I had been so looking forward to my bottle of Cantillon Fou' Foune. The apricot lambic is something of a rarity and I'd been saving it up for a few months. The first sign that something was not as it should be was when I took the cap off to find a small amount of beer between it and the cork.On being drawn out, the cork told me my bottle was filled in 2005, longer ago than I'd realised. Still, it's a lambic, right? It's robust enough to survive things like this intact, isn't it?
Actually, I still don't know the answer to that. The beer was powerfully sour, to the point of throat-burning. It's not vinegar, though; it's the proper bricky saltpetre sourness of good lambic, just turned up to an extreme level. By squinting a bit and concentrating, I could just about detect the ghost apricots lingering at the back of the flavour, but they were very insubstantial and quite possibly imaginary.
So, unless you're prepared for sourness beyond normal human endurance, my advice is to drink your Fou' Foune young.
Your puns get worse and worse. Keep'em up.
ReplyDeleteTa. After I looked up what "foufoune" actually means in French a wealth of opportunities presented themselves but, perhaps mercifully, I didn't use any of them.
ReplyDeleteNote to other reader: don't look up foufoune at work.
ReplyDeleteHere's what amazed me, right: there's an English word with the same initial letter which appears to be an almost exact translation: signifying different things in European and North American English respectively. What're the chances?
ReplyDeleteVery intresting looks like one of the bugs took over, was it latic or actic sourness?
ReplyDeleteI would guess lactic: like I say, it was the normal lambic sourness, just loads of it.
ReplyDelete"I would guess lactic: like I say, it was the normal lambic sourness, just loads of it. "
ReplyDeleteMaybe it was infected ;) !!!
A 2005 Cantillon would possibly still have a an acetic / vinegary edge on top of the lactic sourness, due to a few pediococcus running loose in the brewery... well in some of the older oak casks, which the berwery has AFAIK withdrawn (that's what I was told at the brewery in July this year).
ReplyDeleteFact is, whilst remaining dry, sour and complex, the "fresher" stuff from Cantillon I've had in the past 12 months was much less vinegary than I remembered before, and a lot more enjoyable IMHO.
And it's not just my palate evolving, in that heavy acetic edges in other lambics still make me cringe.
BTW after a few years without new brews of Fou'Foune, a new batch had just been produced when I visited in July this year.
Cheers !
Laurent
Yes, I'd heard it was coming back. Can't wait to get hold of a fresh one.
ReplyDeleteNot tried this, but had a bottle of the Iris the other weekend, bottled in 2010, which was wonderful.
ReplyDeleteThat Iris was lovely... Shame about the Fou'Foune though.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, just occasionally, Cantillon beers remind me of the experience of being sick. It's never really put me off (I love Cantillon beers, even if I don't necessarily like them) but I certainly prefer fruit sourness to vinegar.
ReplyDelete