The Brewery
Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen is a producer of traditional lambic beers, unique to the Belgium Senne Valley region. They started at the end of the 19th century as a lambic blender (i.e. buying freshly brewed lambic wort from other brewers and blending these) and became a lambic brewery in 1998, when interest was at a low. Once a group of approximately 300 blenderies and breweries combined, there are nowadays only a dozen producers left, of which 3 Fonteinen can be considered one of the most stubborn and traditional ones, if not the most.
Besides a brewery, 3 Fonteinen is still the only lambic producer that is also a blender: they still buy wort from other lambic brewers like Boon, Lindemans and De Troch. They are humble but proud to say that they are rated amongst the Top 10 best breweries in the world, according to Untappd databases.
*See here a leaflet with their detailed history*
The style: Lambic beer
Producing traditional lambic takes time and patience; it takes several years before it's ready for the market and they're able to actually sell a bottle. It's just like our wines!
Unique are the grains (40% wheat, 60% barley) and hop, the long boiling time (4-5 hours) and the open and spontaneous fermentation. Airborne wild yeasts inoculate the freshly brewed wort overnight in an open container called a coolship. No yeasts or anything else is added and the beer is not filtered nor pasteurized. It can only be brewed during cold nights (October – May) as they would otherwise affect the beer. In the morning the beer is put into barrels, where it stays for at least a year up to 4 years for refermentation. Afterwards different lambics are blended pure or with fruit.
After bottling, the beers stays another 6 months in a warm room for refermentation in the bottle. On average 3 Fonteinen beers have an age of 2,5 years before they're released.
It is a 100% natural and spontaneous process, with a minimum of human interference. This makes every beer and blend unique, as so many factors determine the taste, aroma, ABV-level… there's no standard lambic beer that is always the same. And they do not seek that either.
As it is a natural product with active yeasts and residual sugars, you can easily store it away for decades and you will see that the beer ages gracefully and with a continuous development of all these factors. A bottle of lambic beer needs to be dealt with with care.
The beers of 3 Fonteinen
In general, 3 Fonteinen have two main types of beers; gueuzes and fruit lambic.
A gueuze is a blend of lambics of different ages, typically 1, 2, 3 and 4 years old. This does not mean they just blend barrels equally (one of each age). The blender selects 5 to 10 barrels which can have had 5 to 12 brews in them. The complicated art of blending means that they cannot make a standard beer and that every batch and even bottle is unique.
To make a fruit lambic, they macerate fruit with young lambic in either a stainless steel blending tank or a wooden barrel. At 3 Fonteinen the fruit maceration ratio is very high, 50% whole handpicked fruit and 50% lambic. They do a long maceration time (5 to 6 months). This makes very intense fruit lambics.
