Cantillon Brewery

Cantillon is the last traditional lambic brewery in Brussels — a family operation that has been brewing spontaneously fermented beer in the same building since 1900, using methods unchanged since the Middle Ages. Lambic beer is fermented not by adding yeast but by exposing the hot wort to the wild yeasts and bacteria floating in the air of the Senne Valley, which means the brewing can only happen in winter (October to April, when the temperature is right for the wild microorganisms), and the beer ages in wooden barrels for one to three years before being blended or bottled.

The self-guided tour of the brewery (included in the modest admission price, which also covers tastings) is one of the best brewery experiences in the world — not because of fancy visitor-centre production values (there are none) but because the brewery is a working museum of pre-industrial brewing. The copper kettles, the wooden coolship (where hot wort is exposed to open air overnight), the barrel rooms where beer ages for years, and the cobwebbed rafters that harbour the specific microorganisms responsible for Cantillon's flavour are all part of a continuous process that hasn't fundamentally changed in over a century.

The tasting at the end includes gueuze (a blend of young and old lambics, effervescent and bracingly sour), kriek (lambic fermented with sour cherries), and seasonal fruit lambics that bear no resemblance to the sweetened 'fruit beers' sold in tourist shops. Cantillon's beer is an acquired taste — intensely sour, complex, and funky — but once acquired, it redefines what beer can be.