meug festival 2022

meug festival 2022

meug festival 2022

meug festival 2022

meug festival 2022

Pours unclear blonde. Small white head. Scent is very funky, full, wood, raw and rough. Taste is full, sharp, higher than expected acidity. Very funky, rough, mature lambic. Very malty finish.

Pours unclear blonde. No real head. Scent is full, funky lambic, islay whisky noticeable. Taste is sharp, intense tart, dry, very oaky. Peatyness is fairly mild, but builds up in the finish. Not my style (peat) but well executed.

Pours unclear amberblonde. Scent is full, spicy by the cayene pepper. Taste is tart, full, pepper, herbal, gingerbread. Very diferent, but a bit much on the cayene.

One of several new Publitasting lambics, flavoured with rhubarb and using De Troch and Herberg lambic. From a fresh bottle opened by the blender himself, cheers Geert! Snow white, very moussy but quickly thinning and opening ring of foam on a clear ‘old golden’ beer with deeper orangey tinge, hazy with sediment. Aroma of very strong ‘ripe’ rhubarb stems and even some of the sweeter stewed rhubarb my grandmother used to make, dried lemon and even grapefruit peel, wet old wood, unripe pear, strong green Granny Smith apple effect, wood sorrel, dry haystack, bitter dried herbs and inedible nuts (typical for De Troch lambic). Lemony onset – or in fact, oxalic acid from the rhubarb ‘sparked’ by lactic acid, but nowhere vinegary or otherwise puckering, leaving a very fruity, bright and radiant effect of lots of very recognizable rhubarb embedded in subtler notes of green apple, gooseberry and lemon peel; lively carbonation, supple and lean body. Cereally-bready core under lively and ‘juicy’ lactic and oxalic acid, ‘yellow-green’ fruitiness and eventually rustic woody notes as well as a late, bit weedy bitterness, connected to that ‘bitter plant’-like association De Troch lambic always shows. The rhubarb and the other lambic components, however, keep everything radiant and refreshing till the end. Quite zesty and colourful, a lovely addition to the growing, but still limited league of rhubarb lambics (and rhubarb sours in a more general sense).

Whisky barrel aged lambic blend from Publitasting, the company of Geert Demuynck, a supplier of rentable refrigerators and other necessities for the catering business who started taking up lambic blending quite recently and is now slowly building a name for himself in the lambic world. Snow white, loosely moussy, open and dissipating head on a clouded warm peach blonde robe with ochre-ish tinge. Strong aroma of indeed pronounced Islay whisky (mostly moist peat but also actual whisky aroma in this case), green gooseberries, strong vanilla-ish oak wood, dry cider, green melon, unripe nectarine, lime juice, oxidized Riesling wine or sweet white grape juice, stewed rhubarb but also a sharp solventy effect (glue) probably from the whisky. Lemony sour onset, quite puckering initially but mellowing down further on, very fruity with impressions of green apple (Granny Smith - strong), lime, gooseberry and sour grapes, medium carbonation, smooth and somewhat vinous mouthfeel; acidic edges, reinforced by strongly drying lactic tartness and an aspect of astringent unripe plum, accompany a bready core, picking up more breadiness in the end due to residual yeast, but more than anything, becoming immersed in a solventy, peaty whisky flavour, carrying a strong vanilla-scenting oakiness and drying wood tannins with it. This almost 'meaty' umami-like effect mellows down the sourness; a nutty, bitter weed- and inedible seed-like astringency typical for De Troch travels along with it, while sour green fruit keeps things refreshing. Conceptually comparable with a few new and very limited experiments by Cantillon (Couvreur) and Angerik (the first Kluysbosch), which I both liked, and this one, intense as it may be, executes a similar idea in an equally captivating way, though the combination of (certainly peated) whisky and lambic will never be an accessible one. Not for the traditional geuze drinker, this one, but adventurous, daring and rewarding for those more accustomed to experimental sours in general. I would not mind having this one again, perhaps even cellared for a prolonged period of time.