Oude Geuze

This lambic comes from Belguim's Brouwerji Drie Fonteinen. It's a bottle conditioned blend of one, two and three year-old lambics aged in oak casks.

Lambics are the hippies of the beer world. Unfiltered and unpastuerized, lambics thrive on the growth of wild yeast and bacteria. In a sense, lambics are to beer what hippies are to people who shower on a regular schedule. The most common style of lambics are sweetened with fruit to make them more palatable to women. Geuze are unsweetened and only bring the funk.

Lambics are spontaneously fermented by wild yeast. The wort is left in open air over night where natural yeasts accumulate to do their thing. The beer these yeast turn out does not resemble beer in the usual sense, and many flavors strange to beer accumulate by their virtue.

Oude Geuze begins with a murky brownish-orange coloring. There's a mellow aroma with hints of cork, oak, funky sourness, and Bret (wild yeast). Perhaps there is a bit of unshowered hippy in there as well. This particular bottle was produced in January 2004 and the flavors have mellowed over time. Geuze are usually salivary gland pumping sour, the way a mouthful of vinegar would be. But the Oude Geuze, while sour, is not mouth puckeringly so. The flavor is sour in general and contains several elements I cannot even begin to describe. There are random jolts of anise, and a mellow barnyard funk. Oude Geuze culminates in a dry finish leaving a confused drinker scratching their head.