Sour gets serious

I left you yesterday half way through day two of the Toer de Geuze, leaving Oud Beersel and heading for De Troch. De Troch is best known for its crazy flavoured lambics, released under the "Chapeau" brand and featuring additives as unlikely as banana and pineapple. They also make the only Christmas-themed lambic I'm aware of. I had them pegged, therefore, as one of the soulless shiny and industrial breweries. Boy was I wrong.

On arrival, De Troch has the feel of an old estate farm. Tall blank brick walls lead around the perimeter to the front gate, whence the path descends into a grand courtyard and here the bar, stage and bouncy castle had been set up. The tour was self-guided, winding through the dusty buildings around the edge, past semi-antiquated brewing equipment and, by way of a convenient plank, across the only coolship I saw all weekend. Thankfully it was empty. The path ends at the top of the house where the casks of maturing beer rest and the brewery had conveniently set up a table where punters could get a taste of the straight lambic, decanted directly from the barrels.

De Troch Lambiek is harsh. Way harsh. There's an intense waxy bitterness running through it, alongside an unpleasantly dry and gritty cement flavour. It takes some getting used to. They were pouring the Oude Geuze that it turns into at the bar and it really concentrates those flavours, bringing that dusty dry concrete weirdness right to the fore. Do not want.

By way of relief, here's De Troch Kriekenlambic, except no, it's harsh again. It's a deep red colour and has a lovely concentrated cherry aroma but completely unravels on tasting into hot phenolic marker pens, super-sweet jam and then an unsubtle sour punch. It's more like cough medicine or some ill-advised foreign liqueur than actual beer. Do not want either.

I was charmed by the setting of De Troch, but their beer not so much. Time to bring this Toer to an end.

Final stop was De Cam which had the most confusing layout of all the sites. This is another blendery so no beer is brewed on site. The small barrel room is part of a complex in the village of Gooik that seems to be owned by the local community and includes a café and multipurpose hall. It was in the latter that tables had been set out and there was a stall selling takeaway bottles, but where was the bar? It took me three laps to figure out that the stall also had glasses available and you could open and drink your beer right there if you wanted to.

I did, however, sneak onto a tour group to see the barrel room and get a taste of the lambic from the casks. The big surprise here is that, while lambic breweries usually employ secondhand wine barrels, these ones had all come from the Pilsner Urquell brewery. And it shows in the jonge lambic too: De Cam Lambiek is powerfully buttery tasting and you need to clamber past all that semi-rancid slickness to find a hint of flinty sourness underneath. It's pretty disgusting and hard to see why they thought this was a good idea. Maybe I just got a bad barrel.

Or maybe they're just very clever custodians, because De Cam Oude Lambiek is beautiful. The colour of mature apple juice, it's all about the relaxed smoothness. There's a mild waxy bitterness and a level-headed amount of sourness, but also some lovely red-apple tannins, lending something of the feel of really good aged Norman cider. This is a beer to quaff by the earthenware jugful.

There was a range of off-kilter fruit geuzes on offer as well and I took a couple home, advised that they might be better with a bit of age on them. I did, however, drink on-site a bottle of Tros Bessen, De Cam's redcurrant lambic. It's 6.5% ABV and dark pink in colour. Earthy funk is its signature move, much more so than sourness. There's a bit of a woody seed bite, and behind all the rustic farmyard goings on there is some real summery fruit. The different elements are stitched together rather nicely, even if the joins are apparent. Perhaps it will blend together with time but at the moment it's delicious, and quite different.

I could have spent the evening getting to know more of De Cam's beers but the bus was leaving and the Toer de Geuze had come to an end. Back to Halle for the train back to Brussels.

The next day, unsurprisingly, a large number of tour veterans descended on the Cantillon brewery in Brussels to get their fix. Other lambic brands are all well and good, but everyone comes back to Cantillon in the end. To deal with the masses the management had decided to open the tasting room at the rear of the first floor, and even set up a makeshift bar up there, complete with a cask of Fou'foune, tasting fabulous.

New to me from the line-up was Cuvée Saint-Gilloise, a modern lambic made from beer that's all been in the barrel two years which is then blended together in a steel tank and dry-hopped before being primed and bottled. I'm guessing it's the hops that give it a lemony tang, one which grows as the beer begins to warm up. The base behind this is the picture of smooth maturity with no sharp edges. It's perhaps a little blander-seeming for that, and there's a hint of butter as well that's slightly worrying, but overall it's fairly easy-going inoffensive stuff, perfectly fine even if the usual Cantillon fireworks are missing.

I had just a small taste of Gueuzestraminer which, as the name suggests, is a grape lambic. Expecting soft and sweet fruit I was instead shocked to find it's a riot of spicy gunpowder and full-on acidic sourness. The fruit is present in the background but it's not the main feature at all. I really enjoyed the uncompromising aggression of this one, and how it manages to pack a serious punch without coming across as harsh or uncouth.

The beer everyone in the room was talking about was Lou Pepe Kriek, and specifically the 2008 edition. Somehow, by a counter-intuitive miracle of biochemistry, the cherry fruit in this tastes bigger, brighter and fresher than in a younger bottle. The overall effect is of a warm cherry tart with then a refined balsamic sourness behind and a quick clean finish. It's not crazy or shocking like the previous beer, just very very tasty and lots of fruity fun. I hadn't given much thought to ageing lambics, having found in the past that older ones tend not to be as enjoyable as all the character ages out of them. But my Megablend experience mentioned on Monday, and this triumph of a kriek, suggest that there may be something to it after all. I won't be in any rush to open the bottles I brought home.

That's it for the geuze-related shenanigans on this trip. To conclude, tomorrow's post will quickly take in the other beers that passed my way this time. You know the drill by now.

Coolship at De Troch

In vitro veritas

The Session this month is brought to us by the All Over Beer blog, and the theme is breweriana and collectables. I doubt I'll be the only one writing about glassware. I have quite a few glasses. While I'm not the sort who believes being served a beer in a glass branded with another name amounts to misselling, I do think glass choice is important for more than reasons of presentation.

It's all about aroma: aromatic beers work best from a wide-mouthed glass. If the vapours aren't given room to manoevure the whole beer experience can suffer. It's for this reason that my default glass for beers I'm not sure about is the Duvel one: an over-sized brandy snifter that will happily hold half a litre and shows off aroma beautifully.

It's not the only oversized brandy snifter in the Belgian beer world, however. Last time I was emptying my wallet at the beer-and-merchandise stall in Cantillon, I threw in one of their delightfully delicate kriek glasses. I don't use it a whole lot and it certainly hadn't seen any Cantillon Kriek until just last week when a selection beers from the Brussels lambic specialist arrived home with my darling wife. Cellar them? My arse.

So out with the kriek glass and in with the beer. It looks beautiful, doesn't it? A lustrous opaque pinkish-red, curved seductively like a giant juicy cherry. The glass really does its bit to show off the beer.

There's little by way of head and the taste is, perhaps unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly sour. I expected the cherry flavour to be more pronounced, but you have to dig deep under the brickiness to find it. What little there is is quite concentrated, like waxy cherry skin rather than sweet juice. Perhaps it would calm down and develop more balance if it were aged a while, but I enjoyed its vigorous youthful sourness, finding it refreshing and mouth-watering.

Just to test the effects of age on lambic fruit character, and to show off my other Cantillon glass, I opened a bottle of Lou Pepe Framboise straight after, a beer I don't think I've ever tasted. It's a 2008 vintage, bottled in 2010 and much less tart than the kriek. It's not just the extra age that produces this effect: Lou Pepe beers have more fruit than the ordinary range and are aged in freshly-acquired Bordeaux barrels. You can read more about the process on the Cantillon website here.

In place of the intense sourness (it's still pretty damn sour, mind) there's a sort of raspberry-flavoured nuttiness, like raspberry seeds. The crispness of this fruit flavour sits really well next to the puckering dryness of the underlying lambic. I wouldn't be a massive fan of raspberries in beer, but this was highly enjoyable. It's getting on for a decade since I last drank Lou Pepe Kriek so I think I may be sending m'lady off on search of some that when she returns to Brussels in a couple of weeks. I have just the glass for it.

A kriek for all seasons

Having bought the Liefmans Kriek in Brussels last winter, intending to save it for some balmy summer afternoon, I finally admitted defeat. After the third crappy summer in a row, a cold wet autumn evening was deemed a sufficiently special occasion to unwrap the paper and pop the cork.

I first discovered this beer about five years ago in Amsterdam's Café Belgique and was very impressed from the get-go. I have catholic tastes in kriek and will happily chug the light sugary ones, like Timmerman's, but also enjoy taking some time over the sharper, more cerebral craft krieks like Cantillon Lou Pepe. Liefmans occupies a wonderful space right between the two varieties.

The base beer is unambiguously sour, but the cherries add a lip-smacking sweet fruitiness which dominates the flavour yet avoids tipping over into cloying syrupy yuck. The natural carbonation is soft, making it a very drinkable beer, and one which is highly refreshing when served cold; but there's also a satisfying warmth to it, derived from the hefty 6% ABV.

Whatever you're looking for in a kriek, this one can substitute nicely.

Far flung fruit

The Session is upon us once more, and this time the theme is fruit beers. The Low Countries, and Belgium in particular, are the spiritual home of fruit beer. Brewers there have been softening lambics with fruit syrup and spicing up witbiers with orange peel since time immemorial. I've decided to step away from the native styles, however, and go for something a bit different: exotically-themed Benelux fruit beers. Surely there can't be too many other Sessioneers writing on that today.

So first up is the delightfully-named Iki Beer. It hails from the Netherlands but is very much pitched on a Japanese theme. As well as the usual hops and barley, cloudy orange Iki contains green tea and yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit. Refreshment appears to be the product's main aim. Alas, what that actually gives us is blandness. The foretaste is dominated by lots of gas making it difficult to taste anything. The aftertaste is quite strong on lagery malt, with the hops level turned slightly higher than the average lager. But of fruit and tea there is only the faintest trace at the end. I'd have hoped for a bit more citrus out of this one, so a bad start to the day's fruitiness.

I admit I'm stepping outside the remit of the Session theme with my next one, Palmnut from the Belgian Mongozo range of African-themed fair trade beers. When one describes a beer as "amber", one does not normally mean to imply the serious quantity of suspended floaty bits characteristic of that gemstone, but Mongozo Palmnut is very definitely amber. You'd almost expect to see a dino-blood-carrying mosquito in amongst the debris. It tastes pretty smooth, though, and carries the full weight of its 7.5% alcohol. Unfortunately there's not much else going on: no nuttiness or fruitiness, just vaguely acidic sour notes, like a lesser class of Rodenbach. I am none the wiser as to what palm nuts actually taste like. Strike two on the fruit quest.

Staying in the same range, my last offering is Mongozo Banana, and there is no shortage of fruit here. Two years ago I reviewed Banana Bread Beer and remarked how well-balanced its banana flavour was. Mongozo cares not for such subtlety: this beer presents a rampant banana dominating everything else. It's incredibly sweet, to the point of turning sour again, and only the soft fluffy texture stops it from being hard to drink. I have little doubt that every single person I know would hate this beer, but I have a soft spot for it. Bananas on the label; bananas on the palate; bananas out and proud. It makes up for the lack of fruit in my other two beers all on its own.

To sign off I'd like to give props to Greg over at Beer, Beats & Bites for hosting this Session and for choosing such a daring topic. Fruit beer has a very bad reputation among beer fans of my acquaintance, and I'm sure there were groans at keyboards across the beer blogging world when the topic was announced. But bunging fruit into beer is one major way of Keeping It Interesting, and for me that's a big part of what makes beer worthwhile. Oh, and if anyone's interested in my actual recommendations for good fruit beer, two very different ones are Früli and Cantillon's Lou Pepe Kriek: both Belgian, natch.

Goosey früht

For some reason kriek gets a bad rap from many serious beer fanatics. I am an unashamed kriek fan, however, and enjoy both the zesty fruity ones (Timmerman's, Liefmans) and the drier, more mature sort (Bellevue, Lou Pepe). Since the cherries are more of an add on (to make geuze more palatable), most kriek-makers also make a variety of other fruit-enhanced beers. Nobody, to my knowledge, does a range quite like Floris. The selection extends beyond fruit into honey, chocolate and cactus(!). Not surprisingly, these aren't all as delicately crafted as the beers of more specialised labels. Floris Kriek, for example, is a super-sweet syrupy kriek. The label boasts that 30% of it is macerated fruit. The underlying beer is rather rougher and fizzier than your typical Belgian lambic, giving the whole product a thrown-together feel. That's not to say it doesn't work as kriek, however: the cherry concentrate makes for a similar sensation to eating cherry pie. Just, if you are planning to reappraise your kriek opinion, don't start with this one.

Which brings me to la pièce de la résistance of the the Beerhall Challenge: Goose Island IPA. Well, it's not an IPA as I understand it, in the English vernacular. It's quite green tasting: hops comes right to the fore of the taste. It arrives via an explosion of fizz and flavour, and lasts right into the aftertaste. English beer has conditioned me to look for a complexity that this Yank doesn't have, but it's a damn good ale, and one you could drink quite a few of without feeling overstretched.

The other new beer from the challenge sheet is Früh, a German kölsch. My only experience of kölsch hitherto is that made by the Porterhouse, which I found just that bit too dry. Früh is better, though. It's dry but more subtly so, allowing more of the malt to come forward. Like the Goose Island, it's not terribly demanding and engineered to make you order another.

The Challenge continues...