Oude Geuze blend 001

After some first and interesting dabblings in fruit lambic, newcomer Odilon, operating in a former brewery building since 2024, took on the inevitable geuze challenge last autumn with this first batch. Odilon does not brew its own lambics but buys the wort from established breweries in the region - but which ones is not disclosed to the public, sadly. Thick and frothy, egg-white, dense, regular, stable head on an initially near clear, warm apricot-golden robe with almost salmon-pinkish tinge and a beautiful column of well-organised, steady, champagne-like sparkling rising up majestically; turns misty and a tad more peachy further on. Aroma of dried out lemon peel, old books, dry hay, green plum, oxidised Sauvignon Blanc, freshly cut sorrel, young birch leaves, green apple core, raw Kohlrabi, petrichor, light barnyard funk, faint background hints of rubber and chlorine. Crisp, tart onset, unripe stonefruit (à la Boon) mingled with green apple, cucumber and a sharper lemony sourness, but nowhere acrid; minerally effervescence, yet perhaps a tad less lively than average for the style (still adequate enough though). Rounded mouthfeel, bread-crusty backbone, drying lactic acidity with green apple-ish fruitiness and ongoing astringent green plum effects, joined by ornaments of Brett-induced funkiness (urine, damp hay) and old wet wood. Meanwhile, underneath it all, creeps a deeply buried old hop bitter element, which provides further body to the finish, reinforcing the drying effect of the acids and the tannins of the wood - and, in the very end, even providing a brief wormwood-like flavour. I think this blend consists of (older) Boon and (likely) the more streamlined Lindemans or Girardin, spiked with a shot of De Troch because of the bitter 'vegetal' element to it, but that is anyone's guess but the blender's I suppose - I would be a lot more enthusiastic had he provided more details concerning the composition of his first geuze, not only in the origin of the wort, but also the ages of the lambics and their proportions. This lack of disclosure aside, I think for a first attempt (at least 'commercially'), this is not a bad geuze at all: it is far from the most refined examples of the style I had and therefore far from world class, but it has all the features required by the genre, perhaps lacking a bit in depth and complexity, perhaps needing a tad more effervescence, vinosity and sour-fruitiness, but nevertheless flawlessly delivering what any regular geuze drinker expects - and doing a better job at that than some other first attempts made in the past years by other new generation lambic blenders, I must add. I enjoyed this one quite a lot.