Spontaneous (Plum)
Pen Druid Brewing in Sperryville, Virginia, United States 🇺🇸
Sour / Wild Beer - Flavoured Regular|
Score
7.11
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radagast83 (13601) reviewed Spontaneous (Plum) from Pen Druid Brewing 9 months ago
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 8
Draft, on tap at The Sovereign. Poured a deep peach-orange color color with a hazy appearance. Flavor was tart plums with a wild, funky, zippy edge. A juicy and fruited wild ale with bright, big acidity.
Alengrin (11675) reviewed Spontaneous (Plum) from Pen Druid Brewing 4 years ago
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7.5
The plum version in Pen Druid's series of 'Amlams', allegedly made with spontaneous fermentation; 75 cl bottle with cork received as an unexpected gift from my Virginian friends Morgan and Lauren, thank you so much guys! Egg-white, tiny-bubbled, dense, open ring of foam lacing in shreds but eventually dissolving into nothing, deep hazy peachy amber robe with 'cognac' hue. Aroma of plum peel and halfripe (still hard) blue plums, sawdust and dusty old bookshelves, crabapple, vague urine note, rosehip tea to even Roosvicée, oxidized apple peel, dried grapefruit zest somewhere, old sweaty leather, very old dry white wine, dandelion, unripe green tomato, raw rhubarb. Tart plum in the mouth indeed, like these small sour ones (or even mirabelles), more than the fleshiness I expect from ripe blue plums, even if there is still a clear plum sweetness in the core of this beer; plum peel and plum kernel tannins act astringently while aspects of dried apple peel, rosehip and wild cranberry travel along too, over a supple, lean body, with a slender bready 'soil' dried by plum and lactic tartness. Ends with very vague associations of cold rosehip tea, raspberry vinegar and wild apples, next to that persistent plum peel feeling; the rosehip factor even adds a certain 'metallicness', but in a natural kind of way. Some plum juiciness does remain in the end, over a dim, somewhat lemony but also lactic sourness which runs through the whole. 'Small halfripe plums' is the general fruit feeling I get here; otherwise the complexity and profundity of a true Belgian lambic is very clearly absent, which is not to say that this 'Amlam' lacks complexity. One day there will be fine lambic in many countries other than Belgium, but so far only Jester King's Spon from Texas and Vandenbroek's lambics from the Netherlands managed to imitate true Senne Valley lambic completely - or almost completely. Virginia still has a long way to go, but it must be said that this plum 'lambic' is well-structured, has no demonstrable flaws and sufficiently entertains, so I certainly enjoyed it (especially after bringing it home safely from a long night in Ghent's nightlife...). Big cheers to Morgan and Lauren!