Faro: The Liquid Gold Brussels Forgot

The Beer Before the Beer

Ask a modern beer lover to name the historic beer of Brussels and they will say lambic, or maybe gueuze, and they will be wrong in an interesting way. Lambic was the raw material. Gueuze (the champagne-method blend of young and old lambic, refermented in the bottle) was a late arrival, a product of the nineteenth century's bottling technology and the twentieth century's prestige. The beer that people in Brussels actually drank, by the tankard, in the tavern, at lunch, at dinner, at the market, after mass, and during the endless dice and card games that gave our bar its name, was something else: faro.

Faro appears in the written record before lambic does. The earliest known mention is from 1721: a rollicking description of a drinking session that lists faro alongside “Leuven beer” and the other “sorbets of the drunkards” of the day. Lambic, by name, does not show up in print for decades after that. The two beers grew up intertwined: lambic was the wild-fermented base, and faro was what most of it became before it reached a customer. If lambic is the flour, faro was the bread.

The recipe, in its classic nineteenth-century form, was a blend: roughly half aged lambic, with its acid and its funk and its wild Brettanomyces character, and half a lighter, younger, cheaper beer called meerts, in French bière de mars, “March beer.” Meerts was made from the second and third runnings of the lambic mash: the brewer sparged the grain again after drawing off the strong wort, collected the weaker liquid, and fermented it the same way: spontaneously, with whatever the Senne valley air happened to be carrying. The result was a low-alcohol, light-bodied cousin of lambic, too thin to age, perfect for stretching.

Blend the two, and you had a beer of perhaps two or three percent alcohol, sessionable before the word existed, with a gentle acidity and a modest price. Then came the finishing touch, the thing that made faro faro: sugar.

The Ritual of the Masher

Belgium in the nineteenth century was becoming one of the sugar-beet powers of Europe, and cheap dark sugar flowed into the cities. Sometimes a beer merchant blended and sweetened the faro before delivery. But in the classic version of the ritual, the version that furnished every tavern in Brussels with a small metal implement now found mostly in museum drawers, the sweetening happened at the table, in front of you, by your own hand.

The tavern keeper brought three things: a stoneware mug of faro, a lump of sugar, and a slim metal tool with a loop at one end and a flattened disc at the other. The tool was called the lambikstoemper, the “lambic stomper.” You dropped the sugar into the beer, took the stomper, and mashed the cube against the bottom of the mug, stirring and crushing until the sugar dissolved and the sour, funky blend turned soft, round, and faintly caramel. Every drinker was their own final blender. Every glass of faro was finished by the person about to drink it, sweetened to exactly their own taste.

There is something almost absurdly charming about this: an entire city, for the better part of two centuries, muddling its own beer with tiny personal pestles. But there was chemistry in it too, and the chemistry explains the tool. You cannot easily bottle a sweetened wild beer. The same wild yeasts that make lambic magnificent will happily devour any sugar you add and turn a sealed bottle into a slow grenade. Sweetening at the moment of service was not just theater; it was the only stable way to do it. The lambikstoemper was a workaround for a microbiological problem, disguised as a table ritual.

Children sang about the stuff. A Flemish nursery rhyme of the era runs: “'t Gaat regenen, 't gaat regenen, 't gaat regenen dat het giet, en als wij geene Faro hebben, dan drinken wij Lambiek.” It's going to rain, it's going to pour, and if we have no faro, we'll drink lambic. Note the order of preference. Lambic, the beer that today commands three-hour lines at Cantillon's Zwanze Day and four-figure bottle trades, was the fallback. Faro came first.

Liqueur d'Or

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, faro was not merely popular in Brussels; it was the city's identity in a glass. Contemporary writers described it as “moelleuse, gaillarde et faraude” (mellow, cheerful, and swaggering), and Brussels nicknamed it the liqueur d'or, the liquid gold. It traveled, too: to Leuven, into the Netherlands, and as far as Paris, where cafés advertised it by name. Even the origin of the word is contested in exactly the way you'd expect for something this old: some point to the golden wine of the Portuguese city of Faro, others to the pharaoh card game, others shrug in Flemish. Nobody knows. The beer predates the paperwork.

It reached literature. In Vanity Fair, as Thackeray's characters descend on Brussels in the days before Waterloo, the Belgian manservant Isidor daydreams not of victory or plunder but of strolling the Green Avenue in a fine coat and “refreshing himself with a mug of Faro at the bench of a beer-house on the road to Laeken.” When an English novelist in 1848 needed a single detail to make a Brussels local feel real, the detail was faro. That is what it means for a beer to own a city.

And it was democratic in the fullest nineteenth-century sense: cheap enough for laborers, light enough to drink at every meal, gentle enough, at two or three percent, that men, women, and by all accounts more than a few children drank it daily in an age when the beer was safer than the water. Which brings us, unavoidably, to the water.

The Poet Who Hated It

In 1864, Charles Baudelaire, broke, sick, embittered, and fleeing his Parisian creditors, arrived in Brussels for a lecture tour that failed, and stayed on in a hotel he couldn't afford, nursing a hatred of Belgium so comprehensive that he began drafting an entire book of it: Pauvre Belgique. Poor Belgium. He hated the architecture, the food, the faces, the manners. And he reserved a special, luminous contempt for faro.

The Senne, the river that threaded through central Brussels, was by the 1860s an open sewer: genuinely, catastrophically foul, the receiving water for the waste of a booming industrial city. Baudelaire looked at the cloudy, sour, yellow beer everyone around him was drinking, looked at the river, and drew the obvious, wrong conclusion. Faro, he wrote, “is drawn from the great latrine, the Senne, a beverage extracted from the excrements of the city.” And then the line that has followed the style ever since: “C'est de la bière qu'on boit deux fois”: it's beer you drink twice.

It is the most famous thing anyone has ever said about faro, and it is a libel. The lambic brewers of Brussels and Payottenland drew their brewing water from wells, not from the Senne. No brewer in recorded history has ever survived on sewage, whatever the poets suspected. What Baudelaire was actually tasting was wild fermentation: the lactic tang, the barnyard whisper of Brettanomyces, the deliberate sourness that his Parisian palate, trained on wine and clean Bavarian-style lagers, had no category for. He mistook complexity for contamination. He would not be the last.

There is a small poetic justice in the aftermath. Within a few years of Baudelaire's departure, Brussels buried the Senne entirely: the river was vaulted over between 1867 and 1871 and simply disappeared beneath the boulevards, where it still runs today, unseen. The river is gone from the city's surface. The beer he mocked is still being poured. Slowly, in small quantities, in a handful of places, but poured.

How a King Dies

Faro did not fall to scandal or to prohibition. It fell to progress, in three overlapping waves.

The first wave was golden and came from Bohemia. Pilsner (brilliant, clear, stable, industrial) arrived in Belgium in the late nineteenth century and did to faro what it did to nearly every indigenous everyday beer in Europe: it replaced it as the default. Faro had ruled because it was cheap, light, and everywhere. Pils was cheap, light, everywhere, and modern: no sourness to explain, no sugar to mash, no cloudy glass to apologize for. The workingman's allegiance transferred within a generation or two.

The second wave came from within the lambic world itself. As bottling technology matured, the blenders of Brussels discovered that lambic refermented in heavy glass produced something extraordinary: dry, sparkling, complex, age-worthy. Gueuze became the aristocrat of the family, the “champagne of Brussels,” the version worth a premium. Faro, the sweet low-strength blend built partly from second runnings, became the poor relation: the past, not the future. When the great consolidations and closures thinned the lambic industry through the twentieth century (two world wars, grain requisitions, changing tastes), the breweries that survived survived on gueuze and kriek. Faro was quietly dropped from the books.

The third wave was the quietest: meerts itself disappeared. Making a separate low-gravity spontaneous beer from second runnings stopped making economic sense, and without meerts, the classic faro blend could no longer exist as it once had. What survives today under the name is, by necessity, a different construction: true lambic, sweetened with candi sugar and, in bottled versions, pasteurized so the sugar stays sugar instead of becoming carbon dioxide and shrapnel. Modern faro runs four to five percent rather than the historic two or three. The lambikstoemper is gone from the tables. In the space of a lifetime, the beer of an entire city became a footnote that even most Belgians have never tasted.

By the time the American craft beer renaissance sent pilgrims streaming into Payottenland in the 1990s and 2000s, hunting gueuze and kriek with the fervor of relic collectors, faro barely registered. The style that outsold everything for two hundred years now occupies a few shelf-inches of the lambic universe, produced in tiny volumes by a handful of houses, mostly out of respect.

The Case for the Sweet Sour

It is easy, traditional even, for serious beer people to condescend to faro. The Oxford Companion to Beer sniffs that modern examples are “very sweet, showing limited lambic character,” appealing “to a very small audience.” Purists treat sugar in lambic the way purists treat ice in whisky. We'd like to offer the toast for the defense.

First: faro is history you can drink. When you order one, you are drinking the beer of Bruegel's descendants, the beer of Thackeray's Brussels, the beer the dice players at the Cour Royale were drinking between rounds of the game called mort subite. There are very few flavors on Earth with that much documented biography, and almost none you can buy for a few dollars.

Second: faro is the single best gateway into sour beer that exists. Straight lambic and dry gueuze are magnificent, and to an unprepared palate they can taste like a lightning strike: the same category error Baudelaire made, in reverse. Faro splits the difference. The wild character is all there: the hay, the citrus, the funk, the tang. But the sugar rounds the edges and carries the newcomer across. We have watched people at our bar go from “I don't do sours” to a bottle of oude gueuze in a single evening, and the bridge they crossed was almost always sweetened lambic. The nineteenth century figured out the on-ramp before anyone knew the highway needed one.

Third: the sweetness is not a corruption of the tradition. It is the tradition. For every year of lambic's history that connoisseurs have spent worshipping bone-dry gueuze, there are two years of Brussels drinkers mashing sugar into their tankards and calling the result liquid gold. If we honor the past, we should honor what the past actually drank.

Why It Matters to Us

Our bar is named for a Brussels café that is named for a dice game that was played, for the most part, over glasses of exactly this beer. À la Mort Subite, the great mirrored 1928 room on Rue Montagne-aux-Herbes Potagères, still serves its house faro today, poured under high ceilings that have absorbed a century of arguments, reconciliations, and sudden-death final rounds. The Mort Subite brewery in Kobbegem still makes it. The chain from a 1721 drinking song to a glass on a table in Brussels is stretched thin, but it has never actually broken.

In Austin, we keep faro in the rotation whenever we can get it: most often Lindemans, the style's great global ambassador, with rarer bottles passing through as allocations allow. We will not pretend it is the fashionable order. It is the opposite: a beer that was too popular for too long to ever be cool again. But when someone at the bar says they're curious about sour beer and afraid of it in the same sentence, faro is the glass we reach for. Two hundred years of Brussels drinkers are backing that recommendation.

And if you want the full nineteenth century at home: pour a lambic, drop in a demerara cube, and crush it slowly with the handle of a spoon. It is not a proper lambikstoemper. It will do. It's going to rain, it's going to pour, and if there's no faro, we'll drink lambic. But try the faro first. Brussels did, for two hundred years, and Brussels was right.

Ask us what's pouring from the lambic shelf this week, and if the faro is in, start there. Bring a friend who says they hate sours. Watch what happens.