Bottle 330ml @ Sommerhuset
Pours deep hazy golden with a small off-white head. Aroma has notes of malt, tartness, caramel, gooseberries, grain, some fruitiness and a weak hint of raisins. Taste is light to medium sweet and medium sour with a long slightly dry, tart, fruity and gooseberry finish. Body is medium, texture is oily, carbonation is soft to flat

Bottle. An unclear, orange colored beer topped by a small, white head soon diminishing. Some curtains. The aroma is mostly on the funky side, with leather and lemon, but there’s also a generic fruityness and a touch of spent grains. Not in an unpleasant way though. It’s tart and medium to full-bodied, a bit heavy on the carbonation perhaps, and with flavors of funky lemon and leather, some barnyard notes in the far back along with the pale malts, and more of a gooseberry flavor than a plum flavor. Sure a nice beer, even though there’s not much trace of the plums. 160424

6oz pour at the Sovereign pours a murky orange with some ringing white head. Nose has a lot of plum, nectarine, white grape, some grapefruit. Flavor is tart with acid, white grapes and grapefruit, plum, nectarine, a bit pithy. Tart finish.

At home. Bottle shared. Cloudy dark golden/ amber, minerallike sour/salty unripe prune, oak, piss (in a good way haha) , light dried apricots & white raisins. Medium sour, light sour. Very minerallike texture, chalkiness.

At home. Bottle shared. Cloudy dark golden/ amber, minerallike sour/salty unripe prune, oak, piss (in a good way haha) , light dried apricots and white raisins. Medium sour, light sour. Very minerallike texture, chalkiness.

Bottle shared thanks to sjogro. Murky orange golden with off white head. Sour grains, light lactic notes, my grandmothers plum jam, soft spices and hay, some mineral touch bordering on salty. Medium sour and very light bitter. Medium bodied with very fine mouth coating carbonation. Nice beer.

The 2015 edition, made with French blue plums, brewed with Alvinne’s own Morpheus yeast and matured on red wine barrels - this can hardly go wrong... No gushing in spite of my expectations, this kicks off fine. Moussy but irregularly shaped, snow white, lightly lacing and gradually dissolving head nevertheless retaining well on the edge; cloudy, deep peachy orange robe with vague ochre hue which increases with adding the deposit. Lovely and elegant sour fruit beer aroma with even some lambic-like features; a ton of fruit, both from the actual plums and from a mass of seductive esters. I get plum indeed (though not necessarily blue ones), apart from overripe gooseberry, pineapple, sweet white grape, cherry blossom, adorable vanilla tannins, some wet wood, quite some funkiness (sweat, wet leather, fermenting hay), candied lemon, yoghurt and much more subtle hints of banana with brown sugar, chamomille, fresh toasted bread. Vivid fruitiness in the onset, a complicated game of a rounded, utterly juicy plum ’sweet-sourness’ on the one hand, coming through in a glorious way, and lots of fruity esters on the other hand (sour berries, unripe peach, lots of red apple and apple peel), all bonded by a soft but still slightly puckering and, more than anything, very well-placed lemon acidity, drying the rest of the palate. Underneath this sour-and-a-little-bit-sweet fruit abundance, a bready, sweetish, rich and sufficiently ’full’ malt body develops; finish beautifully reprises all these flavors and adds a bit of drying wood yet not strongly so, a tad of earthy yeastiness and, indeed, a narrow trace of red wine flavor all the way at the back after swallowing, as is always the case in a well-made wine barrel aged beer; a vague ’chalkiness’ lingers a bit too, reminding me a bit of Cascade’s sour fruit beers. Retronasal feast as well, with all those esters, lively crispness of the plums and some subtle vanilla tannins. Alvinne has had the guts to experiment when few other Belgian brewers did this and it is good to revisit their beers. This particular one is a truly mouth watering sour ale, well-crafted, balanced, rich and vividly fruity - congratulations to Glenn Castelein and the others there.

Bottle at the March DC Tasting. 2015 edition. Poured a cloudy orange color, with a small light off-white head. Aroma was tasty plum tartness, malts. Light sweetness. Light tartness, light acidic notes. Tasty.