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.

Parting shots

I spent my last evening in Cyprus milling around on my own in Larnaca. In amongst the blaring seafront bars competing with each other for the cheapest Keo, and sandwiched between the golden arches and an ersatz-Scandinavian ice-cream chain, is a bar/restaurant called The Brewery, decked out with breweriana and decommissioned brewing kit with four house beers on tap.

It's not a microbrewery, however, and gives no indications (in English, at least) of the beers' origins. I have my suspicions, though, on which more later. What they're definitely not doing is competing on price with the neighbours: 33cl of each beer costs at least €5 a throw. Should you be so inclined, you can get them in measures up to three litres in a table tap, and there are also two self-service bars which can be reserved in a designated area. The non-draught selection is largely canned rubbish like John Smith's, Caffrey's and Guinness, plus bottled lagers like Warsteiner, Sol and Bud. From what I saw, none of the beers is as popular as the iced coffee drinks and fruit cocktails which formed the vast majority of drinks sold.

The house beer that interested me most was their Dark Lager. This reminded me a lot of a Czech granát: good dry, roasted grain notes though with just a touch of sourness on the end. The addition of some nitrogen into the gas mix gives it a fluffy head more like a wheat beer.

I was expecting a wheat beer to be the base of the Cherry beer, but it really really tasted and felt like a lambic to me. It's sweet and very slightly syrupy but, tempered by the underlying hint of sourness, that isn't a problem. The result is balanced and pleasant; tasty and refreshing -- very reminiscent of some of Belgium's lighter krieks, like Mort Subite and Timmerman's. Though while the taste may be Belgian, the price is positively Norwegian, at €6 for a 25cl glass.

The commercial parallels continued with the Lager: a very pale clear yellow with none of the graininess I enjoy in standard microbrewed lager. Instead it has a very Germanic hops-malt balance and really could be any of a number of pale lagers from big German breweries who know how to make it properly. Could it be a rebadge? Could they all be rebadges, in fact?

With this in mind I finished the set with the Wheat beer. Greenish-yellow, lemon-perfume notes and some isoamyl under it all. If you'd told me it was Hoegaarden I'd have believed it without question. The only thing that stops me announcing that these are all simply macrobrews in disguise is the advertised strengths: 5.3% for the Dark Lager; 4.5% for the Cherry, 4.8% for the Lager and 5.3% for the Wheat. This, if truthful, doesn't tie in with any easily-grouped bunch of mass produced beers from, say, InBev. The mystery remains, and my preference for knowing where my beer comes from means that's not a good thing, especially at these prices.

The Brewery is loud, crowded, insanely dear and with poor service. It's still probably the best bar in Larnaca, however.

Feels good to be home.

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...

Sour times

A La Bécasse in Brussels is one of my favourite bars in the world. Their Lambic Doux is a very fine beer, being a sweet version of Brussels's bitter local speciality. I happened across a kriek being sold under their brand recently and decided to give it a go. I'm a big fan of kriek, in its sweet to medium-sweet incarnations. Liefmans is the benchmark, with honourable mentions for Bellevue and Timmerman's. I was expecting something similar from La Bécasse. I was wrong. While there is no doubt that Bécasse kriek wears its ripe cherries up front, at heart it is an unreconstructed, down home sour Brussels gueuze. The contrast in the flavour is remarkable and is unique as far as I know. Despite being made by monster brewer InBev, this stuff couldn't be more Brussels if it tried and is well worth sampling if you can find it.