Skip to main content
Support

Browse by category

All categories
Home

Alcoholic drinks from Pajottenland and Zenne

Lambic (spontaneous coolship beer)lambiek

Lambic is a sour Belgian beer that no brewer pitches with yeast. The boiled wort cools overnight in a wide open tray, where microbes from the air fall in, and then ferments and ages for one to three years in wooden casks. A run of bacteria and yeasts, ending with Brettanomyces, makes it dry, sour and still; most lambic is blended into gueuze or used for fruit beers.

Fully documentedAlcoholic drinks31 daysOude Geuze, Oude Geuze-Lambiek and Oude Lambiek are EU traditional specialities guaranteed (TSG)

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedEach brewery uses its own recipe and publishes no batch. The traditional-speciality rules fix the result instead, such as a wort of at least 12.7 °Plato.
Barley malt[wp-lambic]
Unmalted wheat[wp-lambic]
Aged hopsOld hops keep the beer without making it bitter; the TSG caps bitterness at 20 BU[wp-lambic][tsg1997]
Starterspontaneous (airborne microbes via the coolship; resident cask flora)

Total time across the recorded steps: 31 days

Start
Drag the bar or press Play

What changes: The wort is boiled for hours with aged hops

Step 1 of 6
Long boil with aged hops
Time
3 h
Reported
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Pediococcus damnosus
Dekkera
Lactic acid bacteria

Output: hopped wort.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

freshly boiled wort (about 90 °C when sampled) is sterile

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Lambic is a sour Belgian beer that no brewer pitches with yeast. The boiled wort cools overnight in a wide open tray, where microbes from the air fall in, and then ferments and ages for one to three years in wooden casks. A run of bacteria and yeasts, ending with Brettanomyces, makes it dry, sour and still; most lambic is blended into gueuze or used for fruit beers. Made in 6 steps over 31 days. The longest step, enterobacteriaceae phase in casks, takes up to 30 days (Spitaels F. et al. 2014) and runs at 10–30 °C (Spitaels F. et al. 2014). Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. pastorianus and Pediococcus damnosus do most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main stepup to 30 daysReported[spitaels2014]Enterobacteriaceae phase in casks
Temperature10–30 °CReported[spitaels2014]Enterobacteriaceae phase in casks
AciditypH up to 3.8Set[tsg1997]Maturation in the cask

What makes this one different

Lambic is never pitched with yeast. The wort takes in microbes from the air overnight in an open coolship, so it can only be brewed in the cold months, and it ferments and ages for one to three years in wooden casks. African sorghum beers are also unpitched but are drunk within days.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Oude Geuze (Gueuze Vieille)A blend of lambics with a weighted average age of at least a year, the oldest aged at least three years in wood, re-fermented in the bottle. In a study of gueuze aged up to 17 years, yeasts were cultivated from all beers, but bacteria could not be grown from beers older than 5 years.
  • Kriek and framboiseLambic re-fermented on sour cherries or raspberries.
  • FaroHistorically a blend of lambic with a lighter fresh beer, sweetened with brown sugar. The traditional-speciality application dates faro to the 18th century.
  • Industrial lambic (West Flanders)No early Enterobacteriaceae phase and more kinds of acetic acid bacteria; the core yeasts and Pediococcus probably come from the cask wood.

Safety

Enteric bacteria such as Klebsiella pneumoniae and Escherichia coli are found in the first month in the cask. Enterobacteriaceae are susceptible to pH below 4.0 and ethanol above 2.0 %, and the traditional-speciality rules cap the finished lambic at pH 3.8. That does not prove they are gone. The same study still found their DNA throughout two years of fermentation. The authors say either the DNA persisted or the cells stayed alive without growing on plates.

Hazards the sources name: Klebsiella pneumoniae and Escherichia coli among the Enterobacteriaceae of earlier studies; they are susceptible below pH 4.0 and above 2.0 % ethanol.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

The traditional-speciality application dates lambic, gueuze and the fruit lambics to at least the start of the 19th century, and faro to the 18th.

  1. [spitaels2014] Spitaels F. et al. 2014, The microbial diversity of traditional spontaneously fermented lambic beer, PLOS ONE 9:e95384paper
  2. [tsg1997] Official Journal of the European Communities C 21/9, 21 January 1997, application for registration of Gueuze Vieille / Oude Geuze, Oude Lambiek as a certificate of specific character (now TSG; registered by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2017/2216)spec
  3. [wp-lambic] Wikipedia, Lambic (outline only)wiki
  4. [spitaels2015a] Spitaels F. et al. 2015, The microbial diversity of an industrially produced lambic beer shares members of a traditionally produced one and reveals a core microbiota for lambic beer fermentation, Food Microbiology 49:23–32paper
  5. [spitaels2015b] Spitaels F. et al. 2015, Microbiota and metabolites of aged bottled gueuze beers converge to the same composition, Food Microbiology 47:1–11paper