Geuze Bus Tours: The Reboot

Five years! It's hard to believe that it was five years since I last spent a weekend trundling around the breweries of the Pajottenland. The world has changed a lot since then. For one thing, the Toer de Geuze has now shifted to even-numbered years. I didn't do 2022's first post-Covid Toer but was back for both days of this year's. I was particularly interested to see four locations that I'd never been to before and resolved to visit them all. But before we get to them, a handful of return visits.

Day one, brewery one, was Lindemans. They've scaled things back compared to previous years. Gone are the fairground rides and play-along sideshows, and from four bouncy castles they were down to just one (though huge). Stilt-walkers and smoke machines still brought a little of the carnival, but mostly it was just a big hall to drink in. OK then.

In Brussels last year I tried out their just-released Tarot Noir, an 8% ABV fruit lambic that was so horrifically sweet that I couldn't countenance its twin, Tarot D'Or. At Lindemans, that wasn't an option, and I hadn't even reached the main hall before a glass of it had been thrust upon me. There were no surprises here. It's supposed to taste of "exotic" fruit, and that turned out to be a syrupy-sweet mix of nothing identifiable. Mango, maybe, or apricot? Far removed from any notion of real fruit, anyway. And far removed from lambic too, with no sign of the base beer or even a sniff of sourness. Both of the Tarot beers are beautifully packaged and marketed rubbish.

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the brewery had just launched Lindemans Pure, an oude geuze aged for seven years in a single foeder. It's the sort of thing Boon does; Lindemans copying it suggests there's a healthy market for beers like this. It was an eye-watering €7 a glass, and arrived a very mature-looking amber or honey colour. There's honey in the aroma too, all bright and floral. 7% ABV isn't especially excessive, but does make it heavier-set than most beers like this, and it has a warming chewiness, without any of the zesty spritz of younger geuze. The flavour opens on a dark muscovado sweetness, leading into chalky minerals and a tang of zinc on the end. I wouldn't say it's entirely to my taste, and I doubt I'll be paying €20+ for the full bottle, but it does what it sets out to do. There's an enjoyable mature smoothness to it which demonstrates nicely how much effort went into producing it.

Lindemans tends to be where I try the Megablend on each Toer: the one-off oude geuze created by the participating companies. I had been very impressed by recent ones so was looking forward to Megablend 2024. Unfortunately it wasn't up to the stellar standard of 2021. This one is extremely dry and leans in to the mineral side of the flavour profile in a big way. It's a stony, gritty sort of taste, one I associate with De Troch in particular. In its favour there's a fabulous gunpowder spice in the aroma, and overall it does get more interesting as it warms, introducing lemon zest and softer breadcrust. My favourite Megablends were ones which tasted spectacular on day one. I think this year's may benefit from a little cellaring so I took one from the Lindemans shop before leaving, to do just that.

The schedule being the way it was, I ended up back at Lindemans on the Sunday and tried out the straight Lindemans Lambic. I'm not sure if it's regularly for sale, but it should be. I guess the Brettanomyces is strong with this one, because it's powerfully funky, beginning on ripe peach and mango then adding an edge of Camembert. On different sips I got apple skin, raisin and chanterelle mushroom for some weird, earthy, mouldy fun. Having something like this on the wider market could do wonderful things for the brewery's credibility; much more than that Tarot nonsense ever will.

Back to Saturday, and later in the afternoon we rocked up to Oud Beersel. They, too, had altered the format. It still felt like a beer festival, with an array of bars in tents, but it had all been moved off the street in front of the premises and down to the sloping garden at the back, where things were beginning to get a bit muddy. The array of beers was dizzying and, judging from the handwriting in my notebook, I may have overdone things a little.

New on the roster of Oud Beersel's idiosyncratically-flavoured lambics was Cherry Wood Infused Lambic. I've often criticised this series for not making the special ingredient prominent enough. Here, though, there's a massive amount of cherry in the flavour, tasting red rather than the hazy yellow it actually is. The effect is accentuated further by a heavy-set texture, and that's despite the strength being quite a reasonable 6.8% ABV. A harsh bitter finish is the only other thing I had to note on the day, but overall I liked it.

Also new was Lemon Verbena Leaf Lambic, which is exactly as strong but completely different, texture-wise, being clean and crisp, almost resembling a lager. The lemon verbena came through as more of a zesty citrus effect, rather than anything more herbal or perfumey. This, in the more typical Oud Beersel way, hits against the hard and earthy wax-like bitterness of proper lambic doing its thing. The two sides work well together.

Lambic brewers tend to eschew fresh hop flavours, except when they don't, and the third new offering was Nelson Sauvin Dry-Hopped Lambic. It is not my first encounter with this combination: now-defunct Roman brewer Revelation Cat had one at the Copenhagen Beer Festival in 2010. I liked that but I loved this. Again, at heart, it's a typically delicious lambic, with lots of my favourite spicy mineral gunpowder in evidence. This is set next to an utterly luscious fresh and juicy grape flavour, one which makes the beer ill-advisedly sinkable. I need to come back to this on a clean palate and hope I see it again soon.

Released last year, but new to me, was Beersel's Salted Tangerine Infused Lambic. Salted tangerine is an ingredient in Chinese cooking, which was news to my uncultured palate. This is another excellent peppery one, the spice contrasting with a much smoother base beer, along the lines of the Cherry Wood edition, and indeed the same strength. I don't know if I was supposed to taste actual tangerine, but I didn't. Unlike the others, it was poured from a bottle, so should be easier to get hold of for a retest.

Finally, something from the non-lambic range of Oud Beersel. Bersalis Wild doesn't give us any style designation beyond the gauche "session sour". The brewery notes that it's available solely in KeyKeg, implying that it's all meant to be shipped out of Belgium to less civilised countries. Still, they've given it three years of barrel ageing before that happens, and it really pays off in the overall smooth and rounded mature flavour. I got a pinch of pepper and hints of jaffa and lemon, so not a million miles from lambic. There's a full body to go with that full flavour, and while it is only 4.6% ABV I'm not sure a session on it would be appropriate. It deserves more respect than that, even if it's a poor relation of its spontaneously fermented stablemates.

Toer day one, mercifully, ended there. Day two was an hour shorter and altogether more sedate. It finished up at the joker in the pack, my least favourite lambic brewery, De Troch. It was business as usual in the pretty courtyard here: a bar stocked with fridges full of the super-sweet fruit lambic of the Chapeau range. There were two I hadn't tasted before and I drank them to be polite.

Chapeau Mirabelle looked interesting, if only because I don't know what mirabelle plums taste like. I bet they don't taste like this, though: cartoonishly syrupy with nothing I could assign to being real fruit. In its favour, it does have a very diluted version of De Troch's signature cement flavour, though dialled back to the point of being a pleasant mineral note. This is inoffensive, overall, which I'm chalking up as a massive win for this brewery.

The last roll of the dice for today was Chapeau Lemon. Surprisingly, this poured quite a dark amber colour, though it tasted of lemon cordial: sweet, with no actual citrus bittering. Any sourness here appears to come from the citric acid and I could find nothing of the base beer, for good or ill. It's not unpleasant, just very basic and un-beer-like, which is pretty much par for the course with the Chapeaus. The main thing is I survived De Troch without doing or saying anything unmannerly.

In the next post we'll visit the four brewers which I had never been to before.