Pours unclear blonde, small white head. Smell is lemony, tart, sweaty. Taste is sharp, dry, lemonsour. Arteficial. Not a geuze, what a joke.

Pale blond with light haze. Aroma and flavour are very tart and lemony. For tartness this is decent stuff. Misses a little bit of rounded woodiness in the aftertaste. Otherwise it's good.

23 February 2019. (Tasting formerly known as) RBBWG. Cheers to all, thanks Kraddel for the hospitality! Vintage 2018. Hazy pale yellow with a very thin, frothy, white head. Aroma of oak, vinegar, lactic acid, green apple, cheese, hay, grass, leather, lemon peel, bread. Taste is medium to heavy funky sour, quite lemony & vinegary, next to sourdough & lactic acid, some unripe fruit notes in the back with apple, apricot, even orange, supported by grassy & woody bitter touches. Dry, tart, almost mouth-puckering finish, more vinegar, cheese, wood. Medium body, oily texture, fizzy carbonation. Not bad all in all.

23/02/2019 - 75 cl botte shared on BBGG @Kraddel's place Cloudy straw yellow, no head. Nose has lemon, bit grain. Taste is lemon, hay, sour with a sweet touch but more sour than expected.

Sample from bottle @ tasting formerly know as RBBWG 2019. F: big, white, quick gone. C: pale gold, hazy. A: sour fruity, barnyard, woody, funky, lemon, apple vinegar touch. T: sour fruity, woody, barnyard, funky, bit puckering, lemony, medium body and carbonation, not that bad actually.

Imported from my RateBeer account as Belle-Vue Sélection Lambic Oude Gueuze (by Belle-Vue (AB InBev)):
Aroma: 5/10, Appearance: 2/5, Taste: 6/10, Palate: 2/5, Overall: 10/20, MyTotalScore: 2.5/5

23/II/19 - 75cl bottle @ 1st Belgian Beer Geek Gathering (formerly known as Belgian Ratebeer Gathering), BB: n/a - (2019-266) Thanks to 77ships for sharing the beer!
Pretty clear pale beige beer, no head. No HEAD! Aroma: spicy, weird, funky, herbal. MF: low carbon, medium to light body. Taste: very acidic start, lots of lemon juice, little bitter, some tannins, brett touch. Not too bad. But not a geuze in my book. Aftertaste: acidic, lemon juice, acidic, very one dimensional.

Bottle from Bierhalle, Melle. Hazy yellow/amber colour, creamy foam. Nose of lemon, tart fruit, vinegar. Notes of wood, cellar and funk. Taste is rather tart, rather unbalanced but absolutely not a bad gueuze.

Well, here we are then: the world's largest macro brewing company having noticed the lambic revival, opportunistically resuscitating their famed Belle-Vue Sélection Lambic from the nineties, when AB InBev didn't even exist yet and was simply Interbrew. Now from a green bottle with cork and muselet, bearing transparent stickers as labels, and a bit higher in ABV than the original version, the gargantuan monster Interbrew became after the mergers with first AmBev and later Anheuser-Busch apparently wants to butter up the more discerning beer lover - and make money out of him. After that weird Kriek attempt, launched already a while ago, I was very suspicious about this one, to say the least… Allegedly made from 'different' vintages of Belle-Vue lambic, a mysterious brew that is certainly not made the traditional way but inoculated by means of what is sometimes referred to as the DKZ method (fresh lambic being inoculated by insterile air that is pushed in the tanks, and further blended with old lambic); the bottle, however, fails to mention the age of said lambics, which is clearly an ominous sign. Opens with a bang, but nothing abnormal so far. Egg-white, regular but very loose head, audibly fizzing away like the head on a glass of coke in instants and reduced to literally nothing, so that the whole looks like a glass of unblended lambic in a matter of seconds, all the more so because even with very slow pouring, the content is hazy - albeit with small 'uprises' of minute bubbles, in a straw-hued apricot blonde robe. Aroma, though less strong and expressive than it ought to be for the intended style, is still surprisingly less artificial and more convincing than I was fearing: old lemon juice or even old and stale home made lemonade, some apple vinegar, old books, damp haystack, unripe yellow plum, strong chalky aspect, soggy bread, old socks, vague background hints of Napoléon lemon candy and even an echo of (artificial) orange, baking soda, grass silage. Sour onset, raw rhubarb-like (oxalic acid) with a sharpishly acidic edge, old apples, unripe white grapes, still with a very, very vague apricot-like sweetish touch hidden deep within; carbonation is softish, but fit for the style. Supple bready and clearly very wheaty 'soil' dried by a long stretch of sharpish lactic sourness, notably yoghurty with even a very pronounced baking soda- or talcum-like aspect which becomes bothersome in the end. This talcum-like mineral aspect helps the sourness to dry the finish to a very high degree, while a whiff of stale urine rises up retronasally; soggy breadiness remains, while any hop bitterness from old hops, as would be custom in a traditional lambic, remains very hard to detect. Lemony and raw rhubarb stem-like aspects linger. The sensitive ideological issues surrounding AB InBev's reputation and position in the eye of the average craft beer geek aside, as well as the fact that this is clearly an attempt to cash in on the current lambic rage, I must admit that I was expecting much worse; like that Kriek version, I assumed to get something that wasn't going to smell or taste much like lambic at all. But there was never a Belle-Vue Sélection Lambic Kriek in the past, whereas this version obviously did have a precedent, which I have tasted on several occasions but admittedly many years ago; this resumption does seem to approach the original in certain respects, though I hasten to add that compared with the established geuzes from the small producers, this makes a somewhat clumsy impression, there is something 'fishy' and 'sneakily' artificial about it which I cannot quite put my finger on yet, and it obviously shows a far less 'deepened', less complex and mature character. In all: not a top class 'oude geuze' and none expected, but still a lot better than expected at the same time - which probably doesn't mean a lot considering I had almost no expectations at all. I will ignore AB InBev's arrogance in pretending they can simply create a traditional geuze whenever they feel like it - but admittedly their claim to fame in this field is more successful than I was anticipating. Scoring this is an exercise in impartiality, but this is far less of a failure than that Kriek version and even if this geuze doesn't even come close to the 'standards' set by the likes of Cantillon, 3 Fonteinen, Girardin and others, not even achieving the same quality level as its own past, I cannot but give it a higher score than its Kriek counterpart. Very curious to see what other experienced lambic lovers will think of this one - and whether they will be able to judge this for what it is, not taking into account the capitalist monstrosity of a company that made it.