The other day I picked up some new beers to try. One of them was Lindeman’s Kriek Lambic. A lambic beer is a beer made from malted barley and unmalted wheat. It has little hop bitterness and no hop aroma or flavor. After the wort is boiled, it is put into large shallow vats to cool in the open air (cool ships). As the wort cools it is inoculated with the wild yeasts and bacterial that float on the air. After the beer is cooled and inoculated it is put into wooden barrels or vats to ferment. The result is a beer with a acidic nature and other funky flavors.!–more–
A kriek is a lambic beer that has cherries added to the beer after the primary fermentation has finished. The cherries add color, flavor and more sourness to the beer. The Lindeman’s kriek was a nice cherry flavor without being syrupy. It was sparklely and refreshing. It poured a nice cherry pink/red color with the foam also being pink. It was a little like a cherry flavored sparkling wine.
For my first kriek beer, I quite enjoyed it. I don’t know what other commercial examples are like, but I think that this is something that I would like to brew at home. I wonder how the sour pie cherries would work that we sometime buy over in Willard. Either the the pie cherries or the cherry concentrate would be worth trying.