Quetsche - Draft Version (5.3%)

Tap at Moeder Lambic Fontainas, 7th June 17. Pours a lovely light strawberry colour. Aroma is tart fruit, plums, pith, vineous fruit. Taste is tart unripe plum, yeast, fruit, sour, slight malt sour finish. Excellent and refreshing.

200 ml. draft (obv.) @ brewery during Tour de Geuze 2017. Man this beer looks pretty. Hazy pink plum / red fruit juice with basically no head. Nose is lactic, bit watery, appears to be basically a flat fruit lambiek, Vitamin C sour, sour low vinegar, lemon. Fruit is low way in the back, lemon dominates, watery, lemon juicy, low acidic fruit in the back,... Basically flat. Might have hoped for a bigger classical fruit character. This is just so refreshing, tasty, fun to drink, especially outside on such a beautiful & sunny day as it was.

At Tilquin’s premises during Toer de Geuze. Lighter ’draft’ version of the meanwhile famous Oude Quetsche, so a flat plum lambic, basically. A disparate, very loose rim of volatile off-white and quickly disappearing bubbles on a deep, beautiful coral-coloured, equally cloudy beer with warm, almost salmon pink hue - a beauty. Aroma breathes a ton of fresh fruit: actual yellow plum juice, but also impressions of pink raspberries and tomato juice, subtler hints of hay, unsugared yoghurt, wet leather, grape seeds - in all, the fruit reigns supreme here, with the lambic funkiness remaining very subtle, probably not fully developed yet as this is obviously a young, fresh sample. The same overload of fresh fruit in the mouth: plum juice alright, but not sweet, plum skins as well adding a beautiful wryness, unripe nectarine and green gooseberry accents; sour from the start but not too much puckering ’vinegar’ acidity, it is a dry lactic tartness that dominates here, reinforced by the natural acidity and wryness of the fruit, with the latter more expressive than the first. Flat carbo, supple and light body, a wheat basis underneath providing some background sourishness but a mildly bready barley presence too, both buried underneath this ongoing fruit and lactic tartness; the wryness increases in the end, with tannins from both wood and plum stones I suppose, almost grape skin-like, while a deeply situated, earthy hop presence provides late but notable ’end bitterness’ in the dim kind of way that is to be expected from a lambic; still it is the fruit juiciness and tartness that keeps flooding the palate till deep into the throat. One that heavily relies on a very generous dosis of fruit, in this case plums or ’kwetsen’ (an old name for an old plum type), ideal for a spring afternoon like this one and hugely quenching, with the lambic character remaining a bit subdued. I prefer the bottled Oude Quetsche, but this was surely delicious, have an extra point for sheer fruitiness.