Bottle. Hazy golden color with white head. Aroma is big leafy, flowery, fresh spring meadow. Taste is lieblich, not too dry, good juiciness and flowers. Oily mouthfeel, soft carbonation. Tasty!

Bottle, bottled 23/09/2020 and released april 2023. Color: Hazy golden, white head. Aroma: Tart, hay, subtle funk, citrus hints. Taste: Moderate to over moderate tart, light sweetness, floral / grassy / herbal, grapefruit and sour green apple notes, hay, wood. Hints of old hop. A little greasy. Medium body, just below average carbonation. Quite smooth, even a bit foamy mouthfeel. Subtle rural funk. Very well balanced. Nice new release.

The 'fruition', so to speak, of an earlier experiment involving unblended lambic flavoured with olive tree leaves, namely the bottled and refermented version, fitting in the new 'Sparkling' series by Oud Beersel. Very thick and foamy, egg-white, dense and firm, 'geuze-like', plastery lacing head crowning an initially misty apricot blonde robe with ochre-yellow tinge - and a tornado of, indeed, extremely active sparkling raging through, a more beautiful and stormy whirlwind I never saw in any drink, sparkling wines included; turns into a deeper clouded orange blonde further on, with small dots of, perhaps, olive leaf fragments near the bottom... Aroma of dried grapefruit peel, old lemon zest, lots of dry wood, old bookshelves, dry haystack, hard green plums, white pepper, lots of herbality from the olive leaves (strongly reminiscent of young bayleaf but also green tea, black olive, larch), grass silage, dandelion, unripe apricots, dusty attic, something camphor-ish faraway in the background but this is probably from the olive leaves again. Dry, crisp onset, some unripe apricot surrounded by astringent green plum, lemon peel and small wry crabapples, very spritzy effervescence as expected - refined, but still so 'stormy' that it dominates for a moment, adding minerality and accentuating the sourness, which remains altogether 'mals', quickly shifting to a deeper, 'woodier' lactic tartness, piercing through it all and severely drying a bready core adorned with powerful woody tannins. The tannic effect, however, is amplified by the olive leaves, I can feel the alkaloids contracting my tastebuds - but in the greater context, they bring a bitterness in a citrus pith- and dark tree leaf-like way matching well with the wood and the lambic sours. Apart from that, the bayleaf- and green tea-like herbal effects remain strong retronasally, constantly reminding you that a special and powerful ingredient has indeed been generously applied. Ends dry to the bone, very tannic, bitter and woody, with that herbal effect lingering on for a long time, even becoming a tad tobacco leaf-like in the very end. Strongly flavoured indeed, more so even than the unblended version I had some time ago; I guess the maturation and the carbon dioxide only bring the herbal qualities of the olive leaves further to the foreground. Not an accessible lambic - surely not everyone, not even the casual geuze drinker, will be able to appreciate this and I am certain that many will find it too wry, but it is audacious, powerful and intelligent, aspects I can appreciate in any good beer, lambic or other. I love this series so far - each of the ones I tasted now, is brimming with character, but also takes a while to get used to, something many drinkers may not achieve. Fascinating.