Peaks & Pints wants you to have a musty, old leather, barnyard, horse-blanket, and tart good time tonight. This should be easy since we’re pairing lambics with jazz in our Events Room from 6 to 8 p.m. Every first Sunday, we host Jambic & Lazz, an early evening of lambics paired with Kareem Kandi and his jazz trio. For those who can’t make the show tonight but still want to enjoy lambics on a Sunday, we’re offering an all-day flight of lambics called Peaks & Pints Sunday Lambic Flight. Lambic, like music, requires years of dedication and a consuming passion. Whether straight, faro, gueuze, or fruit-based, lambics are produced only in one area of Belgium, the Senne River Valley, south and west of Brussels in the Pajottenland region. Officially speaking, lambic is an appellation like “Champagne” and “bourbon”; the l-word is strictly enforced and reserved for beers made exclusively in said region.

Most importantly, they’re beers spontaneously fermented by the airborne wild yeasts and bacteria present in this valley and nowhere else on the face of the Earth. Nature didn’t just bless this area with the right yeasts and bacteria — it also endowed it with an ideal climate for slow fermentation, easy access to French wine barrels, and even tart Schaerbeek cherries. The real beauty of these ales is how different they are from brewery to brewery, batch to batch, barrel to barrel. Hell, the beer even changes with each sip down the glass. Adventure is out there — or at least in our Events Room tonight. The coolest cat in Tacoma, saxophonist Kareem Kandi is a versatile musician with strong roots in the traditions of jazz, blues, classical, and funk and has been performing throughout the U.S. and abroad for years, gaining attention from critics and audiences alike.

Peaks & Pints Sunday Lambic Flight

Lindemans Kriek

3.5% ABV

Lambics are sharp, acidic, and fruity. They can be compared to yogurt or vinegar but with hints of sweetness. There are also several sub-styles of lambics. Lindemans was the first to introduce lambics to the American market (in 1979) and has remained the most popular brand. While they also make peach, raspberry, and pear lambic, the cherry is their most traditional flavor. Whole fresh cherries are added to the casks, triggering a third fermentation and promoting a spritz-y carbonation that gives the finished beer a champagne-like character with excellent mouthfeel. The flavor resembles a natural black cherry soda with a dark sweetness and a flash of malty bitterness.

Gueuze Girardin 1882 Black Label

5% ABV

The Girardin family has been making beer since 1882, when they acquired the farm and its small brewery in the village of Sint-Ulriks-Kapelle near Brussels.  For most of the history of the family business, the farm has been the primary focus for the family. It’s only been in recent decades that Brouwerij Girardin has become more prominent. Despite this increase in focus, the Girardin family is renowned for their secrecy and rarely allow anyone into their brewery. Also, most of their production is sold as wort to blenders such as 3 Fonteinen, Hanssens, De Cam, and Tilquin. Girardin Gueuze 1882, sometimes known as “Black Label,” is unfiltered and unpasteurized. Instead of the traditional gueuze blend of 1-, 2-year- and 3-year-old lambic, Girardin 1882 is a blend of 12-, 18- and 24-month-old lambic. It hits the nose with sweet orange and apricot, lactic tartness, earthy hay-like notes, moderate sharp Brett aroma, and light strawberry and plum. From the first sip, flavors of lemongrass, creamy oak, minerals, funky horse blanket, yeast, and slight stone fruit sweetness flit in and out, with none more dominant than the rest. It’s funky, rustic, complex, and super tasty.

Hanssens Artisanaal Outbeitje

6% ABV

Beginning in the late 19th century, Hanssens Artisanaal in Dworp, Belgium spent its first several decades brewing and blending (mostly) lambic style beers. Due to the seizure of the brewery by German occupying forces during WWI, owner Bartholome Hanssens could no longer sustain production as a lambic brewery, so he refocused attention on lambic blending. He purchased wort — the beer’s sweet unfermented precursor — from other Senne River breweries, matured each acquisition individually, then painstakingly blended the resulting lambics and barrel-aged the blend. Today, Hanssens remains a traditional lambic blendery, producing authentic, unsweetened, and unpasteurized lambics under a fourth generation of the Hanssens family. Made with fresh Belgian strawberries and then matured through the winter in oak barrels, Outbeitje is a tart, sour, and dry lambic with an unmistakable strawberry fruitiness, though little sweetness.

Drie Fonteinen Aardbei Kriek Blend No. 1 21/22

6.2% ABV

Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen, or Drie Fonteinen, focuses on aging and blending the beers of other lambic brewers. It’s a mainly Belgian concept that the creative process in producing a beer comes not when its ingredients are combined and fermented, but in how the resulting beer is aged and blended with other vintages to create a new transcendent concoction. Their Aardbei/Kriek is a blend of a strawberry lambic and a sour cherry lambic, in a proportion of 65/35. The lambikken originates from five different barrels and nine different brews. Most of them were 2-year-old lambikken, and almost 10 percent were 3-year-olds. One-third of the lambic volume is brewed with Pajot-grown cereals. The final fruit concentration is 516 grams of strawberries and sour cherries per liter of finished Aardbei/Kriek.

Het Boerenerf Riesling

8.1% ABV

In 2020, Senne Eylenbosch and Vincent Alluin founded Boerenerf in Huizingen, Belgium. The company was built on the foundations of the renowned Eylenbosch Brewery, which closed its doors in 1965. The Dutch word “Boerenerf” translates to “Farmstead,” a nod to the old family farm where the original brewery began, which has been in the Eylenbosch family for generations. The traditions continue in the old stables, where lambic and gueuze beers mature in barrels. Boerenerf uniquely combines the traditional craft of lambic blending with winemaking. Its Riesling is a blend of Riesling wine from a short maceration mixed with young and old lambic that has been macerated on Riesling skins and then aged together for 6 months in oak barrels.

LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory