Not out of production. 2018 vintage but bottled 10/07/24. 330 ml bottle. Pours a dull copper with light head. Aromas of green oak, vinous wood, lime zest and sharp wheaty malts. Flavors of buttery oak, grapes, lemons, caramel, and toasted malts. Soft. Slight tart and slightly creamy at same time. Very good

Syphon, kindly provided by Carlo and Urbain @ LCRBM 2008. I couldn’t get my nose out of the glass. Sherry notes in the very vinous aroma. Malty, sweetish, amazingly complex flavor. A slight sourness. Oak, laurel, cherry, mustard, butter. Tough to describe the multiple layers of flavors and aroma’s. Just in one word: WOW! At the 1st BBF @ De Molen I had the possibility to taste another sample. A bit mouldy perhaps, but this beer was again superb!

Backlog. Handbottled. Murky/hazy yellow with a brief white fizz. Quite flat. Super funky with citrus, caramel, wet grass, light fruit and some spices. Very complex and only a tad oxidized. Really cool to have tried this!

Old tick at Alvinne fest.

The legendary Dirty Horse, the first Struise beer ever (at least of the ones that made it to the market), with a complex history, as is usually the case with Struise classics: apparently originally a spontaneously fermented beer - so a lambic, even respecting the classic composition of lambic grist, aged in sherry barrels and macerated with Noorderkriek cherries - brewed in 1983, decades before Struise went 'commercial', then followed by a few blends that incorporated portions of this one original brew (I had the 2005 one at a beer festival back then) and now reprised, following the exact same production method. My rating here exclusively concerns this new batch (2018 vintage), which does not contain any cherries and could therefore be regarded as "Dirty Horse blonde", to make it easy; for the 2005 batch which still contained a portion of that legendary first batch from 1983, see the corresponding entry. Thin and open, off-white ring of tiny bubbles around the edge of the glass, but not 'head' to speak of; lightly hazed peach blonde robe with 'old golden' glow. Aroma of old dry sherry (and actual old lambic), old wet oak wood, unripe nectarine, wild apple, purple gooseberry, halfripe red plum, musty cellar, haystack, farm-made buttermilk, kefir, apple vinegar, sweat, orange wine, bergamot, fermenting forest leaves. Very estery onset, indeed notably lambic-like, filled with yellow plum, gooseberry, crabapple and rhubarb notes, very tart but nowhere agressively acidic; a more sedate lactic buttermilk-like sourness takes over and carries all that fruitiness onwards, albeit it with a general feeling of preserved fruit rather than fresh (as in, indeed, an old lambic). Close to flat in terms of carbonation, this Dirty Horse 'Blonde' presents a very vinous mouthfeel, becoming a tad astringent in the end; bread-crusty malts support a structure of oxidized white wine, lactic yoghurty tartness, preserved yellow fruit and eventually wet oak wood, all culminating in a rich and complex, long, flavourful finish further coloured by a considerable amount of old red wine aspects, both in aroma and in taste, coming across - in combination with the strong oxidation effects of the beer itself - as remarkably sherry-like. I guess I have to draw the same conclusion here that I drew twenty years ago upon sampling that 2005 blended version, which consisted mostly (90% according to this site) of that near mythical first batch: this comes eerily close to the real thing indeed. Had I tasted this blind, I would have identified it as an aged (unblended) lambic - which is essentially what it is. I am still as childishly surprised as I was back then by learning that those typical features of Senne Valley lambic can be achieved by spontaneous fermentation in West-Flanders as well, and who knows where else. Let us skip the philosophical and zytho-historical consequences of this thought and conclude that Struise, now facing difficult times and halving their production out of economic necessity, deserves its status as one of the great pioneers of U.S. style craft beer in Europe, in the ranks of Nøgne Ø, BrewDog, Thornbridge, De Molen and others. This 'cherryless' version of one of their most legendary beers, also already brewed seven years ago at this time, is a direct echo of their earliest work, without any shortcuts or alterations - indeed this beer brings me straight back to those exciting days when they, and others, first stormed the (then) sleepy European beer scene. A beer that can elicit sentiments like that must truly be a great beer.