Pairing jazz and lambic beer can create a synergistic experience due to their shared characteristics of complexity, unpredictability, and a unique character that appeals to those who appreciate nuances. With its improvisational nature and often sour notes, jazz can complement lambic beer’s tart and sometimes wild flavors. Sold? Peaks & Pints combines jazz with lambics in our Events Room 5 to 8 p.m. every first Sunday. We call it Jambic & Lazz, featuring Kareem Kandi and his jazz trio paired with a lambic flight. For those who can’t make the show tonight, but still want to enjoy lambics on a Sunday, we’re offering an all-day flight of lambics called Peaks & Pints Sunday Lambic Flight: 5.4.25.

Lambic, like music, requires years of dedication and a consuming passion. Whether straight, faro, gueuze, or fruit-based, lambics are produced only in one area of Belgium, the Senne River Valley, south and west of Brussels in the Pajottenland region. Officially speaking, lambic is an appellation like “Champagne” and “bourbon”; the l-word is strictly enforced and reserved for beers made exclusively in said region. Most importantly, they’re beers spontaneously fermented by the airborne wild yeasts and bacteria present in this valley and nowhere else on the face of the Earth. Nature didn’t just bless this area with the right yeasts and bacteria — it also endowed it with an ideal climate for slow fermentation, easy access to French wine barrels, and even tart Schaerbeek cherries. The real beauty of these ales is how different they are from brewery to brewery, batch to batch, barrel to barrel. Hell, the beer even changes with each sip down the glass. Adventure is out there — or at least in our Events Room tonight. The coolest cat in Tacoma, saxophonist Kareem Kandi is a versatile musician with strong roots in the traditions of jazz, blues, classical, and funk, and has been performing throughout the U.S. and abroad for years, gaining attention from critics and audiences alike.

Peaks & Pints Sunday Lambic Flight: 5.4.25

Lindemans Strawberry

4.1% ABV

Lindemans Strawberry fruited lambic has a unique, balanced marriage of sweet and sour, with the complex sweetness of the strawberries matching perfectly with the sourness of the lambic. The recipe was developed specifically for the ever-developing tastes in the US market. It sports a rosy hue and an aroma of ripened strawberries. It shows complex, captivating flavors, with delicate sweetness balanced by traditional lambic tartness in the finish. 

Mikkeller Baghaven Kaleidoscope of Ambrosia

6% ABV

Mikkeller Baghaven Kaleidoscope of Ambrosia is a wild ale with a grist of organic Danish barley, emmer malt, and raw barley enriched with French Strisselspalt, Styrian Celeia, and New Zealand Motueka hops. It is fermented with their house culture in oak, blended with 3-year-old lambic from Oud Beersel, rested for 18 months in French oak prior, and then aged for 6 months in the bottle to achieve its characteristic carbonation and distinctive cellar funk.

Drie Fonteinen Aardbei Kriek Blend No. 1 21/22

6.2% ABV

Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen, or Drie Fonteinen, focuses on aging and blending the beers of other lambic brewers. It’s a particularly Belgian concept that the creative process in producing a beer comes not when its ingredients are combined and fermented, but in how the resulting beer is aged and blended with other vintages to create a new, transcendent concoction. Their Aardbei/Kriek is a blend of a strawberry lambic and a sour cherry lambic, in a proportion of 65/35. The lambik originates from five different barrels and nine different brews. Most of them were 2-year-old lambikken, and almost 10 percent were 3-year-old. One third of the lambic volume is brewed with Pajot-grown cereals. The final fruit concentration is 516 grams of strawberries and sour cherries per liter of finished Aardbei/Kriek.

Brouwerij Boon Millesime Boon

6.5% ABV

In the summer of 2020, the cherries were harvested, and Brouwerij Boon made this delicate, traditional fruit beer based on Belgian Schaarbeek cherries and lambic. The brewery had the fresh cherries fermented with lambic beer that had already aged for 18 months in wooden barrels. Next, the resulting cherry lambic matures for another 6 months in oak casks. Thanks to its accessible alcohol content (6.5%), the distinct and elegant aroma of the Schaarbeek cherries is given free rein.

Het Boerenerf Framboos 2022

7% ABV

In 2020, Senne Eylenbosch and Vincent Alluin founded Boerenerf in Huizingen, Belgium. The company was built on the foundations of the renowned Eylenbosch Brewery, which closed its doors in 1965. The Dutch word “Boerenerf” translates to “Farmstead,” a nod to the old family farm where the original brewery began, which has been in the Eylenbosch family for generations. The traditions continue in the old stables, where lambic and gueuze beers mature in barrels. Its Boerenerf Framboos is a blend of young and old lambics with raspberry maceration from fruit farm De Daalkouter.

LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory