At the MBR Sour Beer tasting. Thanks to whoever brought it! Dark amber body. Sugary aroma, figs. Extremely sugary taste, dust, figs. Eh. Way, waaay too sweet.

[9/20/15] Bottle on a park bench in Brussels. Clear golden with a white head. Grainy lager aroma with a vegetal hint. Sweet flavor, candy-ish, sugary, grainy, with some fruitiness and a faint tart hint. Light-bodied, kinda sticky. Pretty bad.

Timmermans’ take on the commercial bottled faro style, bottle from Fontana in Sint-Niklaas. Loose, milky, light greyish white, irregular head, thinning out quickly and lying on top of a cristal clear, amberish orange beer with tiny dots of dead yeast floating around everywhere. Weird and all but inviting aroma of raw barbecue sausages (probably from proteins), cooked chicken, mouldy mushrooms, nutmeg, cigarette tobacco, green asparagus, dried orange peel, old apple cake, caramel candy. Sugary onset, marmelade and even a lightly lemonade-like sensation, soft (even almost flat) carbo, citrus peel accent but very artificial, smooth caramelly backbone, no recognizable lambic complexity, nor any bitterness of any significance; thin mouthfeel. The weird umami-like meat and mushroom aromas return retronasally and the sugar sticks a bit in the throat, but fortunately not in an exaggerated way; caramel malt sweetness lingers as well. Artificial citrus effect has more to do with ascorbic acid than anything else, I suspect. A ’true’ faro is unfortunately a rare phenomenon these days - whereas it was the most consumed beer style in 19th-century Brussels - but these bottled ’lemonade’ interpretations, initiated by Lindemans, were never a good idea and will not help beer afficionados from abroad to appreciate the style. If you want authentic faro, go to Cantillon’s museum and ask for one. Avoid this kind of artificial sugary crap. This bottle was too old in the first place and probably hasn’t been kept in the best of circumstances, but I will not bother trying to find a fresh one, as it will have the same unpleasant sugary lemonade character and probably even more so than this old bottle. Unpleasant in more than one way - I hardly ever pour anything down the drain, but in this case, it did not take me a lot of time deciding its fate. My expectations of this were low to begin with, but this is actually a lot worse than expected.