This Belgian beer is something special. It’s a Gueuze, which is a blend of lambic beers. These are made by spontaneous fermentations, and are naturally quite sour in taste. Brewery website is here.
It’s very much a wine-lovers beer. It’s completely dry, and on the back label it suggests that this beer can be kept for two decades.
Interestingly, the beer is sealed with a cork as well as a crown cap. This helps make it more ageable, as the crown cap liners allow more oxygen transmission than a cork would. Indeed, this reminds me of an old Yalumba wine from the 1970s that I had, which had a cork plus a screwcap!
Cantillon Gueuze 100% Lambic Bio
5% alcohol. Beautiful stuff, with amazing acidity. Very dry but with some fruit sweetness: notes of grapefruit and citrus, as well as subtle malt and nut richness. Apple notes, too. Precise with a fine mousse. Complex, edgy and intriguing, but not difficult to drink. Very wine like. 9.5/10
Hello Jamie
It takes a while to develop a taste for Lambic; I admit that I dumped the first Cantillon I bought down the sink thinking it was skunked… 🙂 I now love the stuff.
I don’t follow you comment on the crown cap liners. I am not aware of any gas “transmission” in corks (except when they are defective), and there is none in screw cap liners either. If it were otherwise, crown caps would not be used on Champagne bottles during their three years spent in secondary fermentation and maturing (under pressure!), and after disgorgement and corking they would lose their pressure rapidly.
Also, if gas transmission could happen for molecules of that size, in the case of Champagne or Lambic, which are under pressure, it would be from the bottle outward, and it would not be limited to oxygen, nitrogen and CO2 would escape too (all three have similar molecular diameter).
Or did I miss something?
cheers and Happy NY
Mike
Sounds delicious, Jamie. I love beers like this. Any UK distribution that you know of?
Also, I notice you score is /10 rather than your usual /100 for wines. Any particular reasoning behind scoring beer differently from wine?
Apparently http://www.utobeer.co.uk/ do it
10 point scale seems sensible
100 point scale is a bit silly but it’s now the standard for wine