If you visit a traditional lambic brewery in Belgium, you’ll see spiders spinning webs among the casks. They are not a nuisance, and brewers don’t swat them away. The spiders are there by design to protect the fruity beer from fruit flies.
The webs do, however, create a fitting environment for lambic, which can seem a little like magic. Using the oldest of all modern brewing styles, brewers summon wild yeast, resulting in funky, sour beers.Whether the goal is golden geuze or a raspberry-flavored framboise, brewing traditional lambic is very different from brewing typical beer. Brewers mix a batch of “wort” from boiled barley and unmalted wheat, and after repeated heatings and the addition of aged hops, they expose the wort to the open air. The wort is then colonized by yeast and other bacteria from the air, a process called “spontaneous fermentation.”
According to Dave Janssen, an editor of lambic.info who also runs the brewing blog Hors Catégorie, spontaneous fermentation is an ancient concept. These days, most commercial breweries are as sterile as possible to combat rogue yeast strains and bacteria. Surrounded by glistening fermentation tanks, brewers add a carefully chosen yeast, then seal the tanks to prevent contamination. In traditional lambic breweries, though,…
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