Cantillon brewery

Jean Hummler, the Tasting Manager for Moeder Lambic, took me over to the Cantillon brewery on 4 May to witness a very special and rare part of their brewing process - spontaneous fermentation. Fresh wort is pumped into this huge hand-hammered copper koelschip in their open-air attic, where it is exposed for a day to indigenous yeast and other microbes carried by the warm evening breeze. This only takes place a few days each year, and the environmental conditions just happened to be right this very day. We were standing right next to the koelschip while the steamy wort was pumped into it. Traditional breweries like Cantillon have been doing it this way since before Pasteurization and refrigeration. All in all, Jean ended up showing me around the brewery for a couple of hours and even introduced me to the head brewer Jean-Pierre Van Roy. Epic.