Box at Night of the Great Thirst. Variegated golden amber almost brown color, still. Nice aroma of funk and dust. Taste has soft sourness, moderate fruitiness, little sweetness, dry finish. Funkier and more interesting than others I've had.

There aren’t many faros around anymore and certainly not traditionally made ones – long gone are the days that men, women and children alike drank it by the gallons in and around Brussels. Traditionalist Oud Beersel, however, recently decided to add one to their range, made in the old way without any pasteurization or filtering like – most prominently – Lindemans has done for many years; and since this is a fully traditional faro, it is necessarily only available from tap, in this case at Billie’s Biercafetaria in Antwerp. Medium thick, egg-white, irregularly lacing head – I guess this must be the result of the added sugar having sparked some refermentation in the cask; lightly hazy, pure amber colour with deeper brownish-tinged copper hue, darker than the standard Oud Beersel lambic (or geuze), clearly the result of added brown sugar again. Lovely, full-blown lambic aroma, fermenting hay, overripe gooseberries, old sweat, plum juice, soaking wet wood, damp cellar, juice oozing out of a medium rare horse steak, old apples – notably funky in a vivid and clearly young way, and with hardly any additional sweetness noticeable. The taste follows the nose: crisp, sour and tart, lots of gooseberry and unripe stonefruit, lots of fermenting grape with again only a very light candi sugar sweetness to it, adding a thin caramelly layer to a wealth of lambic funkiness and dryness; bready basis, dried by lactic and fruit-acidic sourness. Sweaty, barnyard-like Brett retronasally, sour and dry finish, mild woody notes, the proverbial horseblanket dominating with only a minimal touch of sugariness. This is a great example of a traditionally made faro that has been able to further ferment a bit: though obviously still young, it has had some time to let the candi sugar instigate a refermentation process which has not only created a stable layer of foam – which would not be the case in a really young faro the way it was consumed a century or more ago – but also a seemingly more pronounced Brett funkiness and bacterial sourness. The candi sugar itself, though still noticeable as a subtle addition of ‘naturally feeling’ sweetness, has left only subtle traces of itself. It is good to see that lambic has been receiving so much attention by the international beer community in recent years (I will not go into the malicious matter of exorbitant sums paid for vintage bottles on the second hand market) and who knows, maybe the once most popular form of it will soon make a comeback… If it does so in this authentic form, there cannot be enough faro on the market.