Bottle. Color: Hazy golden, white head. Aroma: Strong horse manure funk, tart apricot notes. Taste: Horse stable funk, oak wood, fruity unripe apricot, apricot skin. Tannins. Moderate to over moderate tart. Medium body, below avergae carbonation. Long astringent finish. Nice.

A new one in Tilquin's vast fruit lambic range that made it from experimental and unblended beginnings into bottled and refermented 'official' form, with 230 gram of apricots per liter. Quite thick and frothy, egg-white, irregularly edged but dense, plastery lacing, firm head on a cloudy apricot blonde robe with deeper, warm orangey tinge. Aroma of indeed apricots but not overwhelmingly so and more unripe and sour than ripe and sweet, embedded in lemon juice, farmland, old wood, unripe mandarin, raw rhubarb, green apples or even raw quince, green gooseberries, sourdough, kefir, damp earth (even light manure warming up), spring blossom hint, giant hogweed juice, sheep's sorrel, clay, apricot vinegar. Crisp, acidic onset, sharp lemony sourness combining the lambic's own acids with the natural astringency of the apricots - which in this case, as orthonasal perception already announced, taste more of unripe, hard and sour apricots than sweet ripe apricots (which I coincidentally had yesterday); lots of sharp green plum, unripe pear and gooseberry effects, with the sourness of the apricot being hard to distinguish from the lambic itself. The sourness is also enhanced by crisp, lively carbonation, moving through a supple bready core buried under pronounced yet fruity lactic acidity and ongoing fruit acidity, developing complexity when woody tannins set in, no doubt in themselves enhanced by tannins from the fruit (kernels). Light flowery notes appear at the end with a spring-like feel to them, very likely connected to the apricots, but earthy and farmland-ish funkiness is present as well. The unripe stonefruit and lemon sourness continues well into the finish, but mitigating sweetness from ripe apricots remains all but absent - keeping this lambic firmly on the lemony edge, but in a crisp, pleasantly astringent, juicy and refreshing way, without turning vinegary. Quite a sharp, astringent fruit lambic, but bright and colourful too - but I would have welcomed a bit more fructose sweetness underneath it all, just to soften everything a bit and put more emphasis on the fruit, which does not fully open its typical flavours here. Solid for sure, as usual from Tilquin, but this producer has more captivating fruit lambics in his range, in my opinion.