Second-fiddle sour

Anywhere else, Petrus would be a highlight of the local beer scene. In Belgium, during this Golden Age of Geuze, a sour beer specialist that doesn't have a lambic appellation is always going to be on the second rung. I guess that's why Petrus, brewed by De Brabandere in west Flanders, is pitched squarely at the export market, where lambic is hard to find and/or outrageously expensive. It perhaps also explains the, er, creativity in some of the beer styles. A selection of them landed on the beer taps of Dublin back in the spring.

The first I met was Sour Passionfruit, at Against the Grain. It's a cheery bright gold colour despite the serious 7.3% ABV. The flavour is a full-on riot from the get-go. It incorporates all the sweet tropical fruit and all the puckering sourness yet somehow manages to balance the noise and give us a tune. The underlying quality of the base beer (their flagship Aged Pale) shines through: a matured mineral spice, seasoning and accentuating the mouthwatering quality of the fruit. The aftertaste is the only part where the syrup has too much control; otherwise it's very nearly as good as a fruited geuze, if a little heavy on the booze.

A month or so later, it was off to UnderDog, where Petrus's distributor, Grand Cru, had organised a tap takeover. I began with the Aged Red, a companion to the Aged Pale flagship, though with an ABV soaring to 8.5%. It's an attractive smouldering deep ruby colour, but that's as good as it got. The flavour is joltingly sweet, beginning on acceptable cherry sherbet but turning quickly to sickly cough sweets. A tacked-on sour twang lies cowering in the background, sharp and gastric. It had mellowed, or had mellowed me, by the half-way point, but it's still too loud and rough to be enjoyable.

Let's go back to basics, then, and take another look at Aged Pale, this time from a single maturation vessel: Foeder 102. I got a suspicious buzz of appley cider from this first, followed by a much more pleasant white pepper spice. A waxy bitterness is next, similar to what you'd find in the more coarse lambics, certainly lacking the smoothness you usually get in a well-aged example. Still, it has impressive layers of flavours and I'd judge it a cut above the sharply acidic non-single-foeder version. Worth trading up if you have the choice.

The one beside it is definitely a Belgian's idea of what an American would want from a Belgian beer, going by the name Cherry Chocolate Nitro Quad. It's 9.5% ABV and a very dark red-brown colour. The aroma mixes strong and bitter stout with artificial cherry concentrate, and the flavour reflects that. The dark fruit of the quadrupel style is absent, perhaps because of the nitrogenation. Maybe the brewery thought that a secondary addition of cherry flavour would compensate for that, but it doesn't. At least it's smooth, despite the bitterness, and there's very little sign of all that alcohol. That makes it fine to drink, but really not very subtle or complex.

It seems to me that the Petrus marque is a bit of a one-trick pony. They got the Aged Pale right but haven't offered me anything else in that league. Mind you, I have a very similar opinion of that other non-lambic sour producer, Rodenbach. Maybe not every brand needs an extension.