Why Cherries?

You might ask, why is there such a Belgian tradition and fascination with cherries? Many factors make cherries very desirable for brewers. First, the fresh taste and aroma of sour cherries are unique—the fruit aromas of a kriek add to the sensory pleasure of enjoying a beer, and the pits also add flavor. Also, the lambic yeasts ( and others) almost totally ferment the cherries’ sugars in the months following the addition of the cherries to the lambic. Any remaining sugars can also trigger refermentation in the bottle, while unfermentable sugars in cherries can impart some fullness to a brew. In addition, the deep red color of an authentic kriek is a beautiful sight. All these factors can make for an incredibly complex brew, one that has to be contemplated even as it is savored.

Cherries are also relatively easy to work with—cleaning cherry juice, skins, and pits from the brewing and filtering equipment is not terribly difficult. And, in central and western Europe, cherries have a relatively short harvest window of a few weeks, which can lead to an oversupply of the fruit and lower prices. This makes brewers happy.

Timmermans’s Willem Van Herreweghen adds, “We prefer working with cherries as opposed to other fruits. Take raspberries, for example. Raspberries are more difficult to work with due to the content of the fruit itself. Cherries have stones [pits] that are much bigger than the small seeds of the raspberry, so raspberries are much more difficult to separate from the beer after maceration.”

Raspberries also lose their color much more quickly than cherries. Whereas a traditional kriek can retain its reddish color for two or three decades or more, raspberry lambics can lose their pinkish color within a few years. Raspberries are also much more expensive than cherries. This, and the difficulty of working with whole raspberries, means only the most determined of brewers will do so.