Description
This beer expresses the characteristic sourness of lambic without being forbiddingly sour, sweetening the pill not with sugar but with careful blending of aged beers to produce a flavour of great subtlety and complexity, and the unusually high gravity makes for a full-bodied and satisfying quality rather than a noticeably alcoholic kick. The aroma is very restrained, though there is a little clean grain and some wet woody notes. The taste is initially dry and sour in the invigorating lambic fashion, but soon softens, maintaining the sour kick but mixing it with distinct fruity, spicy and slightly sugary-sweet flavours: pears, lemons, kumquats, wood, vanilla and light spicy tastes including cloves dance against a full, rich body. In the finish the beer shows that salty, tangy, slightly dank character that some lambics share with fine dry sherries, the result of long maturation in wood in the company of a menagerie of microorganisms, and at the very end of the long finish, a last blast of oaky vanilla flavour emerges
