Nordic Dream

Special and very limited fruit lambic created at Hanssens with equal parts raspberries, strawberries and cloudberries on the initiative of Jens Skrubbe, whom I have known for two decades - and whom I have to thank for reserving at bottle to pair with the köttbullar at Pressklubben. Eggwhite, moussey, thick and firm, frothy head slowly receding over an initially clear, warm orangey golden beer, shifting to a misty peach further on. Radiantly fruity aroma of pronounced strawberry and bursting ripe yellow raspberries, cloudberries being related to raspberries are a bit lost in this but there is a wild blackberry juice-like effect I think can be ascribed to them, preserved lemon, unripe nectarine, stewed rhubarb, wet wood, sour cream, pickled apricot, barnyard, dry earth, wild apple. Tart, juicy, utterly fruity onset radiating with ripe yellow raspberry - and I guess cloudberry, very hard to identify against the raspberry especially when aromatically speaking, both are also dominated by the strawberry, which (as usual) provides little colour or body but lots of (sweet-fruity) aroma; side notes of rhubarb, green apple and unripe nectarine position this stream of almost sweet, ripe berry fruitiness through a minerally sparkling, smooth-bready and sour-creamy lactic middle, as in sour fruit yoghurt, in the end backed by woody tannins and light but noble 'wild' Brett elements (damp hay, sweaty funk). A lemony sour streak lingers in the finish but nothing of the sometimes dreaded sharp acidity often associated with Hanssens, at least in recent years, is to be found; instead, the lemony, sour-creamy and sweaty-funky character brings me back to the Hanssens lambics I remember fondly from two and a half decades ago - when Cantillon or De Cam were actually sharper and more acrid than Hanssens... Granted, using equal parts of three fruits which are not equal in aromatic strength was probably not the best idea: both orthonasally and retronasally the strawberries are quite dominant, albeit in a very elegant and bright way, while the raspberries are less obvious and the rare, delicate and expensive cloudberry, the one actually justifying the 'Nordic' moniker, remains largely eclipsed. That said, though, cloudberries are probably difficult to distinguish from raspberries in a fruit lambic anyway - for all I know, the 'raspberry part' of the aroma here could be half due to those cloudberries too. In the end and seen as a whole, this to me was an absolutely stunning, bright, almost 'summery' fruit lambic and one I enjoyed very much as an apéritif even if it was at an hour when the Swedish apparently deem it inappropriate to order alcohol with your food... In all, a true gem, and one of the best Hanssens lambics I had in a long time.