cantillon | Love Good Beer

This week the Alibi Room is celebrating their 400th tap list rotation by stocking said tap list with epic beers. This Monday to Thursday (you may have already missed two days, but still two to go) they are opening an hour early at 4pm and selling 10oz glasses of said epic beers for $4 each. It’s quite the beer list and you can view it in full over at Barley Mowat. As far as I know, this is the first time Cantillon has ever been available on tap in BC. Special note, I contributed some bacteria to the two year old lambic.

Lucky for me, one of my beer buddies made a reservation for 4pm on the first day and made a seat available, thanks Gerry. Sure enough, at 4pm a largish crowd of beer nerds assembled and the Alibi Room quickly filled up. It was so busy, in fact, that it took forty five minutes to get our first beer(s). Our whole table ordered one of each Cantillon right off the bat. I have to say, I love Cantillon, but drinking three glasses of lambic in a row is a bit much. I preferred the Gilloise to the Gueze to the Kriek, though all were good.

Me and Cantillon and happiness

Next up was the Tofino Spruce Tip IPA I so fondly remembered, which I didn’t find as delightfully sprucy as last year’s version. I’ve heard that collecting spruce tips is an arduous task, so maybe they skimped a bit this time around? What followed was a collaboration by Graham of P49 and Tak of Steamworks called, and I’m not kidding, Besties with Testis, an IPA fermented solely with brettanomyces. I hazily recall it being great, hopefully the first and last time I enjoy putting testis in my mouth.

Here’s the full list of beers that I did gone and drunk, in order:

Cantillon Gilloise
Cantillon Gueze
Cantillon Kriek
Tofino Spruce Tip Aged Hoppin Cretin’ IPA
P49 + Steamworks “Besties with Testis” 100% Brett fermented IPA
Central City Citra hopped Imperial IPA
P49 Lord of the Hops IPA
Upright Bourbon Sour blended Stout

Central City imperial IPA is always great, but I set myself up poorly for P49 Lord of the Hops. I believe P49 is going for the session crowd with this one, meaning I found it severely lacking in hops and almost cloyingly sweet. I need to give it another shot though, since I drank the CC and P49 IPAs in the wrong order. I finished strong with the Upright Stout, which was just fantastic.

I’m heading back tomorrow to enjoy a few of the other beers I missed out on. That’s what’s great about this 400th celebration, I didn’t have to over indulge because it’s one night only. Sure, some of the more popular beers were consumed immediately, but Nigel staggered the list such that some excellent brews will be coming on at the halfway point. I was worried I was going to have to wait in a giant line, buy a ticket, or fight someone to get in, but instead I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised at the civility of this celebration.

If you have time, read the forward Nigel wrote in the beer menu. If more businesses appreciated their customers this much, people would give them more of their money. I would personally like to thank Nigel and the Alibi Room for all their hard work in taking the BC beer scene to the next level. See you guys again tomorrow.

Cheers,

Chris

Cantillon is widely regarded to be one of the best brewers of lambic beer in the world. Lambic, if you don’t know, is beer that is spontaneously fermented via wild yeasts that just happen to be in the air. Different regions of the world contain their own unique concoction of wild yeasts floating about, resulting in very unique (horrible) tasting beers. Brussels, and the area southwest of it, are historically considered to have excellent wild yeast strains optimal for lambic brewing. Of course, with modern technology, the beneficial wild yeasts have been isolated and can be purchased by any old brewer. Still, lambic brewing requires a tremendous amount of skill and patience. Done wrong and the taste is horrible, done well and the taste is still one many would consider to be ‘acquired’. Lambics are sour, require years to become drinkable, and are often brewed with fruit, the sugar from which cuts the sourness of the final beer. Cantillon has mastered lambic brewing and continues to produce top notch beers in the last remaining lambic brewery in Brussels. It’s still family run and they use the same equipment they’ve always used, going back to the nineteenth century. Obviously we needed to visit this place.

The Cantillon Beer Lineup

I’ve heard the name Cantillon bandied about with such high regard over the years that I expected a slick operation. Instead we found a hole in the wall warehouse in a suburb of Brussels that looked like it was going to fall apart. It’s old, cold, and there are spiders everywhere (spiders are considered to be great friends of natural brewers because they eat annoying bugs attracted to the sugar in unfermented beer). Amazingly, the tour was self guided and included two free tastes (gueze and framboise) for all of five euros a person. What modern brewery would let you go on an unguided tour? My favorite part of the tour was the fermentation room, which is a room in the attic exposed to the great outdoors via a few portholes. In the room was one giant shallow aluminum tub where all Cantillon beers pick up their wild yeast. I couldn’t believe they would let me in this magic room, especially considering I was a bit sick at the time. Expect the 2012 vintage Gueze to contain hints of Chris phlegm, imparted by a few careless sneezes.

The Magic Brewing Room at Cantillon

The brewery at Cantillon is an amazing place to visit. It’s encouraging to see such a big name brand operating so humbly by nice people in a small, family run shop. It lived up to the hype and then some. If any of your Vancouverites are interested in trying a local lambic, Storm has 12 year aged (forgotten about in the back of the brewery) fruit varieties on sale and they are fantastic.

Cheers,

Chris

PS> If any pretentious North American beer douchebags try to tell you that lambic is pronounced lambeek, ask them why the staff at Cantillon pronounces it lambic? Let’s leave the bad attitude to InBev, shall we?