Hazed golden in the glass and an ok head Fine intensity in the aroma Balanced sourness and acidity Gentle carbonated. Easy to drink. Pale malt, some vinegar, oak, citric, fruity and vinous flavor [Bottle at Drunken Chefs in Halden, Norway]

Copperblonde, coldhazed beer under a huge, just off-white head. Rodenbach yeaststamp, but sweetish, sweet-sour sauce, dried sultanas, old clothes, hay, lactic acid. Sweet-sour, raisins on balsamic, wet wood, lactic acid (no acetic!). Dried fruit on sour beer. Good carbonation, quite slick, medium bodied. Bit surprising - the classic Rodenbach acetic trace completely absent, but still very much in the Rodenbach style. Txs to Stef!

A new Rodenbach is not something one encounters every week, so this one, a blonde sour extensively aged in oak, sparked interest as soon as it was announced. Apparently it is a reinterpretation of a beer they made in the sixties and seventies called Saint-Georges, best viewed as an answer to the commercial success of Van Honsebrouck’s Saint-Louis ‘geuze’ since the late fifties; together with Jacobins by Bockor and the long forgotten Geuze Flandrine by Louwaege (defunct for more than two decades now), they constituted a specifically West-Flemish family of ‘lambicoid’ beers – made by blending with ‘real’ lambic from the Pajottenland at least originally, or created with microbial cultures taken from lambic and cultivated in their own barrels, sometimes blurring the boundaries with the ‘oud bruin’ variants they made (and still make). In any case these beers were intended to compete with the success of the ‘industrial’, pasteurized and sweetened lambic beers (‘capsulekensgeuze’ for instance) popularized by Belle-Vue and others around that time – only much later did some of them attempt to imitate the traditionally made lambics (Saint-Louis Fond Tradition being the foremost example). I unfortunately never had the original Saint-Georges by Rodenbach (I have only seen vintage glasses of it), but I imagine the new Evolved is also ‘evolved’ in the sense that it skips the filtering, pasteurisation and artificial sweetening the original probably underwent. Probably, because I have no verification of this so I would love to find out. Anyway, on to the bottle, shared with my girlfriend: moussey, off-white, fizzing head, breaking quickly and dissolving in the end, over a misty peach blonde beer with deep old-golden tinge. Aroma of old storage apples, oxidized white wine, wet leather, kefir, unsugared yellow fruit yoghurt, some wet wood, young sherry, pickled gherkins, dust, cream of tartar or even wet clay, persimmon, sweat. Begins very fruity in the mouth, brightly so even with tart green apple, sour grape, halfripe yellow plum and a sweeter peach note accompanied by a soft minerally carbonation and a smooth, increasingly vinous mouthfeel. ‘Yellow-green’ fruitiness is carried onwards over a sender yoghurty lactic tartness and sweetish pale malts underneath, adorned with a distinct minerally accent (wet clay) and hints of soft woodiness in the finish; old white wine, cider, persimmon and apricot impressions linger at the back, topped off with a slight leathery (Brett) funkiness. All the way at the back, a very brief and volatile note of underlying hop bitterness shows up. Very fruity, bright sour ale of sorts, actually far removed from the ‘capsulekensgeuze’ in old West-Flemish style I was fearing a bit based on its premise – but times have long changed of course, and in fact we are closer to Bavik’s classic Petrus Aged Pale or even Alvinne’s Phi (and other blonde sours) territory here. Given how this Evolved was made, it could perhaps do with a tad more maturity, woodiness and depth, but I am not complaining: this was a gently tart, bright and elegant sour I can certainly recommend.