The machines and methods used at Cantillon are decades and even centuries old and create beers that have blissfully little to do with the mass-produced brews that line the world’s supermarket shelves.
On a production day, light streams through the window, people work in overalls, and steam collects in drips on the ceiling. The tiny facility is a perfect way to understand how beer is made.
To begin, huge quantities of crushed wheat and malted barley are given a hot-water bath in a giant wooden tub, creating a heady-smelling liquid called wort, but this is where the similarities between lambic and mass-market beer end.
Aged hops - more of a preservative than a flavoring agent for lambics - are added and the near-boiling liquid is pumped upstairs to catch a cold. In a shallow copper vat known as a cooling tun that’s nearly as large as the drafty, musty room it’s kept in, the wort is exposed to the elements, particularly the wild yeasts native to Brussels’ Senne Valley (especially Brettanomyces bruxellensis and Brettanomyces lambicus) and perhaps others unique to the brewery itself.
Inoculated with the wild yeasts that will kick-start the fermentation process and turn this water into beer, the liquid is aged in winery-style oak barrels for up to three years, at which point the barely-fizzy brew can legally be called lambic.
“We’re not really trying to do it for effect, but it’s what the beer needs,’’ says Van Roy, who catches me staring at a hundred-year-old engine that’s connected by long belts to almost every machine in the production rooms.
“That’s the heart of the brewery,’’ he says, but instead of sounding worried that the antique’s performance is vital to his weekly paycheck, there’s an assurance that it is.
The family-run brewery embodies a definition of honest work and an honorable trade that are lost in time. Watching it happen, I realize that beer, the good stuff, is a link to tradition and the city’s postwar heyday.
