Lambic Festival at Beachwood BBQ and Brewing

This past Sunday was Beachwood's Lambic Appreciation Festival. Located on East 3rd Street and the Promenade walk, Beachwood BBQ and Brewing is the second location of Seal Beach's original on Main Street.

Sunday was the lambic day. Lambic is a type of beer that is different than your average beer. Beer basically comes in three kinds, all based on the type of yeast used to ferment the sugars into alcohol. The first is ale, and this gives a wide variety of flavors and styles, from browns, to reds, to pales, to stouts. I'm an ale man, as far as that goes. Lager in the second type of yeast, and this probably accounts for the largest volume of global beer production. Uh, what I mean is, the majority of beer brewed on Earth is lager, by a wide margin.

In America you've got Budweiser and Bud Light, Coors and Coors Light, and Miller and Miller Lite, which account for something like 90 percent of American beer production: all lagers. In China, a country that produces more beer than America, it's all lager, and in the two biggest beer drinking countries in Europe--Germany and the Czech Republic--it's all lager.

Lager is a bottom fermenting yeast, while ale ferments on the top, if you're really interested in how that works.

Lambic, on the other hand, is brewed with wild yeast and is occasionally referred to as spontaneously fermenting. Lambics use fruits as well as grains to provide sugars to be fermented, and as a things to drink, taste like sour fruity beer. Sometimes they're less carbonated and mostly flat.

The style of brewing goes way back, when monks would leave large vats of the wort in the rafters of their monasteries and yeasts travelling along the winds would find them, make a home, eat a ton of sugar, and eventually make some fine beers. The process takes a long time still, and is decidedly old school.

The taste for sour beers and lambics is waning in Belgium, the main provider of these types of beer. It seems to be the market of beer connoisseurs in America is keeping this tradition alive.

That's a fact I learned at the Lambic Appreciation day during a talk from one of the speakers.

Now, I am a fan of beer. I love beer. I've brewed my own in my cabinet before. In my younger years I did keg stands and case races, all the while trying to appreciate the finer things about beer. I do enjoy a good lambic, but see, that's what you do, you enjoy it. Lambic isn't the kind of thing you drink to get your swerve on, and it was kinda nice being in an extremely crowded bar with everybody drinking and there not being any drunken asshats bumping you and spilling on you.

Which was unusual and nice.