I thought I might be a little sneaky and steal a march on The Beer Nut and Laura who will doubtless post very soon about their trip to the Cantillon Brewery by cracking open my single bottle of Cantillon Gueuze before they make it to print. This bottle has hung around in my cupboard since the now legendary ICB trip to Copenhagen for the European Beer Festival. I grabbed the bottle eagerly when I saw it on the shelf knowing full well that it is not available in Ireland and likely will not be for quite some time.I love tart/tangy things. You know those fizzy cola bottles and other teeth rotting type tangy nasties? Those are my preference when it comes to sweets. In fact I love vinegar. I enjoy it on salads in various guises and I adore the acetic vapours that stream from a bag of steaming chips fresh from the chip shop. With this in mind it should be little wonder that I really get off on Lambic beers and this one in particular really hits the spot. It is almost acetic in its intensity with a wonderful lip smacking acidity that cuts through everything and lingers, tingling on the sides of the tongue for an age after the mouthful. I have tried other Lambic style ales over the years but this one fully delivers in a way that the tamer ones do not. The only beer I have tried that surpasses this for outright acidity is Stevns CCC from Norrebro Bryghus in Copenhagen which was uncompromising in its intensity and left even me pulling very funny faces.
I am always left a little perplexed by lambic because it contains flavours that I adore but at the same time signal death to any of my home brewed beers. I marvel at the cocktail of micro fauna that contribute to the incredibly intense and complex flavours in these beers, yet render them so enjoyable. Perhaps I'll swab down The Beer Nut next I meet him in the hope that some of the resident house yeast from Cantillion has ensconced itself upon his person and I might culture it here in The Black Cat Brewery and brew some of this tangfastic beer for myself.
9 comments:
All the good stuff is under the love handles. Ooooh yeah.
TBN, you have just ruined the lovely images of cola bottles and vinegar I was building in my little head.
I wanna try that stuff Thom. The closest I can get here is bloody Berliner Weisse (neat of course). Not a patch on the real sour deal.
There are increasing rumblings on ICB about making up a lambic. It could be like the doubles where everyone makes them at the same time. Or the american way of everyone brews one day then throws it in one barrel. That sounds like communist beer to me though
^^^^^^^
Word from the Chief Rumbler.
If anyone's interested there's space for a decent-sized cool ship in my attic. Shall we see if Homebrew Company can source one?
My attic also, incidentally, contains 4.75 litres of Cantillon Gueuze. But they all belong to my missus and she'd have my nuts for a necklace if I so much as looked at them speculatively.
Cantillon have a little wood burning stove heating the seating area of the brewery and actually burn staves from barrels deemed beyond repair. During our visit I suggested the possibility of rescuing one or two of these staves (TheBeerNut volunteered his bag), to give the resident micro flora a new home in one of Dublin's fine polypropylene buckets, but an industrious brewery worker decided to throw the remaining wood from the pile into the stove before the escape committee had agreed on a plan of action.
Now that would have been something!
I still think Séan smuggled out one of those staves when we weren't looking.
Did you ever have hi-sour sweets when you were a kid? My parents ran the best sweet shop for miles so I spent my youth eating all sorts of rubbish. Anyway hi-sours were a sweet with an incredibly sour coating which then changed to a sour apple flavoured sweet with a bit of sweetness. Cantillon gueuze reminds me of hi-sours.
I remember hi sours. Tiny sweets so sour they came individually wrapped? Gorgeous.
I taste almost all beers, but i steel like to taste more and more!!
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