Strange fruit

Cherries, raspberries: the canon of acceptable fruits for lambics is well established. Apricots, grapes: it keeps getting wider though. Today it's two from Timmermans with two new fruit additions for me. Both come in cans, to further underline their non-traditional nature.

Strawberry Lambicus is bright red and just 4% ABV, suggesting the puree proportion is substantial. The ingredients listing tells us there's elderberries as well for some reason. The flavour? Strawberries. Loads and loads of big, juicy, ripe (possibly tinned) strawberries. Unfortunately this leaves almost no room for beer. There's a tiny tart twang on the very end, but it's disappointingly sugary overall. In a time when the syrup-blending lambic breweries are offering more classy vintage stuff, this is quite disappointing. Better crack on with the next one, so.

With Sloe Lambicus the ABV drops to 3.5% ABV, though the price stays steady at €3.75. The elderberries remain. I liked the colour of it: a deep and luxurious purple. I don't think I've ever eaten an actual sloe but this does taste of sloe gin: a sticky sweet berry character, not far from blueberry. There's even less beer character in it this time, and absolutely nothing sour. I preferred it to the strawberry one, however.

I had been holding out a hope that these would be in some way classy but they're very definitely not. They're a slightly unusual take on syrupy fruit beer, but syrupy fruit beer is all you get, and not cheaply either. The sloe one is the best of them, and I'd be very interested in a properly aged sloe lambic.