To hear Rich Soriano lay it out, our day spent gallivanting around the Brussels hinterland will be straightforward. As we drive through industrial suburbs on a wet October morning, Soriano—Lambic spiritual guide for visitors to Brussels—sketches out his regular Saturday routine. First, to the Lambic blendery Gueuzerie Tilquin to open the taproom, then a whistle-stop tour of the Senne River Valley in search of food and drink at his favorite and mostly forgotten Lambic haunts.
But now, the clock is ticking into the afternoon, and we still haven’t left Tilquin. Soriano pours out the dregs of the latest bottle into a nearby glass, and the blendery’s founder, Pierre Tilquin, emerges from behind a wooden cupboard with a glint in his eye and a green bottle scrawled in red ink in his hand. Part two of our plan is rapidly disappearing over the horizon. Soriano—the boy from the South Texas borderlands who has become an unlikely but essential advocate for Lambic and the culture that sustains it—leans over the bar with a look that intimates: “Well—what did you expect?”
In 2009, Soriano arrived in Belgium a Coors Light drinker vaguely aware of the country’s culinary trinity of beer, chocolate, and waffles. His first contact with local beer came not through the Wild Ales of Brussels and the Senne Valley, but with a fresh bottle of Orval at a dingy village café on the outskirts of Mons. That gateway beer jolted his curiosity, and set him on a path that led inexorably to Brussels’ last working brewery.
Belgium’s beer scene a decade ago was a different world. “Craft,” as is understood in 2020, didn’t really exist. The country’s Lambic brewers were emerging into a period of financial security after decades of decline and underinvestment, and most breweries were not set up for lone visitors like Soriano. “If you Googled ‘beer things to do in Belgium’ 10 years ago, Cantillon was one of the few things that came up,” he says. So that’s where he went, and 10 years later he hasn’t really left. It sounds like an abrupt escalation—from the unthrilling consistency of Coors Light to the confrontational acidity of a Cantillon Gueuze—but that flavor profile wasn’t a total novelty for Soriano. “Being Hispanic, being Mexican-American, sour flavors, we dig that,” Soriano says. “So I tried [Lambic], and I thought, ‘Beer can be sour? I don’t have to add my own lime?’”
“Being Hispanic, being Mexican-American, sour flavors, we dig that. So I tried [Lambic], and I thought, ‘Beer can be sour? I don’t have to add my own lime?”
A self-described cultural magpie, Soriano was attracted not only to these tart beers but to the deeply rooted traditions he discovered around them. He wasn’t the first foreign interloper to fall under Lambic’s spell: for some, the appeal is in the mythos that surrounds the centuries-old beer, while for others, it’s the idiosyncratic brewing techniques, and the complex flavors they produce. But to complete his acceptance into the Lambic fraternity, Soriano had to convince members of the old guard that his passion was true. Lambic brewers emerged into the 2000s battered from a half century of precipitous decline and local disinterest in traditional brewing. Innately truculent, they were reticent about prospective carpetbaggers looking to profit from a revival that was fitfully taking hold.
It soon became clear to them, as they observed Soriano in the region’s Lambic-centric bars, restaurants, and brewery taprooms, that his interest was anything but self-serving. They watched him invite strangers to share a bottle and their stories with him, or corral disparate groups of drinkers together, creating an itinerary for the rest of their day or taking it upon himself to bring them on his personal route through the best places to eat and drink in the area. Eventually, they were convinced.
“Oh dude!” Soriano exclaims when asked about what prompted his conversion, and his passion for converting others, beyond his appreciation for Lambic’s taste. “It’s like when people say, ‘I’ve never seen ‘Indiana Jones.’’ ‘Well, today, we’re going to get to see ‘Indiana Jones!’’ I get to show someone something new and interesting. You get to show people cool stuff, and give them their own Lambic story.” Soriano left Belgium not long after his own epiphany, but continued to evangelize at bottle shares and Lambic parties while living in the American Midwest and the English Home Counties. Despite his fervor, he never gave Lambic the hard sell. Soriano still recoils from the performatively onanistic, fetishistic attitude that the worst of contemporary Lambic bro culture has regarding the acquisition of rare vintages or exclusive events. “No one likes a fucking dick swing,” he says.
Clouds part and a wet autumnal sun streams through the taproom windows. A father-and-son pair from Rhode Island sidle into the blendery for a beer. Filled glasses in hand, they join Soriano on a tour of the facility. There was no application process to become Tilquin’s all-purpose taproom wrangler. After returning to Belgium in 2012 following his period abroad, Soriano started to visit the blendery on his regular Saturday rounds. “It was literally just Pierre at the time, it was just like a wooden stove, and it was always, always cold,” Soriano says. “I did think the scale was super cool. This guy was doing what he wanted to do his way, and I respect that. Dope.” Soriano became a regular fixture on Saturdays, then began helping out with tours, and when Tilquin opened a dedicated taproom, Soriano found himself behind the bar.
It’s been a mutually productive relationship. Soriano and a band of online Tilquin enthusiasts he herded together in an eponymous Facebook group have encouraged Tilquin in his more outré experimentation with fruited Lambics. The Saturday taproom crowd would regularly suggest outrageous combinations, like a gin-barrel aged, cacao-nibs dry-hopped Lambic, or a pineapple-and-banana fruited blend. Tilquin would politely bat away these suggestions—at least until 2015, when Soriano and the other Tilquin Enthusiasts group admins had gathered at the blendery for their first annual Christmas tasting. When Tilquin opened the doors to let them in, they found piles and piles of bananas and pineapples. Tilquin had called their bluff, and set them to work peeling and chopping.
Tilquinananas has never been released commercially, but bottles pop up at the occasional event, labeled with a Rich Soriano “seal of approval.” This collaborative tradition has continued ever since, the latest result being the green bottle with the red scrawl that Tilquin has rustled up. It turns out to be a Tilquin Lambic-Stout blended with Congolese coffee nibs, and it was Soriano’s idea. The Americans have since departed, and the two men huddle over the bar’s ledger while Tilquin gently ribs Soriano about his burgeoning media profile. The afternoon disappears further into bottles of maple syrup Gueuze, quince Lambic, pinot noir and pinot gris blends. Someone hauls bottles of IPA from the fridge to rebalance our stomach pH. When hunger starts to gnaw at everyone’s attention, the original Saturday plan is resuscitated. Nearby Café De Bascule is first up, a dressed-up station café in a village where the train no longer stops and which does a good line in restorative plates of salty, tangy pottekeis (locally made sheep’s cheese).
After our brief stop, we make our way across the lumpy backroads of the Pajottenland to the hamlet of Mekingen. Soriano’s head remains clear, having absented himself from the bacchanalia back at the taproom, and he knows these roads well. When he was in danger of disappearing into an abyss, he rescued himself here among the nooks and crannies of these hills.
In the autumn of 2014 Soriano was a world away from Brussels. He was vacationing in Cambodia when a catastrophic dirt biking accident landed him in a Bangkok hospital, his right arm paralyzed, and its mobility reduced permanently. After two weeks of rehabilitation, Soriano returned to Belgium on sick leave, battered, bruised and seeking solace. “I started hanging out with Lambic people,” he says. “I would go hang out with people, and they would just let me … because I had all day, and clearly I was not in the best mental spot.”
“Before the injury I was a power-lifter, I was a mountain-biker. I was all these things, and I had to re-identify. And in trying to find out who I am, what I’m about, I found this beer thing.”
And so he came to find himself in places like the Oude Smis van Mekingen. There’s a standalone table in the middle of the room when we walk into the bar, and we take it. In one corner a pair of laborers are drinking away a day’s work, their boots dusty and untied. Dried sausage links hang over the bar, next to yellowed posters of long-departed schlager revues and calendars from years ago, made by banks that no longer exist. A table of graying men is sharing around a bottle of Moriau Gueuze, and when the landlady comes for our order, we follow their lead.
“Before the injury I was a power-lifter, I was a mountain-biker,” he says. “I was all these things, and I had to re-identify. And in trying to find out who I am, what I’m about, I found this beer thing. So I kind of doubled down on beer, and stuck with it.”
When he resurfaced, Soriano possessed a key to unlocking the peculiar delights of Lambic and its heritage. Because Soriano is a self-effacing facilitator, he lets the beer speak for itself while he takes pleasure in watching new arrivals experience their own epiphanies at the bottom of a glass of Lindemans or De Troch Lambic. In fact, if it were up to him, he’d rather this article never come out.
Time for dinner, and we emerge from the Oude Smis into a creeping twilight. Soriano guides us by sense memory through identikit, red-bricked Flemish villages. The rolling hills outside the car darken and a day’s alcohol intake strengthens its grip, and loosens mine. There are brief, fuzzy interludes at a new Lambic brewery followed by a couple of beers at the Den Herberg brewpub before events refocus as we zip by Beersel Castle, its turrets lit up by floodlights.
Our final destination is the 3 Fonteinen restaurant on Beersel’s main square. Soriano is a frequent visitor, dating back to when he would share a Saturday morning coffee with Armand Debelder in the brewery, just behind the restaurant. “Lambic is a cultural designation and I wanted to learn more about it,” Soriano says. “This old guy seemed to know a lot. So, I’d let him tell me all about it.” They’ve remained close, each experiencing their own turbulent decade. 3 Fonteinen was pushed to the brink of collapse in 2009 after a catastrophic thermostat malfunction forced Debelder to dump 80,000 bottles, but a decade later, Debelder had righted the ship to the extent that he divested control just before a new €25m brewery and barrel store were announced in October 2019.
“Having people understand that Lambic is cool, Lambic is unique [but] it’s [just] beer. We can drink it.”
It’s Debelder’s nephew Thomas who welcomes Soriano into the brightly lit restaurant with a beaming smile. They exchange gossip as we’re shown to a table near the bar, and it’s clear, more than the beer, or the amateur cultural anthropology, that these relationships are what bind Soriano to this odd little corner of Belgium. That and his unshowy gospel extolling the simple virtues of a glass of Lambic. “It’s not like, ‘Why can’t it be like the good old days?’” Soriano says, reflecting on the dramatic transformation in the perception of Lambic, even in the decade in which he’s been involved. “For me it’s more … having people understand that Lambic is cool, Lambic is unique [but] … it’s [just] beer. We can drink it.”
So we do, and eat heartily before heading out for Brussels. Soriano rouses me from a half-sleep and drops me off at the edge of the city before continuing into the night. He has more stops to make. There are still, after all, people out there who have not seen “Indiana Jones.”
Words + Photosby Eoghan Walsh Language
