What makes Belgian beer so special | Food Secrets

If you ask something in the world about Belgium, they will say chocolate, waffles, maybe our soccer team. But they will certainly say beer. We call this the champagne of the Puy-de-Land because we use our champagne bottles and cork it like a champagne. It's not such a surprise that women are brewing because it started with the women. We are in Brussels, La Grande Place, a great marketplace. And this is the house of the Brewer's Guild. It still lives in the Middle Ages and now it's still the headquarters of the Belgian Brewer's Federation. It's the beating heart of Belgian beer culture. In Germany, you have the Rheinland Geburt, you can only use butter, hop, malt and yeast for the beer. There's only four ingredients. Okay, it's good. You can make a good beer with four ingredients, but Belgium is different. We use fruit, we use spices, chocolate. Whatever you can imagine. It's not poison. You will find it in a beer. We are occupied by every nation in Europe. We're occupied by the French, by the Germans, by the Spaniards, by the people from Austria, even by the Dutch people. And what we did, we always kept our own traditions, our own soul. But every nation that occupied Belgium brought something to Belgium. And when it was good, we stole it. And we integrate our own cultures also in our beers. So we have a huge variety of beers. In Belgium, if you go to a pub and the waiter or the barman doesn't have the right glass for the right beer, he will apologize ten times. I'm very sorry, but I don't have the right glass because they are in use or they are broken. Can I give you another glass? And then the client will say yes or no. A very famous brewery is Timmermans. It's an old brewery. It's fantastic. And they make very, very, very, very good beers. A must-visit. Timmermans started in 1702, started as a farm, cultivated their own grains, and began to produce beers for themselves. We brew Lambic here in Brewery Timmermans. As you can see, here in the middle is our maesch kettle. This is where we're going to mix our water and our grain together. That's what we're going to do to start the brew and to start to make Lambic. The production of Lambic beer is done by using 60% malted barley and 40% raw wheat. We mix that with water like any other brewery. But what makes Lambic special is that we're talking about spontaneous fermentation, which means we don't add any yeast. Yeast drops in the beer and inoculates it on the cool ship and then ages in between one and three years in a wooden barrel. The machinery you see here in the whole brew hall is heritage. That means it's protected. We work with what we got. It looks like an old museum, but it's actually, as you can see, still functional. So here I'm next to our boiling kettle. As you can see, the boiling kettle is completely filled with 135 hectoliters of beer. So now it's time to add our hops. These are Belgium Golden hops. They are aged hops. The hops that we're using in this brew are hops from 2022. So they have been aging already for four years. So in total, 20 kilos of hops went in. And now it's just three to four hour boil. And then we're ready to send it off to the cool ship. The cool ship that you see here can have 220 hectoliters if completely filled. It's Europe's biggest cool ship, completely made out of copper and shallow. So more surface area for the yeast and the batteries to settle in. And more surface for it to cool down as quick as possible. There's a brewing season attached to it. So that means we only brew from the end of September till May, when nights are cold. Because we need those cold nights to cool down our beer naturally on the cool ship at night. So after the three to four hour boil, we'll put our beer, our wort, on top of the cool ship. Where it cools down till 22 degrees Celsius. And where it's there, then inoculated with the wild yeast and batteries. It's not only in the air that you get the wild yeast and the batteries. But also in the barrels itself and in the building and in the structure of the room itself. It's a combination of those things together that makes our lambic our lambic. Even we started after the Roman times. People, especially women, they were brewing beer at home. Around 800, like with Charlemagne, the great emperor. There was like an industrial kind of beer production. And also the monastery of the monks started to create beer. At the time, there was no hops in the beer. Around 1400, more or less, hops was coming from the eastern of Europe. And hops was used to conserve the beer in the first place. And before we had hops, the beer was made with grout. Like a mix of several herbs and spices. Just to conserve the beer. And grout, you cannot make it yourself. You have to buy it with the grout house. With like the person who has the license to produce and to sell grout. It was kind of a form of taxation. I was looking up into the books. How they were brewing in the Middle Ages in a natural, healthy way. And that was with herbs. So I use a normal brewing process with malt. And then we milk. And then we heat up the malt. We use water. And then we add a different type of yeast. And in the cooking, we add the herbs. So you don't really feel the difference between a normal beer and our beer. Only our beer, because we don't use the hops, is more soft. Now we're at our voederhal, our wood park. That's where we age our lambic. Between one and three years old. So after the beer is brewed, the beer is fermented and aged in wooden barrels. The barrels can be different sizes. So this one on the right here can contain between 600 and 1,000 liters. And the big ones we call voeders. Those are more 4,000 to 5,000 liters. This beer ages in here and loses a bit of liquid during the aging. It's called angel shirt. So that means that every few months, we need to refill those barrels. As you see here, this is one-year-old lambic. It's more similar to a wheat beer or a hefeweizen than to a lambic. It's by the wild yeast and the bacterias and the aging of it. This is a three-year-old lambic. It turns out clearer, acidifies over time. This is our Oude Geuze. This is a blend of one, two, and three-year-old lambics together. Re-fermented spontaneously in the bottle. It's a young lambic that adds residual sugar to the blend and carbonates the beer in the bottle. It's highly pressurized. That's why we cap it in champagne bottles and cork kits. It's what we call the champagne of the biotalent. The base beer is our lambic. After aging it in woods for one year, we add 300 grams per liter of cherries to it, which transforms the lambic into krieke lambic and is then used to blend to get our lambic and stout, our collaboration with Guinness, or to be blended into our Oude Kriek, which is a krieke lambic of different ages, re-fermented in the bottle. I just love it because I'm born and raised in Brussels. It's the beer of our people. I think we should protect it and keep on doing it and keep on loving it. Belgium is a typical beer country. It comes from our ancestors and we give it through, through, through. And I think it's the knowledge and the strength that we give that through. And that, I think, it's our strength here in Belgium. And even if you go to a small town, and you go to like the canteen from the local circle, like very low division, very bad players, very bad circle, but you go to the canteen, you go to the room, at least they have like five or six beers, and every beer has its own glass, so it's fantastic to drink beer in Belgium.