This weekend, we visited Brasserie Cantillon in Brussels. This is a small, family-owned brewery that’s been in business since 1900 (and is still brewing beer pretty much the same way as when they started).

Cantillon is not far from the center of town, just a couple of blocks off a major boulevard near the main train station.  The neighborhood is pretty nondescript, none of the shops were open at 10am on a Saturday.  But once you open their big wooden door, it’s a completely different story.  Right away you see the brewery is not like other breweries.  It’s much more cozy, with a small tasting room and gift shop right as you enter, with aging bottles stacked all along the corridor leading back to the brewery proper.

The self-guided tour takes you through the brewery, where you can see their wood-clad mash tun, their beautiful copper kettles, their kegging and bottling lines, and fermentation tanks for the fruit beers.  There is an endless array of barrels and bottles aging:

The real difference comes when you get to the attic, where you see their coolship — a giant shallow copper dish where the wort cools, and begins fermentation from wild yeast brought in on the wind.

Of course, no brewery tour is complete without a tasting.  We tasted their gueuze and frambozen.  We’d had their gueuze before and liked it quite a bit, but the frambozen was really fantastic.  Unlike other frambozen we’d had before, it wasn’t overly sweet or cloying.  Instead, it had more of an earthy, raspberry-leaf flavor that blended well with the lambic tartness.

Of the breweries I’ve seen, Cantillon has the most character, by far.  Every other brewery I’ve seen, from a giant mega-brewery like Guinness to the tiny Swamp Head, is basically the same: a variety of stainless steel cylinders in a warehouse, connected by a crazy assortment of pipes.  But Cantillon is completely different.  Their equipment is from a completely different era, and is truly beautiful.  The open fermentation runs completely counter to the sterilized and controlled fermentation standard everywhere else.  They have some modern equipment too (including some modern cylindrical fermentation tanks for aging their fruit beers).  But the core brewing operations are a living antique.