I appreciate that. I was honestly hoping that I wouldn’t have to eat my own crow, since this was just something I remembered from a book on brewing lambics. I read it a long time ago, with aspirations of trying to brew them myself. Alas, the start up costs are high and the brewing time extremely long. I may yet get there, but what a risk that will be, to wait three years just to find out if I completely messed up.
See, I just thought it was pasteurized, backsweetened, and force carbonated or something like that. I mean, you have ciders that are pretty sweet and carbonated from France (Normandy in particular) that I assume are made using traditional methods. Granted, they’re nowhere near the sweetness of Lindeman’s framboise, but they’re still sweet. And sweet champagnes. So I thought there must be a way to do the same thing with a lambic that might be out of reach for your average homebrewer.
The easiest way to simulate it would be to do what the Germans often do with their soured Berliner weissbeer: add some fruit syrup to the glass before you pour your beer. That will give you the Lindeman’s syruppy sweet effect. Were I to make a lambic, I would do a secondary ferment with the fruit and let it ferment out completely, but supplement it with syrup before serving for those who like it sweet.
Actually, I have found that simply adding canned fruit to the beer before fermentation produces something at least comparable to the unsweetened lambics. Without the lactic acid, its still not the same.
Other ways to sweeten beer is with unfermentable sugars like lactose. Obviously, this won’t do for lambics. I am not completely opposed to using artificial sweeteners in beer. The book I read said this was not at all unusual for lambics. This homebrew website lists it as a possible ingredient in the section on belgian style fruit lambics. I just think Lindemen’s is horribly sweet.
I’ve used lactose in ciders, and I really don’t like it too much. I don’t mind it as much with stout. I do know artificial sweeteners are used in brewing and cider-making–especially with ciders it’s quite extensively discussed on the websites (like the Homebrew Talk you linked to), but I was just surprised that Lindeman’s used it.
I’ve made soured beers before, just let them wild ferment. It’s not all that scary, but it is completely unpredictable. If you like lambics, just give it a shot. Make yourself a wort, and when it cools down, throw in some rye flour (which has a lot of wild yeasts on it), open ferment, and see what happens. It does take about a year for the flavor to even out, but I drank almost all 40 bottles of mine within 6 months. I like it rough. 
My best ciders have been wild fermented. I just crush apples and leave them in a carboy until they bubble. Two years ago, I made three 3-gallon wild batches – 2 turned out fine and fruity, 1 apparently got infected with acetobacter (vinegar bacteria.) But that’s fine with me. I now have a carboy of homemade apple cider vinegar to go along with my carboy of red wine vinegar (which was purposely cultured with a mother of vinegar). I also made about 20+ gallons of sulfited and fermented with cultured yeast batches, but the wild ones were by far the best.
I’m sad you didn’t, although you gave me a good idea for mine ;). The SO loves it too, but doesn’t sing it from the hilltops. I’d imagine it would hurt his images.
I can’t believe you used the words “smirnoff ice” and “lambic” in the same sentence ;). It’s like comparing platinum to…shrapnel.
Tried it tonight. Did the large mouthful. First reaction was “eh, it’s good, but not great” then as it sat & warmed up a bit, I really could tell the distinctive flavor. And so by the end, I was all “This is more like it!”