Book Review: Lambic
Republished from BrewingTechniques' May/June 1993.
Lambic
by Jean-Xavier Guinard
(Classic Beer Style Series, Brewers Publications, Boulder, Colorado, 1990), 196 pp., $11.95.)
Lambic is a book as astonishing and complex as the beers it describes. As with all the books in this somewhat uneven series, it addresses a single beer style, examining it with a depth that's satisfying but never exhausting. Guinard's obvious understanding of and enthusiasm for these beers, combined with his remarkable research and fund of lambic lore, draws the reader fully into the lambic world.
And such a world! These are the beers of Brueghel, the last European survivors of the ancient brewing tradition of spontaneous fermentation, now practiced in only a few breweries in a tiny corner of Belgium. Out of fashion for many years, they've recently been "rediscovered," and while their new popularity assures the style's survival, it threatens to redefine that style in terms of today's bland palate. Yet vestiges of the customs and traditions surrounding these beers can still be found in Belgium, and in this book.
The book is organized into chapters on the history of the style, a discussion of the beers' sensory profile (which Guinard is unusually qualified to address), a remarkably detailed study of the beer's chemical composition, and a description of past and present commercial brewing practices. The chapter describing fermentation and cellaring covers the unique microbiological process involved and details the technical differences between the substyles. Other chapters provide a closer look at gueuze and the fruit lambics, a discussion of serving lambics, and a substantial section on making lambic-like beers at home (more about this later). The first of two appendices discusses many of the present commercial lambic breweries and their products. The other is, unfortunately, the same glossary appended to all books in this series, appropriate or not.
The book reads well, is well organized, and its graphics are effective. A reader would never guess that English is not Guinard's native language. His writing style is not only clear and entertaining but makes it plain that he's a scholar: attributions are clear, and plenty of information is given in the extensive bibliography to allow the interested reader to continue research. Homebrew literature too often presents speculation as fact, but this book seems entirely free of that. The high performance liquid chromatography analyses of a variety of lambics and the detailed study of the contribution of each of the yeast species involved in the amazingly complex fermentation were exactly the kind of data I'd been hoping to see in a book of this sort. Even the famous brewery spiders, so horrifying to brewers accustomed to Pasteur-inspired methods, are identified not only by species but by their function: they provide a means of controlling the population of fruit flies, known vectors of acetic acid bacteria.
In the chapter on brewing these beers at home -- which is really the point of a book like this, isn't it -- the careful description of commercial practice and microbiological processes has special value. Lambics are the beers they are because of the unique spectrum of microflora that live in the region in which lambics are brewed. Expose a cooling wort to unfiltered air (as lambic brewers do) anywhere else, and you may have a spontaneously fermented beer, but it won't be a lambic. The would-be lambic brewer must choose between faithfulness to the process, or faithfulness to the flavor. American home brewers have tried both approaches with varying success and have experimented with hybrid approaches, such as pitching the wort with cultures revived from bottles of commercial lambics. The weakness in the latter approach, of course, is that the cultures thus rescued are the ones most recently active or most capable of reviving quickly from dormancy, and may not be the ones that affect flavor. Guinard declares immediately that he's opting for the flavor, and recommends pitching pure cultures of the bacteria and yeast with the greatest impact, primarily Pediococcus damnosus, Brettanomyces bruxellensis, and B. lambicus. Some of the test batches Guinard brewed while developing the recipes in the book were extremely convincing, and many experimenters have come to feel that his is perhaps the most valid approach to brewing these beers outside their natural environment because it offers the largest measure of control over the process. Others worry that beers made this way will lack the complexity and the wild originality of traditional lambics. Home brewers experimenting with fermentation of these beers in wooden casks have suggested that the wood provides the needed complexity and interest, and perhaps fermenting in wood a wort of a traditional composition that has been pitched with a combination of bottle cultures and pure cultures may prove the most productive. The very long maturation times these beers require ensure that much experimentation remains to be done.
No experimenter in this style, though, should be without this book. Like few others, it has advanced the field it addresses. Even those who disagree with Guinard's approach to brewing these beers will find the other information in the book of considerable value. I first saw it after I returned from my own research in Belgium, and despite all I learned there I still feel indebted to Guinard for this book.
--Martin Lodahl
Auburn, California, USA
