Sr

Bottle (thanks fatphil). Pours golden. Aroma is funky, sour, lemon. Flavor is sour, sweet, fruits, some dryness. Finish is sweet and sour. Overall:very good.

Bottled:
Pours hazy orange with sparkling bubbles and a dense head. Sourish aroma with lots of lemons and lime. Sourish flavour of lime and grape fruit.

The resurrection of the old Oud Beersel lambic brewery in 2007 had to be funded and marketing a couple of classic and straightforward top-fermented beers brewed at Huyghe and branded as "Bersalis" in reference to Beersel, was the way Gert Christiaens and Ronald De Bus did just that - but then the lambic project took off, and in recent years, several cross-overs between those Huyghe ales and Oud Beersel lambic have been released. This is one of them: Bersalis Kadet, a simple coriandered Belgian blonde, aged on lambic casks, with the deliberate intention of having it inoculated by the microflora present in those casks. From a green 37.5 cc 'geuze' bottle with cork and muselet. Medium thick, coarse, bit irregular, lightly lacing, off-white head, retaining well around the edge and slowly dissipating in the middle, over an initially only lightly hazy, deep and pure 'old gold' coloured beer with pale peachy hue and some coarse bubbles rising up from the bottom; shifts to an ochre-hued clouded milkiness with the sediment added but only in the very end. Aroma is very clearly and thoroughly impregnated by lambic biology, with impressions of raw rhubarb, unripe nectarines, green gooseberries, moldy old lemons, old apple peel, fermenting hay, a lot of soaking wet old wood, old cardboard, dusty book shelves, dried bitter garden herb leaves, 'immortelles', some 'Brett urine', horseradish juice, pickled carrots, kombucha and a - fortunately - very faint whiff of rotten white cabbage. Very crisp, bright onset, a lot of lambic-ish esteriness indeed, lots of sour green apple, hard pear and unripe pineapple wryness, lemony acidity even but subtly so, very refreshing, still with a very vaguely sweetish peachy core; carbonation is very sharp and effervescent, minerally and numbing the tongue, more 'large-bubbled' than the average traditional geuze and more in line with what you would expect from an overcarbonated Belgian blonde, but indeed adding to the beer's crispness and spritziness. Lactic, vaguely kombucha-like tartness dries the palate, but the crisp 'green fruit' acidity keeps it lively and refreshing, over a pleasantly bready, fluffy malt underground with light soapy edges - which in this case can only come from the coriander in the basic beer (which contains no wheat), though fortunately it has lost most of its character in this lambic treatment and became just and empty shell of its former self, retaining only its soapiness but not its retronasal spicy aromas. Hop bitterness is late, earthy and a bit leafy, more expressive than would be the case in the 'old hops' effect of a true lambic and closer to the somewhat peppery hop bitter character of the basic beer; meanwhile the finish is much more emphatically drenched in not just the lingering lambic fruitiness and drying sourness, but also a lot of tannic 'old woodiness', again pushing the balance back to the lambic side of this product. A modern sour ale, with the distinction of actually having been soured by natural lambic microbes at an actual authentic lambic brewery - an honour many American or other foreign sour ale producers might be jealous of, I can imagine. This beer proves how wonderful and powerful the spontaneous fermentation of the Senne valley really is: it can even turn a very mediocre Belgian blonde, brewed at an even more mediocre old school family brewery in Eastern Flanders, into a lovely, complex, crisp and well-bodied sour. With the memory of the regular Bersalis Kadet in mind, this, in its lambic makeover, has become a totally different and infinitely more interesting beer altogether - though it must be said that literally all the credit goes to the lambic microbes and the wooden casks in which they are housed, so that it almost feels as if Kadet has been done too much honour here... And all details considered, the soapy remains of the coriander, a strong presence in the basic beer, still keeps bothering me a bit even in this otherwise highly enjoyable environment.

37.5 cl bottle. Pours hazy yellow. Small white head. Aroma is wooden, bretty and earthy. Farmhouse funky. Sour, dry wooden. Crisp fruity. Citric and smooth fruity. Sourish and fruity finish.

Sampled @ RBBSG 2017. Clear golden orange color, small white to off-white head. Smell and taste lightly sourish, wood, brett. Quite nice.