Back Up the Kriek

Last week my friend David invited me over for cigars. When I arrived he was over the moon with what he had found at new mega-store called Friar Tucks'. The store carries thousands of bottles of wine, a great selection of Scotch and other distilled spirits, and several hundred beers. In the beer section David found something that he had been looking for over several years: A bottle of kriek.

Years ago, at a time when I was homebrewing, David returned from a trip to Michigan and presented me with a flat of gorgeous cherries. While they could have gone into a cobbler, a pie, or my mouth, I instead decided to pitch them into five gallons of Belgian ale. In Belgium, the lambic style beers are a blessed mixture of skill and serendipity. In the old Belgian breweries the hot wort, or unfermented liquor from malted grain, would be pumped into the rafters of the brewhouse to cool. There, natural yeast, bacteria, and other flora and fauna would float into the beer.

It was this combination of elements, which could be considered faults in a German pilsner, honed over time, that produced beers unparalleled in their complexity, aroma, and flavor. Unlike other ales and lagers that can become stale in a few months, Belgian lambics can be aged for years and actually gain in complexity and depth.

The style of lambic that I wanted to produce using David's cherries is known as a kriek. After the wort had fermented, I innoculated the carboy with a special variety of bacteria. The cherries floating on top became coated in a downy covering of what looked like mold. There are a lot of parallels in brewing Belgian beers and making cheese.

Anyway, the kriek made from David's cherries turned out to be awesome. And the older it got, the better it got. We found a bottle in my old basement about five or six years after the fact and it just blew us away.

Then came the sad part. I was no longer brewing, and for a while the initial bloom was off the rose on microbrew availability. So David could no longer find kriek. Sure, there was framboise (raspberry) and peche (peach, which you either like or HATE). But no kriek.

So David's find was definitely cause for celebration. It called for a glass of Kriek and a great cigar.

Here's to David and to Belgium!