Javier Albisu
Brussels, 7 May. When talking about his spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers, appreciated all over the world and marketed under the Cantillon brand, Jean-Pierre Van Roy appeals for patience, letting the must mature and respect for centuries-old techniques that describes with precision and passion.
At the entrance to his factory in the Brussels commune of Anderlecht, a family business founded in 1900 by Paul Cantillon with a “savoir-faire” that has been handed down for four generations, a banner sums up the master’s philosophy: “Time does not respect what is done without it”.
“It is a spontaneous fermentation beer, that is, we do not add yeast to cause the fermentation of the must. The must is cooled in the open air, indoors, in a large red copper vat, and during that cooling process at night, little by little, it acquires wild yeasts, which are responsible for natural fermentation, as all beers were made before Pasteur,” Van Roy explained to EFE.
The industrialist, who considers himself neither an artisan nor a scientist and who avoids being called a magician, has small, bright blue eyes that move with vivacity as he explains between the vats and barrels of his factory-museum-bar-shop-temple by where 35,000 visitors a year pass.
Van Roy wears jeans, a T-shirt and a leather jacket that give a certain rocker air to an octogenarian who jokingly camouflages an age that he does not appear to be: “I have been 20 years old for 61 years. Do the math,” he says.
THE TECHNIQUE
Cantillon, which uses equipment from the early 20th century, only produces 2,500 hectoliters a year, a minutiae compared to the millions of hectoliters sold by Belgium’s big industrial brands. And that exclusivity is part of the success of a hard-to-find beer.
“The production is limited, first, because we only manufacture in winter and, second, because we need a huge area to store it, because it will not be sold until two and a half years after manufacturing,” he explains.
Restricting manufacturing to five months – November and March – is necessary so that the night temperature oscillates between -5 and +8 degrees and the broth of the boiled cereal drops from 100 to 20 degrees while the wild yeasts settle in the brew.
“Only the roof separates the wort from the stars. Then the lambic beer matures in oak or chestnut barrels for one, two or three years. And the gueuze is a blend of lambic beers that is refermented in the bottle. I would say the lambic is to gueuze what white wine is to champagne”, he summarizes.
FROM HARDSHIP TO FAME
“One day I met a pretty girl, Claude, and I didn’t know she was the daughter of a brewer. That’s how I met Marcel Cantillon, who was a lambic maker. The factory was not doing well in the sixties and the family didn’t there was interest in taking it back, so it was about to disappear. My father-in-law told me: ‘Jean-Pierre, either you take care of it or we close’. It was 1969. I thought about it with my wife one night, I took the factory back and revived it”, summarizes.
The beginnings were hard for Van Roy, who had studied to be a teacher and did not know the beer trade: he was on the verge of ruin, he paid credits at 12% interest and saw how the rest of the manufacturers did not respect the traditional techniques, described by law.
So much so that in the eighties he denounced eight large breweries for fraud, but the lawsuit was filed and the law was changed in 1993 so as not to catch his competition at fault, because three people worked at the Van Roy factory and hundreds of others. It was there that he decided to prioritize the Cantillon brand over the uniqueness of the lambic beer.
FROM ASIA TO AMERICA
And success ended up knocking on his door. It first gained fame in Belgium, when those archaic, sour beers popular at the turn of the 20th century came back into vogue, including fruity varieties like cherry kriek. And in the eighties, the first Japanese importers appeared, marking the beginning of an international expansion that today extends to thirty countries.
“Before I had to kneel to sell a beer and now they kneel to buy it,” jokes Van Roy, who boasts that he has never been on a plane because his customers come to his factory.
The second pillar of his international fame goes through the United States, where Van Roy is a star.
He was introduced to a whiskey and beer “guru” named Michael Jackson in a book published in 1977. And then Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who traveled to Brussels in December 1986 and first visited King Albert II , then the Cantillon brewery and then Prime Minister Wilfried Martens, with whom he spent the afternoon talking about the beers he had tried.
THE FUTURE
Today Cantillon is a thriving business, thanks to beer sales and also to the busy museum, which he founded in 1978, is managed by his daughter Julie and is in the process of expanding.
Jean-Pierre is still active, but his daughter Magali is in charge of administration and his son Jean is in charge of production, so Cantillon’s continuity is guaranteed.
Times change, the catalog of beers is evolving and the maestro respects the decisions of the new generations, although not all of them excite him.
“The elderly have the obligation to respect the decisions of the young that we would not make. But they should not go too far either, because I am still very reactive,” he warns smiling while sipping a gueuze. EFE
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