Barrel cleaning at Cantillon

We popped over to Brussels for the public brew day at the Cantillon Brewery. We first discovered Cantillon on our last visit to the city in 2007, the brewery was highly recommended in our lonely planet guidebook, and we have been in love with their delicious lambic beers ever since.

Cantillon is one of a handful of breweries in Belgium that still use the wild yeast fermentation method to create sour beers. This basically means that rather than using yeast produced in labs, they leave their wort (i.e. sugary liquid made by boiling malt in water) exposed to the wild yeasts found in the brewery's loft. This in turn means that they can only brew during the winter months when temperatures are low enough to avoid bacterial infestation.

If you are yet to be charmed by this yeast talk, it might help to know that this is a family owned operation and they employ 4 people in total. The chap pictured was on barrel cleaning duty. The recipe they use is over 600 years old and all the equipment, with the exception of the bottling line, are over 100 years old.