Kriek: The Cherry Beer of Brussels and the Fruit That Almost Disappeared

A Beer Named After a Cherry

Some beers are named after the men who brewed them, some after the saints of the abbeys that made them, and some after the devils that seemed to hide in them. Kriek is named after a cherry. In Flemish, a kriek is a sour cherry (specifically the small, dark, tart Morello type) and the beer that carries the name is, at its heart, the simplest idea in Belgian brewing: take a barrel of already-remarkable beer and throw a load of whole cherries into it.

That "already-remarkable beer" is lambic, the wild, spontaneously fermented ale of the Senne valley just southwest of Brussels: the same sour, oak-aged, funky base that becomes gueuze when it's blended, and framboise when it's fruited with raspberries. Kriek is its oldest and most classic fruit expression. Where framboise is the pretty younger sibling, kriek is the deep-rooted elder: dry, tart, stony, and unmistakably a product of Brussels and the farmland at its edge.

And behind it sits a genuinely good story, about a wild cherry that grew almost nowhere else on earth, that nearly went extinct as the city swallowed the orchards, and that is only still with us because a stubborn network of people decided it was worth saving.

The Schaarbeek Cherry

To do this properly, you have to start with a tree. The most storied cherry in the history of kriek is the Schaarbeekse kriek, the Schaarbeek cherry, named for the Brussels commune of Schaarbeek (Schaerbeek in French) in the north-east of the city, where it once grew in abundance. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Schaarbeek was famous for its cherries; the fruit was so bound up with the area's identity that it became a local emblem, sold in markets across the capital and prized by the lambic brewers who wanted it for their casks.

What makes the Schaarbeek cherry special is what makes it difficult. It is essentially a wild cherry, grown on its own rootstock, ungrafted, so it grows true only from seed and to its own slow, unruly schedule. The fruit is small, with relatively little flesh around a large pit, and it is intensely, mouth-puckeringly sour. That is precisely why brewers loved it. A cherry bred to be eaten out of hand (sweet, fleshy, forgiving) makes a soft, one-dimensional beer. The Schaarbeek's high acidity, thin skin, and generous pit-to-flesh ratio give kriek its backbone: sharp fruit, a stony almond note from the cracked pits, and enough character to stand up to the assertive funk of aged lambic.

Slow Food, which lists the Schaarbeek cherry in its Ark of Taste catalogue of endangered foods, describes it plainly: a wild cherry, not grafted, traditionally used to make kriek by fermenting it whole in the lambic cask. It is, in other words, a beer ingredient first and an eating cherry a distant second: a fruit whose entire reason for surviving was the beer it made.

A Tradition Older Than the Records

Nobody can point to the year kriek was invented, because it is older than the paperwork. What we do have are traces. Documentation of local sour cherries being sold to Brussels-area brewers goes back to at least the late 1700s, strong evidence that cherry beer was being made in the region long before anyone bothered to write down a recipe. One of the earliest explicit written mentions of adding cherries to beer appears in an 1878 manuscript kept by a tenant farmer near Schepdaal, in the heart of the lambic country, and by the opening years of the 1900s there are clear published recipes for kriek production.

This puts kriek among the oldest surviving beer styles in continuous production anywhere. And it points to something important about how it came to be: fruiting lambic was, originally, a piece of seasonal farmhouse thrift. The Senne valley was full of orchards; the region was full of small brewers and blenders making lambic year-round. When the cherries came ripe in high summer, you had a glut of intensely sour fruit and a cellar full of maturing sour beer. Putting the two together wasn't a marketing idea: it was what you did with the harvest.

Fruit in beer, it's worth remembering, is not the novelty it can seem. The use of cherries and raspberries to flavor beer in this corner of Belgium predates the near-universal adoption of hops as a beer flavoring. Long before "fruit beer" was a category on a menu, it was simply beer with the fruit that grew outside the door.

How a Traditional Kriek Is Made

The method is old, slow, and beautifully simple in outline, and fiendishly demanding in practice. It begins with lambic: a beer made from malted barley and a large proportion of unmalted wheat, boiled with aged, deliberately stale hops (used for preservation, not bitterness or aroma), then left to cool overnight in a broad, shallow open vessel called a coolship, usually in an attic open to the night air. There, wild yeasts and bacteria native to the Senne valley, famously including Brettanomyces, settle into the wort and begin a spontaneous fermentation. The young beer is then racked into oak casks and left to mature, developing its dry, sour, funky, faintly citrusy character over months and years.

To make kriek, the blender takes lambic, often around one to two years old, and adds whole sour cherries, pits included, directly to the cask. The cherries typically go in at a generous rate: traditional producers commonly use something on the order of 200 to 400 grams of fruit for every liter of beer. Then the waiting begins again. The cherries macerate in the lambic for months (anywhere from a couple of months to nearly a year, depending on the house) and the sugar in the fruit kicks off a fresh, slow refermentation. The wild microbes eat that sugar down, usually to almost nothing, so a traditional kriek ends up dry rather than sweet: all the flavor of cherries, almost none of the sugar.

Leaving the pits in matters. As they sit in the acidic beer, they lend a subtle almond, marzipan-like note and a stony bitterness that rounds out the fruit, a signature of the real thing. After maceration, the beer is drawn off the spent fruit and matured further; the best oude krieks are then bottled with a little young lambic to trigger a secondary fermentation in the bottle, giving that fine, dry, Champagne-like sparkle and the capacity to age gracefully for years.

This is the version that earns the protected names. Under EU rules, terms like Oude Kriek and Vieille Kriek are legally reserved for kriek that meets specific requirements: a genuine lambic base, real cherries, sufficient age, a secondary refermentation in the bottle, and maturation on the lees. It's the same instinct that protects Champagne or Roquefort: a recognition that a name born of a place and a method shouldn't be borrowed by everything that looks vaguely similar.

Sweet Kriek and Sour Kriek

Here is where a lot of drinkers get confused, and fairly so, because two very different beers hide under the same word. If your only experience of kriek is a bright-red, syrupy, soda-sweet drink poured from a small bottle, you have met the modern sweetened kriek, and you have not yet met the real thing.

Over the twentieth century, as the sour, challenging traditional styles fell out of fashion, many producers sweetened their fruit lambics to reach a broader, less adventurous audience. These commercial krieks are often made with cherry juice or syrup rather than whole macerated cherries, matured for a fraction of the time, and finished with added sugar. The result is soft, jammy, and easy: pleasant enough, and a genuine gateway for many people, but a world away from the dry, tart, oak-and-funk complexity of an oude kriek.

The traditional camp (houses like Cantillon, Boon, 3 Fonteinen, Oud Beersel, Hanssens, and Girardin) makes the austere, dry, sour version: real lambic, real cherries, real time, and no sugar to smooth over the edges. Neither is "wrong." But if you want to taste what kriek actually is, and why brewers went to the trouble of a wild ungrafted cherry in the first place, you want a traditional oude kriek in the glass. It is one of the most complex and rewarding things you can drink.

The Cherry That Nearly Disappeared

The great threat to kriek, as it turned out, was not changing taste. It was concrete. As Brussels grew through the twentieth century, the city spread out over exactly the orchards that had made the Schaarbeek cherry famous. The trees that once ringed the commune were felled for housing, streets, and industry, and the wild, ungrafted cherry (slow to grow, hard to cultivate at scale, useful mainly for beer) had little to protect it. By the later twentieth century the Schaarbeek cherry had all but vanished from Schaarbeek itself.

It survived, barely, out in the countryside. In the Senne valley and the surrounding Pajottenland, the same farmland that gives lambic its wild yeast, brewers kept finding just enough of the old cherries to keep the tradition flickering, supplementing them when they had to with other sour varieties, including cherries imported from Poland and elsewhere. For a while, "Schaarbeek kriek" survived more as a memory and an ideal than as an ingredient most brewers could actually get their hands on.

And then, quietly, people started putting the tree back in the ground.

Bringing the Orchard Back

The revival came from two directions at once: the brewers and the neighbors. On the brewing side, traditional lambic houses that cared about authenticity began planting their own orchards rather than trusting to a dwindling supply of foraged fruit. Producers like 3 Fonteinen and Oud Beersel put in cherry trees. Cantillon (the Brussels blending house that has spent a century refusing to compromise on the sour, traditional style) backed an ambitious project with the urban-agriculture cooperative Vert d'Iris to plant thousands of Schaarbeek cherry trees in and around the city, aiming to grow enough fruit to supply the brewery's own kriek for years to come.

On the neighborhood side, the tree came home to Schaarbeek. Beginning around 2011, a coalition of cultural groups and tree-planting volunteers, a collective known as the Bûûmplanters among them, began planting Schaarbeekse kriek trees again in the gardens of ordinary Schaarbeek residents, reintroducing the fruit to the very streets it was named for. The commune itself became involved in reintroduction programs, and a small square in Schaarbeek even carries the name of the cherry-tree growers, a civic wink at the fruit that once defined the place.

It is a slow project by its nature: you cannot rush a cherry tree to maturity, and a wild ungrafted one least of all. But it is real. The Schaarbeek cherry, written off as effectively gone, is being deliberately, patiently replanted by people who understand that a beer style is only as alive as its ingredients. Save the tree, and you save the beer.

How We Serve It at Mort Subite

Kriek is close to our heart for an obvious reason: our namesake, the old Mort Subite house in Brussels, is a lambic name, and a kriek has always belonged on that list. There's a certain rightness to pouring cherry lambic in a bar named after a Brussels café that grew up around exactly this kind of beer.

We serve kriek cool but not frozen, in a stemmed glass or lambic flute that lets the fruit and the funk climb up to your nose, never in a frosted mug, which numbs everything that makes it interesting. If you're new to it, we'll happily start you somewhere approachable and walk you toward the dry, traditional oude kriek when you're ready; and if you already know what you want, we'll pour you the real, tart, oak-aged article and let it speak for itself. Either way, look for that stony almond note underneath the cherry: that's the pits talking, and it's the sign of kriek made the old way.

It's a beer that rewards a story, and this is a good one to tell over a glass: a wild cherry that grew almost nowhere else, a farmhouse habit older than the recipe books, a fruit nearly paved over by a growing city, and a quiet campaign of brewers and neighbors putting the trees back one garden at a time. Drink a proper kriek and you're drinking a small piece of Brussels that people refused to let disappear.

Check the draft menu, or ask the bar what is on today. Come taste the cherry beer of Brussels, the way it was meant to be made.