In the late aughts, I did my weekly beer shopping at a Whole Foods on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Craft beer was exploding so much at that time that when the supermarket opened in 2007 it had an entire separate store just for beer. For a few years, it was arguably the best beer store in the entire city.
The Bowery Beer Room, as it was known, had cooler after cooler of the hottest IPAs of the moment, six fresh taps for growler fills, grain stations for homebrewers, and a large selection of carefully curated European imports.
I would often head over to the Belgian section, which offered several bottles from Brasserie Cantillon, including the brewery’s vaunted Saint Lamvinus, a tart and sour-tasting lambic made with Merlot grapes then aged in Bordeaux barrels. I wanted to try it so badly, but at $45 a 750-milliliter bottle, it was then out of my budget. But every week, after grabbing an interesting 6-pack, or a $9.99 64-ounce growler fill, I’d head over to the Belgian section, just to make sure Saint Lamvinus was still there gathering dust.
And then one day, around 2009, I was shocked to see there was no more Cantillon at the Bowery Beer Room. Someone had bought it all. I wouldn’t see Cantillon on shelves in New York City for the next 15 years as sour beers became one of the hottest styles in the country, alongside IPAs and boozy stouts. (In 2017, Whole Foods replaced the Bowery Beer Room with a coffee shop.)
That was all until very recently, when I visited my current local beer store in Brooklyn and saw they had bottles of Cantillon Fou’ Foune, the brewery’s sublime apricot lambic. The store only received six bottles, and I bought one; several were still there when I came back the next week, so I bought another. A month later, the store’s Instagram announced it had just shelved Cantillon Sang Bleu, a honeysuckle lambic. Back in 2008, that social media post would have assured bottles sold out within minutes. This post got no comments and only 13 likes. Bottles were still there days later when I finally did my weekly beer run.
Then, just last month, I came into the store to see Saint Lamvinus in the cooler, at a quite reasonable $30 a bottle. No one seemed to care, except me. I took it home and drank the entire bottle within the hour.
How did Cantillon, once the most coveted brewery in the world, become just another bottle in the U.S.?
It’s a reminder of how quickly American drinkers can elevate a style to cult status — and just as quickly move on. The story of Cantillon is the story of sours in America — adored, chased, and eventually abandoned.
Supplicating for Sour
Using the Wayback Machine, I pulled up Beer Advocate’s Top 100 Beers List from 2007, the year the Bowery Beer Room opened. Back then, only six “sour” beers ranked, with Saint Lamvinus the only Cantillon entry, squeaking in at #88.
By then, Cantillon had been distributed to the U.S. for over a decade. A touring American musician and beer fan, Joel Shelton, had “discovered” the brewery — which had been founded in 1900 — in Belgium.
“I think there was a good amount of curiosity about the [sour] style before 2008, but I don’t think it really took off until then due to the age of the American craft beer movement in general.”
“When a tour stopped in Brussels for a week or two in the summer ’93, one of my missions was to see what lambic was all about,” Shelton once told me. “The first taste I had of [Cantillon] gueuze had the effect of the heavens opening up, with full violin section.”
Learning from Cantillon’s owners, the Van Roy family, that the brand had no U.S. distribution, Shelton flew back home with a collection of 750-milliliter bottles in his bag, hoping to convince his brothers Will and Dan that they should start importing it.
The Shelton Brothers, as they became professionally known, began importing Cantillon in earnest starting in 1996. It took several years to sell the first 1,200 cases.
“Sales were nearly nonexistent, even in Belgium,” Shelton recalls.
But by 2013, everything had changed and the U.S. beer landscape was now ready for such challenging flavors. By then, Beer Advocate’s top 250 beers list included 11 Cantillon beers. highlighted by Fou’ Foune at #11, the brewery’s Lou Pepe – Kriek at #28, Saint Lamvinus at #36, and the European-only release Blåbær Lambik at #39.
Today, it seems hard to imagine a time when Belgian lambic was possibly so hot. If you’re in your 20s or early 30s, it’s possible you’ve never even tasted one.
And it wasn’t just Cantillon.
Among a list then dominated, as it still is today, by IPAs and big, boozy stouts, a shocking number of sours beers — mostly Belgian lambic but also American wild ales — dot the top 250.
There was Russian River Supplication, a brown ale aged in Pinot Noir barrels, at #10, as well as the brewery’s Beatification, a koelschip-fermented beer, at #25. The Lost Abbey offered Duck Duck Gooze at #38 and Cable Car at #44. Drie Fonteinen, another Belgian lambic producer, offered its Oude Geuze Vintage at #60. Ithaca Beer Company had Brute at #78.
All totaled, 15 Belgian gueuze or lambic and 17 American wild ales made the top 250 list. What happened?
A Sour Curiosity
Sour beer is not a real category per se. Historically, sour-tasting beer had been created by Old World brewing methods that allowed wild microflora in the air — yeasts and bacteria like Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, Pediococcus — to inoculate the wort. In the Pajottenland area of Belgian, near Brussels, starting in the 18th century, lambic was developed via open fermentation tanks known as koelschips.
Nearby, West Flanders had its own style of sour beers known as Flanders red and Oud bruin. Germany would offer sour beers in the form of Berliner weisse and gose, both soured in the kettle via Lactobacillus.
Not surprisingly, these classic Old World styles were fading into obscurity as the U.S. and many other countries began to favor more bland, light-tasting corporate lagers post-World War II. It would take the modern craft beer boom and many U.S. fans’ desire for more complex beers to revive interest in the challenging flavor profile and generate a cult following around beers like Cantillon.
By the 1990s, many U.S. brewers were starting to take their own stabs at sour styles, like the aforementioned Russian River, the Lost Abbey, and Cascade, not to mention Allagash, Goose Island, and New Belgium, which had La Folie, a Flanders-style sour brown ale first released in 1997 and appearing on Beer Advocate’s top 100 list as early as 2007.
“I think kettle sours were — and continue to be — good for craft beer in general because they brought folks to beer who normally reached for something else.”
“I think there was a good amount of curiosity about the [sour] style before 2008, but I don’t think it really took off until then due to the age of the American craft beer movement in general,” says Jen Currier, head of Wicked Weed’s mixed culture program, which launched in Asheville, N.C., in 2012. She attributes the growing popularity of sour beers at the time to both bottle shares and beer festivals.
One such festival was Zwanze Day, launched in 2011 at notable beer bars across the globe that would tap speciality Cantillon kegs for eager consumers. I remember going to early events at Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn; the bar was busy but not overcrowded. By 2015 or so it had become a total shit show. Sour beer was a full-blown sensation ready to take over the mainstream.
Hot and Sour
If “sour” was all of a sudden hot, it would only make sense for breweries to make it faster and cheaper. Enter: kettle sours, which began to emerge around 2012.
The first truly accessible release was probably Westbrook Gose, a tangy, slightly salty sour wheat ale in a can. It offered the sort of addictively Sour Patch Kids-like flavor profile that so many Americans love; far less tart and acidic than, say, Cantillon or Russian River’s wild ales. It became an immediate sensation and an explosion of quickly soured canned beer would follow, like Peekskill Brewing’s Simple Sour. By the summer of 2013, The New Yorker was even covering the sour trend.
“I think kettle sours were — and continue to be — good for craft beer in general because they brought folks to beer who normally reached for something else,” says Currier.
Eventually, many breweries would start pairing fruit with their kettle sour bases, rendering the mildly tart beers even less so. Today, Westbrook offers nine different flavored goses, including Orange Hibiscus Gose, Whipped Pineapple Gose, and Grandma’s Apple Pie Gose.
“Like everyone else, we’ve seen diminished volume over the last few years. That doesn’t mean we are stopping.”
“I think that the folks still producing these styles have a promise to fulfill to consumers who are on their own craft beer journeys,” says Currier. “If these styles don’t exist, producers are making their taprooms inaccessible for folks who don’t love standard craft styles.”
Drink Cantillon, Be Happy
In November 2020 Shelton Brothers was forced to cease operations due to massive debts incurred by the pandemic, a lack of sales to on-premise bars and restaurants, and in settling a lawsuit. The fact that the bulk of the 150 or so producers they imported and distributed were European breweries like Cantillon that leaned toward expensive, laboriously made sours probably didn’t help that much either.
In America, as drinking moved away from the style, all- or mostly sour breweries like Portland’s Cascade and Vermont’s Hermit Thrush both went out of business last year. Other sour-producing breweries like Goose Island and Bissell Brothers have greatly scaled down or eliminated their sour programs. Yet some breweries are continuing to fight through the downtrend.
“Like everyone else, we’ve seen diminished volume over the last few years,” says Currier. “That doesn’t mean we are stopping. As a brewery who introduced a lot of drinkers to the barrel-aged sour beer category, we believe it is our duty to continue to produce sour beer that brings people into the category rather than pushes them away.”
In fact, she believes Americans are very much still interested in the style, noting that Wicked Weed’s Morte series — blended, spontaneously fermented sour ales oak-aged with fruit added — remains some of the brewery’s best-selling beer. Other breweries and beer companies are likewise continuing to push sours.
In August of 2024, a California-based company called Lime Ventures took over Cantillon’s distribution in the U.S. It’s probably no coincidence that this was around the time I began to again see the brand on shelves at my local beer store.
If you’re a fan of any red hot alcoholic liquid — allocated bourbons, barrel-aged stouts, Belgian lambic — when it’s in its heyday, you wish it wasn’t so popular so that you and other people who truly loved it could still buy it at a fair price.
Then, one day, it’s no longer so popular, and you get your wish. Suddenly Cantillon is on shelves at all times and you can buy it and drink it whenever you want. Yet, ironically, you feel a bit upset.
Why is that? Is it the sadness that something you love is no longer cool?
Instead, I realize, I just should be like Charlie Bucket, the boy who suddenly got everything he always wanted, and just lived happily ever after.
