Because of the demand for Kriek, there are not enough Schaerbeek cherry trees to cater to it. That is why other cherries are taken into consideration. What Other Cherries Can Be Used?

The cherries used to make Kriek Boon Sélection are carefully harvested. They are cleaned right after they are harvested: we remove the leaves and stems so that only the cherries with their pits remain. We then freeze the cherries immediately and store them in our special cold store. This allows us to make beer with fresh cherries all year round. We use up to 300 tons of fresh cherries a year for all our Kriek beers FlavourKriek Boon Sélection is only available on draught and is based on our bottled Oude Kriek Boon. Kriek Boon Sélection is made in a similar way as Oude Kriek Boon: we make it by fermenting 400 grams of fresh cherries per litre Lambic. The blend of this Kriek Lambic and young Lambic is kegged. The high number of cherries result in a very intense, yet slightly tart cherry flavour. Result: this beer is 100% natural.

Even more important to Krieks than color, though, is authenticity in flavor. “The style hinges on the quality of the fruit,” Priest contends. “The quality of the underlying beer is important and needs to be complementary, but if it’s even a bit boring that can be a perfectly serviceable canvas for exemplary fruit. I reject any beer hoping to approximate the character with syrups or flavorings or extracts. You can’t fake cherry character… you need real cherries.” 8 of the Best Cherry Beers Kriek In this case this geuze is more of a wink and nudge towards the american tries/experiments of our beloved lambic. These tries, resulting in interesting and nice bottles of beer, but also very often resulting in beers that we find to tend more towards malt vinegar, seem to be liked by a lot of people even with the enormously high acetic acidity, and mostly by Americans. When we made a more acetic Oude Geuze (the VAT 108) to put in our Discovery Box, many people loved it, but it seems many Americans still found it not sour enough. Boon lambic uses real fruit such as cherries and raspberries as opposed to juices, extracts, or flavorings [7] Framboise is a related, less traditional Belgian beer, fermented with raspberries instead of sour cherries. Kriek is also related to gueuze, which is not a fruit beer but is also based on refermented lambic beer. Some breweries, like Liefmans, make "kriek" beers based on oud bruin beer instead of lambic. If you like simple answers, you could describe Kriek as a bunch of cherries soaked in the ferment of a Lambic. And then most brewers blend the resulting liquor with a younger Lambic to pump up the fizz factor.

How Do You Make Kriek Beer?

To us acetic sting (as we like to call it; "piqûre acétique" in French) is an off-flavour. But it seems it is an acquired taste for other people (in this case more so the American part of the world). So don't expect enormous amounts of sour because of course we're not going to let anything leave the brewery that we don't like ourselves. But what you taste is a nice complex, balanced Oude Geuze with acetic acidty that is already way above the level we normally prefer and what we'd easily at our brewery unofficially label as "american taste". At the same time it's still relatively mild compared to other beers, but it is only to show that we don't believe acetic acidty should have such a huge role in these beers. It is nice to add a small barrel with "neig" (lambic with acetic sting) to a large blend to give some depth (a bit like using salt and pepper in the kitchen). But it should not be a dominating taste in the beer. All the stories of irregular bowel movements and the enamel of teeth coming off is not what a properly made lambic beer should have as result.

Have a deliciously fruity experience at your favourite pub with Kriek Boon Sélection, a Kriek draught beer with extra cherries. This blend of Kriek Lambic and young Lambic is 100% natural and completely irresistible because of its rich cherry flavour. To reach higher ABV levels, brewers blend a younger Lambic after the aging with fruit. This allows for more alcohol production. Can You Age Kriek?You can buy traditional Kriek from the US importers of brewers like Boon and Lindemans. One example is Merchant du Vin Corporation who imports Lindemans. Another is Global Beer Network for Boon. I don’t know that there is such thing as an American Kriek,” shared The Referend Bier Blendery’s founder James Priest. “The serious practitioners are all blessedly making the best beer they can with the best fresh, local fruit they can, rather than forcing stylistic uniformity.” Perhaps it’s more accurate to refer to American attempts at the style as simply spontaneous cherry beers (as one of our examples does) so they don’t carry the weight and history of the Kriek style, which is specifically Belgian. Kriek lambic is a style of Belgian beer, made by fermenting lambic with sour Morello cherries. [1] [2] Traditionally " Schaarbeekse krieken" (a rare Belgian Morello variety) from the area around Brussels are used. As the Schaarbeek type cherries have become more difficult to find, some brewers have replaced these (partly or completely) with other varieties of sour cherries, sometimes imported. After blending fruit and bottle conditioning, some brewers age Kriek for a few more years. This is a testament to the power of fermentation as a preservative. How Long Can You Age a Kriek? This is how Kriek beer was meant to taste. We make it with 250 grams of fresh cherries per litre. Discover the pleasure of its pure, authentically fruity character: refreshing, soft and beautifully balanced. Kriek Boon brings you the taste of real cherries.