Delete, Protect, bureaucrat, administrator
4,588
edits
Changes
no edit summary
There is no greater dichotomy in a beer style than there is with lambic. For many, lambic is an entry level beer, marketed to be easy drinking, sweet, and a great transition for people who didn’t previously like the taste of beer. On the other side is a complex beverage, an acquired taste that is considered to be one of the best, most valued, connoisseur beers in the world.
Lambic has been sweetened for more than 200 years. Until the mid 1800’s when pressurized barrels enabled beer to move more freely, beer in Belium was primarily lambic and Faro. Faro is lambic that has been sweetened with brown sugar. Lambic drinkers Drinkers who didn’t appreciate the tart nature of gueuze lambic would add one or two lumps of sugar. A tool called a ‘stoemper’ was often used in lambic to help the sugars dissolve faster. Of course, in spite of the popularity of Faro and sugar sweetening, traditional lambic drinkers insisted on drinking their lambic “neat,”.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the demand for sweetened lambic continued to grow. “After World War II, consumer tastes became sweeter with the success of cola and soft drinks, and the big brewers in particular played to this trend by bringing ‘capsulekensgeuze’ to the market. “<ref name=“GeuzeKriek”>Jef Van den Steen, [[Books#Geuze & Kriek: The Secret of Lambic Beer|Geuze & Kriek: The Secret of Lambic Beer]], 2012</ref> Belle Vue and other lambic brewers began the process of using pasteurization to prevent bottle conditioning and potential bottle explosions as a result of the residual sugars being left in the beers. Filtration also removed many of the bugs and created a cleaner beverage suited for the soda drinker market.