Today is this blog's 14th anniversary and I'm celebrating with some as-live blogging, something I almost never do. To mark the occasion I pulled a beer from the stash I'd been meaning to drink shortly anyway.
I bought this bottle of De Cam Wilde Bosbessen when I visited the blendery on the 2017 Toer de Geuze. The recommendation (I don't remember from whom) was that it wasn't quite ready for drinking yet. With a return visit on the cards soon I thought I'd better try it out beforehand in case I need to fill a suitcase with it. It's a bilberry geuze, the fruit foraged from the Ardennes forest. 40kg per 100 litres, says the label, which sounds like a lot. No surprise, then, at the deep blood-red colour.
It smells invitingly jammy, with a touch of old oak and new leather. The foretaste is jarringly tart. If that's what it's like after two years mellowing in the bottom of my wardrobe, it must have been paintstripper going into the bottle. That tartness is the only real contribution I get from the fruit. There's no berry sweetness and certainly no jam to taste. The other half of the flavour comes later: a long and distinctly Bretty funk, all mucky farmyard and sweaty horses.
I'm not a big fan of this. While it's certainly interesting, it lacks the mineral spices of good geuze and doesn't show any of the fruit flavour that often masks it, nor any warmth or body. It's thin, severe and perhaps could have done with another couple of years in the cellar. The funky finish is its best feature, but that's not really what I'm looking for in something like this. Guess I'll have to make up for it next birthday.
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