To reach higher ABV levels, brewers blend a younger Lambic after the aging with fruit. This allows for more alcohol production. Can You Age Kriek? If you remove the fruit facet, there is not much difference between Gueuze and Kriek. They are made from the same base: Lambic Sour Wheat Beer. And both beers share the same basic concept of blending Lambics up to a point. Some brewers macerate for up to a year. They also go up to a 3.3 lbs./gal (400g/L) fruit ratio. Where to Buy Kriek Beer This is how Kriek beer was meant to taste. We make it with 250 grams of fresh cherries per litre. Discover the pleasure of its pure, authentically fruity character: refreshing, soft and beautifully balanced. Kriek Boon brings you the taste of real cherries. I don’t know that there is such thing as an American Kriek,” shared The Referend Bier Blendery’s founder James Priest. “The serious practitioners are all blessedly making the best beer they can with the best fresh, local fruit they can, rather than forcing stylistic uniformity.” Perhaps it’s more accurate to refer to American attempts at the style as simply spontaneous cherry beers (as one of our examples does) so they don’t carry the weight and history of the Kriek style, which is specifically Belgian.

The beer is stored primarily in large wooden barrels, called foeders. Brouwerij Boon has a park of more than 100 horizontal casks averaging 8,000 litres capacity each. Only old oak barrels are used, as new oak contains too many tannins [10] You may or may not have seen this recently; either way I'd still like to let you know there's a new Oude Geuze we've made with Mikkeller! In this case… Read More You can buy traditional Kriek from the US importers of brewers like Boon and Lindemans. One example is Merchant du Vin Corporation who imports Lindemans. Another is Global Beer Network for Boon.

Where to Buy Kriek Beer

Yet, modern interpretations tend towards the target market of the sweet-toothed folks. These sweet beers tempt the bitter beer haters with an option that is still a beer. You could say this is a win-win for beer lovers if you are not into fully authentic Kriek. However, watch out for sweetened juices, essences, and flavored syrups. Which Fruit Is in a Kriek Beer? For the Oude Kriek Boon, no less than 400 grams of fresh cherries are used per litre. The cherry lambic refermented in the bottle. The large amount of cherries gives this Oude Kriek a very intense yet smooth taste. Kriek beer follows the same initial process of brewing Lambics. The processes branch off once you select the age of your base Lambic. Below is the outline: An Alcohol-By-Volume of 3.5 to 7.0 percent dominates the Kriek space. Since cherries do not contain much sugar, they do not add to the alcohol level, rather, they dilute your blend. Under a Belgian law as amended in 1993, geuze must be made based on spontaneous fermentation only, without specifying what percentage of spontaneous-fermentation beer must be present. Hence, geuze beers and their fruit varieties that are not prefixed with “oude” are not produced by spontaneous fermentation alone, or in some cases only to a very limited extent. [7]

Oude Geuze is what started it all. Based on the lambic style, and synonymous with Brussels brewing, it was a beer that a 21 year-old Frank Boon loved. So much so, that when Oude Geuze started to fall out of favour, he was determined to keep it alive. He bought Rene De Vits’ geuze in 1978, acquiring the building, an arsenal of oak lambic barrels and a whole lot of dust and cobwebs. Classic Kriek should be dry in the sweetness department. This is thanks to the hardworking bugs that turn the sugars in your ferment into the alcohol you know and love. The earliest known fruit used for Kriek is the Schaerbeek Cherry. It is a small and red cherry native to the town of Schaerbeek, in Brussels. It is known as wild cherry: it is not grafted on plum trees or “regular” cherry trees. The dark-red Morello cherry is a common alternative. Do not even think about using sweet cherries. They will not give you the best flavor to weight ratio. You may or may not have seen this recently; either way I'd still like to let you know there's a new Oude Geuze we've made with Mikkeller!

Maybe we’ll take a visit to the Mandarin Oriental sometime next year, pull up a plush chair and enjoy their Beer Afternoon Tea because, as much as I enjoy a home poured bottle of Kriek Boon, I’m certain it’ll taste even better with a menu designed to match it’s fruity charms. Even more important to Krieks than color, though, is authenticity in flavor. “The style hinges on the quality of the fruit,” Priest contends. “The quality of the underlying beer is important and needs to be complementary, but if it’s even a bit boring that can be a perfectly serviceable canvas for exemplary fruit. I reject any beer hoping to approximate the character with syrups or flavorings or extracts. You can’t fake cherry character… you need real cherries.” 8 of the Best Cherry Beers Kriek

The cherries we use to make Kriek Boon are carefully harvested. They are cleaned immediately after harvesting: the stalks and leaves are removed and only the cherries and their pits remain. The cherries are frozen immediately and stored in our special cold store. This allows us to make beer with fresh cherries all year round. We use no less than 300 tonnes of fresh cherries every year to make all our Kriek beers . Vintage When Boon's beers are bottled, they are marked with a best by date that is 20 years after the bottling date. [11]Traditionally, kriek is made by breweries in and around Brussels using lambic beer to which sour cherries (with the pits) are added. [3] A lambic is a sour and dry Belgian beer, fermented spontaneously with airborne yeast said to be native to Brussels; the presence of cherries (or raspberries) predates the almost universal use of hops as a flavoring in beer. [4] If you use frozen cherries, you will need to extract pits from fresh cherries if you want the nutty notes in your beer.

To us acetic sting (as we like to call it; "piqûre acétique" in French) is an off-flavour. But it seems it is an acquired taste for other people (in this case more so the American part of the world). So don't expect enormous amounts of sour because of course we're not going to let anything leave the brewery that we don't like ourselves. But what you taste is a nice complex, balanced Oude Geuze with acetic acidty that is already way above the level we normally prefer and what we'd easily at our brewery unofficially label as "american taste". At the same time it's still relatively mild compared to other beers, but it is only to show that we don't believe acetic acidty should have such a huge role in these beers. It is nice to add a small barrel with "neig" (lambic with acetic sting) to a large blend to give some depth (a bit like using salt and pepper in the kitchen). But it should not be a dominating taste in the beer. All the stories of irregular bowel movements and the enamel of teeth coming off is not what a properly made lambic beer should have as result. Boon Geuze Mariage Parfait has an alcohol content of 8%. It consists of 95% mild lambic, aged at least three years and specially reserved for this purpose,… Read More Unable to muster anything quite as tasty as the Lounge’s ace chef Paul Thieblemont, I hopped down to Gregg’s Bakery and snaffled a jammy biscuit instead.* The Boon Millésime 2020 is a traditional lambic beer made with fresh Schaerbeek cherries. Thanks to the alcohol percentage of 6.5 per cent, which is not too high, the pronounced fruit aroma is given free rein. The cherries were harvested in the summer of 2020 and then fermented with lambic, which had already matured for 18 months. Ultimately, the bottling occurred in October 2021 after another six months of maturation in oak casks, followed by refermentation in the bottle. For the Millésime 2020, Boon used 270 grams of cherries per litre. A traditional kriek made from a lambic base beer is sour and dry as well. The cherries are left in for a period of several months, causing a refermentation of the additional sugar. Typically no sugar will be left so there will be a fruit flavour without sweetness. There will be a further maturation process after the cherries are removed.

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Boon lambic uses real fruit such as cherries and raspberries as opposed to juices, extracts, or flavorings [7]