Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 8.5 | Flavor - 9 | Texture - 10 | Overall - 8.5

Oud Beersel has their lambic days every year in September, but this year's edition is special as they have an anniversary to celebrate: exactly twenty years ago, Bersalis was launched by the then-new owners of the brewery, Gert Christiaens and Roland De Bus, the starting shot of the renewed Oud Beersel that brought back the lambics once produced by the Vandervelden family. I still remember the original geuze and kriek by Vandervelden, as well as I remember regretting the closure of the brewery (now only blendery) and the launch of Bersalis - I guess it is fair to say that the Oud Beersel name has been accompanying my beer explorations for two and a half decades now and I am still a fan. So if they have something to celebrate and bring out new products for the occasion (three new geuzes in this case), I just have to have them - beginning with this one, a geuze made from lambics in which cherry wood was soaked, actual literal cherry wood that is, cut from their own Schaarbeekse kriek-trees; in that sense this is the logical extension of the cherry wood lambic they made earlier this year (and which I still have to taste). From the trusted 75 cl bottle with stickered transparent label, cork and muselet. Some brief initial gushing, as from a bottle of champagne that has been shaken - actually contributing to the celebrational character of the bottle in this particular case... Medium thick, snow white, tiny-bubbled and quite dense, slowly opening yet generally well-retaining head on a misty apricot blonde robe with very faint (salmon-)rosy tinge and strings of fierce sparkling everywhere. Aroma of very pronounced dry wood or dry tree branches - a bit more so than usual in Oud Beersel geuze variants and doubtlessly the result of the barrels combining with the rose wood prunings, lots of green apple, lemon pith, old dried grapefruit peel, unripe plum, petrichor and hot sandstone getting wet, Bretty horseblanket, haystack, dry farmland during a heatwave, apricot kernels, dried bitter weeds (hawkweed and the like), withered grass, vague touch of cherry sweetishness at first - when opening the bottle - but utterly volatile and probably autosuggested. Crisp, dry onset, a tad lemony-puckering at first but quickly shifting to a more wry-ish tartness of unripe green stonefruit and citrus peel, with side notes of green apple and sour berries; high effervescence as befits a geuze, with a nice line of minerality throughout a bread-crusty, dry backbone, upon which very recognisable Bretty 'horseblanket' funkiness is built, in the end further dried by strong woody tannins - more so, again, than regular, or so at least it seems. Something perfumey does pass by retronasally - amidst the funk - but it is hard to pinpoint and even hard to describe, 'fruity' (like the expected 'almondiness') is not the right word, 'herbal' is too vague, but in any case it must be linked to the cherry wood. Perhaps a comparison with black Japanese sakura tea is possible, but without the smokiness - and only as a very subtle, ephemeral whiff. Pleasantly (old hop) bittering in the finish, just a tad earthy and dandelion-ish, but well-connected with the woodiness and the lingering green-tart fruitiness that keeps everything alive, spritzy and brightly lit. Oud Beersel has more often than not blown me away with their geuzes: to me, they are still hugely underrated in comparison with a few other traditional lambic producers, but I maintain that they are perhaps the most refined, precise and sophisticated geuze blenders around today. This one too, though keeping its cherry wood infusion subtle enough to keep it interesting - you have to go searching for it, but search and you will easily find it - bundles so much skill, elegance and crystalline perfection that it can, to me personally at least, be justly called a celebration of two decades of passion in the field. Absolutely great geuze - yet another one in this producer's impressive track record.