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Brewery

Time to Kriek

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The Short Kriek Season

Regular cherries have quite a long season during the summer here in Belgium. However, noordkrieken, better known as sour morello cherries which are used to make Kriek have a much shorter season. You can only buy them for about two weeks each July.

Ginger Beer

Why they are special

The krieken are softer than regular cherries and are more sour. Because of this sourness, they are less prone to infiltration from worms, but they are sensitive to other infections and infestations.

The most prized krieken used for the best Lambic Kriek beers are Schaarbeeekse krieken which is a rare morello variety grown in Schaarbeek, a suburb of Brussels. Demand for them is now so high that some brewers, such as 3 Fontainen, have started to plant their own trees.

The cherries have a pleasant sourness which when fermented into an already more sour beer such as a lambic, oud bruin, or Ginger Tipple give the beverage a refreshing tartness. This is why they are sought after by brewers.

Don’t Rush Ginger Kriek

It takes us 6 months to create our Ginger Kriek. First we brew a Ginger Tipple for 4 weeks. Yesterday, we bought the krieken for the 2018 vintage. We checked each cherry before washing to remove the insecticides and adding to the Tipple to ferment.

After about 6 weeks, the cherries sink down in the vats to show that their sugars have fully fermented. Then we sieve the brew before bottling; we do not filter!

After bottling, the 3rd fermentation takes about 2 weeks, but the bottles need to sit for a further 3 months before we can release them onto the market.

Unique

Our Ginger Kriek is the only ginger and sour cherry alcoholic beverage in the world and the 2018 vintage is 90% pre-sold.

Perhaps in 2019 we will produce more.

 

Ginger Tipple Gets Ahead

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Ginger Tipple Gets A Head

One of the criticisms of Ginger Tipple, especially from Belgians, was that there is no head, no foam, no froth, no Belgian lace, therefore it cannot be a beer.

Appearances are important, even before one tastes or smells the beer, and while Ginger Tipple scores high on the flavour, aroma and colour, the froth disappeared within seconds. Even though plenty of lambics and geuzes do not have foams, but they are part of Belgium’s beer psyche. Ginger Tipple is not yet there.

This is about to change!

Ginger Tipple with a headWe carried out an experiment with some bottles of our new beer, the soon to be launched Tipple Hop. We double dry-hopped with two different hops giving it tons of hoppy flavour and aroma. At 7% ABV it also has a pleasant soothing effect on your nerves. A touch cloudy; if we could classify it, we would call it a New England Ginger Pale Ale.

In our laboratory, we developed a gluten-free non-chemical based additive which adds proteins to the Tipple Hop without affecting that delicious blend of ginger and hops.

Brewer Jeremy Sulzbacher commented “The commercial additives I tested left an unpleasant taste, so we developed our own natural foaming agent. This one even enhances the flavour!”

We are keeping the details secret, and it will be a few months before we can go commercial with it.

Helping People is Wonderful

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Ginger Beer

Helping People is Wonderful

Ginger BeerI first met Marc Struyf 3 years ago. I was developing Ginger Tipple and I found out that he was one of Belgium’s leading hop expert. He travels each autumn to America’s main hop growing area, Yakima Valley to try out their latest varieties, and gets there before the big Belgian breweries.

He also grows some hops nearby and there is a big event each September when they are harvested.

He invited me to visit him on a Friday afternoon in late May. The weather was perfect and the garden of his brewery is idyllic. His microbrewery, Den Triest, is located in a small rural town near Brussels called Kapelle-op-den-bos,

We sat in the garden and after I explained to him what I was trying to achieve, a ginger beer with hops which had to be Kosher for Passover, and possibly organic, he suggested which hops to use, and even gave me some samples.

The Beers

Ginger BeerAnd then we started tasting his beers. They are among the best you can ever taste. As a hop expert, his IPA is supreme. There are a number of skills to brewing an excellent IPA. Most importantly, the underlying ale has to have body and flavour. Too many IPAs are dishwater with lots of hops. If you taste his regular beers, the blondes, bruins, doubles etc, you will taste the excellence in his brewing.

Then there is the dry hopping, when the hops are added towards the end of the fermentation or after it. Besides the selection and proportions of the hops used, there is the timing. Again, a lot of IPAs have a nasty kick from leaving the hops in for too long.

Kriek

Ginger BeerAnother of his wonderful beers is his Kriek. Most of the cheaper krieks are sweet. The high-end lambic krieks are very sour. Marc achieves that perfect balance of a pleasant sourness with only an undertone of sweetness. Of course, the colour is wonderfully natural.

Marc taught me how to take our Ginger Kriek to a higher level, using a technique not found in textbooks.

 

The Bar

Marc brews mainly in 200 litre tanks and sells his brews in 75cl bottles, mainly for export. His bar is open on the first Sunday of each month. So if you want to taste his beers you have to catch one of the 12 days a year it is open.

The healthiest way is to go there by bike as there are a lot of few bike routes in the area.

Ginger Tipple

Ginger KriekI get particular pride when I hear from other brewers who work with Marc that they tasted Ginger Tipple when they visited him. Yesterday, one of his regulars approached me and said that he had heard a lot about my ginger beer from Marc and wants to sell it in his bar in Mechelen – he stocks over 300 beers.

When I went to pay, I looked in the kitchen and saw on his shelf of favourites a bottle of Ginger Kriek, I beamed with pride.

What I like most…

When I thanked Marc for his help and told him that his advice was perfect he replied “I am happy for you .
Also for my self , helping people is wonderful.”