User:Gaël

My name is Gael, you might know me from my involvement with BXL BeerFest working on the lineup and guided tastings, or my involvment in a couple of informative groups about craft beer for the past decade or so. If not, I was born in France and moved to Germany 10+ years ago, I am a music nut (old school heavy metal mostly, but also blues, jazz, folk, ...) and a father. If you ask anyone who knows me, they'll probably tell you that I am intensely passionate by the things I love, and driven by a thirst for knowledge. Knowledge of how things work, how they came to be, of their history, of the actual culture through the eyes of the people who make it - I need to understand the true meaning of things. In order to do that, I believe patience is key, and I like to go with the flow discreetly, making real connections with people, never caring much for hype or getting influenced by anything else than my own palate and natural path of discovery. My explorations are usually following a domino principle, taking a moment to really understand something before switching to the next - through similarities most of the time.

I started drinking Belgian beer pretty much as soon as I was of age (obviously), but my love for lambic really started developing around 2009 after I felt happy with my other explorations. By that time, I felt pretty satisfied with my ramblings around the world of spirits and scotch in particular, which lead me to then explore the barrels used by distilleries, which brought me to sherry and then vin jaune, an oxydative wine from the Jura region in France (as I said, the domino effect !), which still remains with me to this day. During these years, beer was always there, but discovering these wines and their similarities to lambic had me stop and put my focus on them again. It quickly became clear that this was my destination, and that it felt like home. The rusticity, authenticity, the honesty and generosity of the people I met, as well as the challenging taste of a true traditional lambic for many people made it all familiar and special to me, I never looked back.

Another thing about me is that I strongly believe things are better shared. If something gives me happiness, it only makes sense to share that feeling with the rest of the world. I can get carried away at times describing things in details, in my best efforts to share not only informations but also all the feelings of joy that it brought me. I want people to feel what I felt, to understand more than what they heard or read somewhere, to connect on a deep level.

My hope is that I can do that with lambic.info as a platform to share that passion with as many people as possible, the other nerds out there who thrive on knowing more, and are part of our effort to preserve a tradition that deserves to keep going and to be known.