog food,” the chorizo man said without missing a beat, “Well, dogs love them!”

Like the German sausage man, our accents betrayed us. Many of our customers were less than discreet and would often yell out, “But you’re not British!” because we were Americans selling British artisanal products made by British citizens. In the post-Brexit world, they already were policing their borders and bluntly critiquing all that was not British. I cannot imagine the same words being uttered at a pair of boots made in India but sold at Mark & Spencers.

Many would-be British customers professed loving the sampled products made on a family owned and operated Organic farm, until they saw the price tag. They would tell us instead they would be buying a mass-produced Asda cheese variety pack for half the price. They loved the idea of products made in Britain, until the price was actually remunerative to the British people making them and more costly to them. On the other hand, a global customer base found the prices fair. We sold cheese and spirits to many tourists, including Brazilians, French, Ecuadorians, Indians, Dutch, Americans, Spaniards and of course British as well.

With a hard Brexit now a reality one must now imagine a future Chester Christmas Market without this diverse international clientele, its German sausage vendor and sausages, vociferous Americans selling artisanal Organic gin, handsome Dutch lotharios and polyglot Italian food venders. Without them, there hardly would have been a Christmas market at all last year. Yet the leave voters must deny any positive contributions by non-Brits. For leavers, anything from Europe or elsewhere must be treated with great suspicion if not derision.

Beyond your ordinary xenophobia, there seems to be another kind of delusional thinking fueling Brexit. Evidently, leavers assume that somehow British people will seamlessly step in to make these products and sell them in their own stalls, all at big box chain store low prices. Somehow people will get paid more while the cost of goods and services will decline. Supposedly, there is pent up and untapped entrepreneurial spirit and artisanal skill that ‘evil’ Europe and Europeans are somehow suffocating. Only once this supposed dead weight is removed, will they put the “great” back in Great Britain. The Chester Christmas Market suggests otherwise. Brits had just as much right to make products and have a stall at the market as did non-Brits, though they were clearly not taking advantage of it. How they will somehow be caught by a newfound entrepreneurial spirit post-Brexit was best left unexplained by leavers.

It is distressing that Brexit is in effect pulling a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life and doubling down on what would happen if millions of people had to leave. Instead of affirming the contributions of the ordinary non-British person, they are willing to let George Bailey metaphorically drown as millions of people may have to leave Britain if they curtail reciprocal freedom of movement between the UK and the EU. They are like Mr. Potter yelling at George Bailey to disappear so that they can take over. It is sad that they need to create a tight monopoly over their labor market just so it can be finally fit their rigid definition of what is “British”.

If the Chester Christmas Market is any indication, the UK seems to be careening towards Pottersville. These international vendors and customers were not the enemy. Instead they were like George Bailey, saving Britain from a boring and monotone dystopia. Vendors sat in the cold for 31 straight days and brought life to a market that was staffed mainly by non-Brits. Non-British customers bought products made by Brits and non-Brits. Yet these contributions were still somehow off-putting to leave voters whose perverse version of Britishness has thrown the lives of these hard workers into greater precarity. They have strengthened their grips on a monopoly for British jobs, irrespective if British people actually have the skills to staff them. With such Mr. Potter-like greed and callousness it is impossible to hope that it’s a wonderful Brexit.

Brussels: Where Beer is the Secret of World Class Cuisine

By Eric Van Vleet

Lili and I are self-professed Francophiles. Our unabashed love for the place even figures in our awe-inspiringly ambitious and alliterative blog title. But as you, dear reader, may have noticed, we also harbor a deep, almost obsessive love for Belgium. Not only is it our favorite beer nation but also because the food there is just as incredible. We have already written here about our travels there for the 2017 Bruges Beer Festival and more recently, about our visit to our favorite brewery in the world, Cantillon, when it recently opened its doors for a public brew day. Clearly our travels have been beer-focused, though we have always managed to stick to the glutton’s Belgian food pyramid that for us consists mainly of waffles, fries and chocolates.

Eating in Belgium goes far beyond these tempting and shockingly delicious street foods and sweets. As featured in Michael Jackson The Beer Hunter TV series, also the subject of a Biencuits blog post, Belgium’s chefs have developed an entire cuisine in which people cook with beer and pair food with beer as well. Beer is integral and fully incorporated into this cuisine. It is foundational. In Belgium, one does not have to choose between eating well and drinking well. In fact, just like in any wine-growing region, the two compliment each other undeniably well.

The common conception of beer food in the US in general includes fried foods, burgers and barbeque. While all can be delicious when done well, Belgian chefs have used their amazing beer not only to pair with ‘comfort’ foods, but instead to use beer at the same skill level that French chefs use wine. Beer is not an afterthought. It is an integral ingredient and component.

Lili and I have been fortunate enough to visit three amazing beer-focused restaurants in Brussels that were so delicious they did not make us miss wine for a minute. While they are different, we would unreservedly recommend them all for your next trip to Brussels. And there should be always another visit to Brussels, which for us is one of the world’s greatest cities.

Nüetnigenough is an intimate restaurant located a short walk from Grand Place. Along with Cantillon, it should be a stop on every Brussels beergrimage. Even the mantle is covered with bottles of good beer! Their beer menu alone is worth the stop as they have lambics/gueuzes from some of our favorites like Cantillon, 3 Fonteinen and Tilquin as well as other styles from De Struisse and Verzet. Their black pudding with gueuze was an amazing appetizer and delight for any blood sausage fan. The beautiful Jambonneau Dijonnaise was good enough that Lili and I have ordered it twice, while it is more than large enough for two people to share. Its almost sweet flavor worked nicely with a 3 Fonteinen Oude Kriek.

While Nüetnigenough has been a standby for us in Brussels, on our last visit we made new discoveries in the world of beer-based cuisine. Restobieres is a somewhat cluttered and cozy restaurant that has an old-school appeal that included sprinkled parsley as a plate decoration. Yet considering the deep tradition there, Belgium old school is an amazing thing, especially in places that serve affordable prix fixe menus paired with an amazing beer menu, like at Restobieres. The plate of cured ham for my appetizer matched any charcuterie I have had in Spain or France. Lili’s celeriac soup also was flavor-packed, warming and an overall auspicious beginning for the meal. For beer, they even had a Boon lambic on tap that was just tart enough but went well with food. Seeing duck on the menu, I could not help myself, especially when I saw that it was cooked in a cherry sauce and kriek beer. For our beer pairing with the main course, we had a Giradin Black Label Gueuze, which did not bring a full-on funk but was deliciously tart and did not overpower the food. Lili had what she proclaimed the softest and greatest meatballs of her life. They served these wonders with fries just to make sure that Lili would ascend to Belgian heaven. For the dessert course I had a passion fruit mousse, while Lili had Brussels style waffles (made with a liquid batter) topped with delicious strawberries.

The next day, we took a long walk out to the Ixelles neighborhood to dine at Les Brassins. While Restobieres is in a lively neighborhood, Les Brassins is located in a quieter, residential neighborhood. Despite its modest appearance they more than delivered on the quality of their food. I had a classic dish beer-based Belgian dish, carbonnade flamande, which is stew with beef, beautifully caramelized onions and a Belgian dubbel or strong dark ale. Previously we had enjoyed the dish from one of the fry stands in Bruges. At Les Brassins, the stew’s flavor was naturally sweet, rich and deep. It was without a doubt the greatest beer based stew I had ever tried. Since I cannot deny drinking Cantillon when available, I ordered their Organic kriek beer that went well with the stew. Hooked on meatballs after Restobieres, Lili ordered them cooked in flavorful tomato sauce. The acidity from the tomatoes did drown out some of the other more subtle flavors, so she preferred the meatballs from Restobieres. We each had a side of fries which were perfectly cooked. Beyond delicious food, Les Brassins has an amazing collection of beer signs and advertisements, some of which came from defunct Brussels breweries. Though its decor is not as welcoming as Nüetnigenough, Les Brassins has a clean comfortable feel compared to the slightly cluttered but homey feel of Restobieres.

For a beer hunter and food lover, a visit to any of these restaurants is a dream come true. It is not only that these foods can go with beer, but that that many of the dishes described above were cooked with beer and likely conceived with beer in mind. In each restaurant the staff was knowledgable and spoke English well. Especially at Nüetnigenough, waiters can not only recommend a beer based on the different dishes that interest you but also depending on what you like. They know that the proper beer elevates their food to another level entirely. After visiting these restaurants, you will realize that most chefs have too long focused on wine, even outside wine-growing regions. By visiting these restaurants you realize that beer just as well as wine can be an ingredient and accompaniment to world class food.

Have Beer, Will Travel: Michael Jackson, Beer Hunter

By Eric Van Vleet

The rapid expansion of so many craft breweries making so many innovate beers allows a person drink locally and almost never even have the same brew twice. There is no better time in the US than now to be a beer connoisseur. Yet even as local beer scenes in the US flourish, the consummate drinker should also travel to experience their favorite beer styles in the places where they were invented in order to appreciate them even more.

In your travels you would be well-advised to follow the example of the true OG of beer hunters, Michael Jackson. No, I am not talking about the self-proclaimed “King of Pop”. As the man himself explains in his deep British accent: “My name really is Michael Jackson, but I don’t sing. I don’t drink Pepsi. I drink beer.” Based on his global travels, he has published incredibly informative books on beer and whisky and left us an undeniable gem, his six-part, three and a half hour long The Beer Hunter series, which is available for free in its entirety on YouTube.

Jackson could not have made the series at a better time than 1989. While momentous shifts like the fall of the USSR were on the geopolitical horizon, equally revolutionary changes were happening in the beer world. During his episode about California, he visits a beer festival attended by many of the state’s first craft breweries, then called microbreweries, like Anchor, Sierra Nevada and Mendocino. During this visit, Jackson captures the beginnings of California’s ascendance into a global brewing powerhouse.

Jackson even interviews Fritz Maytag who bought the nearly defunct Anchor Brewing Company in 1965 in San Francisco and rejuvenated it and the California Common or “steam” beer style along with it. If one person can take the credit for relaunching craft beer in America it is Maytag. Yet this is California after all, and the incipient movement comes with what Jackson calls “a distinct whiff of utopia”.
There is a lovely segment where Maytag organizes a “California pilgrimage” to the state’s barley-growing regions with his brewers. Such a beergrimage helps to maintain a connection with the ingredients. In doing so, Maytag wanted to fight against a “factory attitude” and to be apart of the “risk” inherent in any agriculture cycle and harvest. Beer was leaving its ‘industrial’ trappings and to take on an “identity that relates to an actual farm.”

After re-watching The Beer Hunter series it is incredibly difficult not to give here an extended breakdown of each episode. The sheer excitement it produces makes to me want to head out immediately beer hunting. Just seeing the production process and the gorgeous pouring of a cask ale in Britain nostalgically reminds me of our days on that island or how his forays into Belgian lambics brings back an aftertaste of those “sour” beers that contain entire galaxies of different fermented fun. Elsewhere, in the Bohemia, Jackson tours the gorgeous caves and wooden casks at the Pilsner Urquell brewery. In Germany, he explores an all but vanished style of “stein beer”, where brewers would drop incredibly hot stones into the brew in order to bring it to a boil. In the Netherlands he visits Trappist monks and craft brewers riffing on these styles. This series is not just the travels of an eloquent student of beer but the recording of a pivotal moment in the history of beer when craft beer was beginning in America and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in Britain was trying to defend its “independent local breweries” from the homogenization of industrial lager.

In The Beer Hunter, Jackson has one foot in the past and one foot in the present. He respects tradition while also celebrating innovation. Any skilled brewer today should try to balance the two as well. As US craft brewers continue to add novel and crazy-seeming adjuncts, they are nearly all based upon beer styles that have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Jackson traces those links, explains them in a down to earth way that demonstrates his vast knowledge. We are lucky that his masterful series is freely available to all on YouTube. If you haven’t ever watched it now is the time. Just be ready as immediately after viewing you may be heading to a local brewery or even buying plane tickets to head out on an international beer hunt.

When the "Wild" Yeasts Come down from the Rafters: Brew Day at Brasserie Cantillon

By Eric Van Vleet

Brasserie Cantillon is without a doubt the favorite brewery in the world for Biencuits. In fact, during our first visit, Lili and I discovered that “sour” beers (lambics, gueuzes, faros, krieks) were for us the best beers of all. It was also that first visit that converted me into a unwavering beer hunter. I began my search for something as well crafted and complex as Cantillon’s beers. After we ordered our first bottle of their Fou’ Foune, an apricot lambic beer that not only brings a galaxy of sour glory yet still preserves a distinct ripe apricot fruit flavor, we knew we would have to return to Cantillon. And return we did three more times after, virtually making the beergrimage to Belgium for this brewery alone. Yet on our last visit, we were able to have an even more enriching experience than being in a beloved place drinking our favorite beers. We were able take a guided tour during a public brew day.

While you can always take a self-guided tour any time of year with the help of a multi-lingual brochure, the fact that we would have an actual tour guide describing the brewing process as it occurs was an enticing chance to see the masters at work. Better yet, they only open the brewery to the public a few days a year. Being able to visit the brewery on this day is like the beer hunter’s version of winning the golden ticket to visit Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, though unfortunately our tour guide did not have the same acerbic sense of humor as Gene Wilder’s version of Willy Wonka, though thankfully was not a creeper like Johnny Depp’s unfortunate take on the character. In general the staff is a tad brusque but knowledgeable and our tour guide that day was no exception.

But I digress…what is unique about Cantillon’s lambics and other beers is that because they are the product of spontaneous fermentation, brewers need the proper temperatures that can foster the reproduction of these “wild” yeasts. As a result of these yeasty limitations, they can brew only during the spring. The fact that they do not use cultured yeast means that they must rely on the yeast in the air of their 100-year-old building to start fermentation. Our tour guide reminded us that roughly 95% percent of beer styles are the product of controlled fermentation with the use of only one and more rarely two cultured yeasts. All beer was once brewed like this with "wild" yeasts. With these cultured yeasts one can hope to achieve an entirely uniform result. Cantillon’s spontaneous fermentation with dozens of bacterias and yeasts sets their beers apart and makes each brew at least slightly different.

Since these “wild” yeasts will vary depending on the brewery’s location, and hypothetically each place has their own local strains of yeasts and bacterias, only Cantillon and the other breweries in the Seine River valley around Brussels can legally produce “lambic” beers. Similar to my discussion of wines in a previous blog post here, the European Union has created a protected status for lambics, just as they have for Champagne.

While many breweries in the US produce American Wild ales with lambic-style methods, they cannot call them lambics. The idea being that these beers are like none other in the world because of the yeasts and bacterias that come down from the rafters at Brasserie Cantillon. Our guide described how the brewing of the grains that creates the wort attracts the bacterias and yeast present in the brewery to come and ferment the beers. These brewers try to welcome these “wild” yeasts and bacterias by practicing open vat fermentation, instead of enclosed vats that keep out such yeasts. Additionally, in order to be called lambic beers, they must have a minimum 35% malted wheat, which is different from most beers that are made exclusively of malted barley. Another important difference, the brewers at Cantillon in general use hops only to help to preserve the beers. They use incredibly dried hops that add no flavor or bitterness. By not using strong hops, their “wild” yeasts are truly the star of the show.

The next innovation for their beers is that they are barrel-aged for a minimum of one year in order to be a lambic. Interestingly enough, Cantillon’s brewers are not too concerned with the provenance of these barrels, but instead they buy used barrels that formerly aged wine. Unlikely many white whale American beers that are aged in Bourbon barrels to add a boozy flavor, barrels for Cantillon’s beers are not used to impart any flavor. Instead, they are only used as a vessel for fermentation. During the tour we saw that they cannot put the bung into the barrel at first or else the pressure from fermentation could destroy the barrel. We were even able to see a young lambic frothing up over the rim of the barrel in vigorous fermentation.

If all of this is not fascinating enough for fermentation fanatics, some lambics are allowed then to age for up to three years in the barrel. At this point the master brewer can produce gueuze, which is a blend of three different vintages of lambics. In effect, the blender is able draw from multiple barrels in order to create a perfect gueuze that reflects past years’ brews but is never exactly the same given the vicissitudes of spontaneous fermentation. As Cantillon has been a family owned and operated brewery for generations, they have been able to pass down blending skills generationally. Yet, they blend the different vintages of lambic not only to add depth of flavor, but also to aid in carbonation. They add in a one-year lambic to their blends which produces bottle conditioning and a lovely mellow carbonation. Our guide used the analogy that lambics are like white wine because they are flat and that gueuzes, given their bubbles, are like Champagne.

While their lambic base beer is a work of art, they take this base and create miracles (beeracles?) with creative additions. They add fresh fruits to lambics after fermentation has ended in order to leave some of the residual sugars from the fruit. Again we advise you to obtain a bottle of Fou’ Foune by any means necessary. Zwanze, a rhubarb lambic, has a kind of tartness that goes surprisingly well with the sourness of the beer. Their elderflower beer, Mamouche, has almost a tangy, slightly mustard-like flavor. Their Vigneronne pushes the wine analogy further while adding white grapes to a lambic that makes it taste like a gorgeous biodynamic white wine. Their take on the kriek style, a sour cherry lambic, has a lovely red color, nice tartness and in some cases uses only organic sour cherries. These additions of fresh local fruit to a gorgeous lambic base beer makes virtually all of them must try beers.

Seeing Cantillon on a brew day and having a guided tour made us even more aware of how unique of a place it is. For over a century the family has been making “sour” beers. Sadly all the other historic lambic breweries have gone out of business within the city of Brussels. It is amazing to tour the building that has become home to the kinds of yeasts and bacterias that come down from the rafters to help ferment what are for us are the greatest beers in the world. It is enlightening to see people working under highly unpredictable conditions, brewing beer roughly as it has been done for thousands of years before Pasteur’s discovery of yeasts. Their lambics, show how doing things the right way, the slow way, the labor intensive way, can yield exceptional results. From the work of the “wild” yeast to the brewer’s masterful blending abilities, Cantillon demonstrates the highest level of “craft” to which others should aspire.