CABPOM August: 3 Fonteinen Kriek & Le Chevrot

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of CAMRGB

Something a bit different this month. Fruit beer and white cheese work well together but add some goatiness to the mix and it becomes something special.

3 Fonteinen is one of the revered Belgian lambic brewers but they also make kriek. This one is just a bit special as it uses wild forraged schaerbeekse cherries, adding a different flavour than you'd normally expect froma  kriek. Schaerbeekse cherries used to be cultivated specifically for use in brewing, but with the fall in popularity of lambic the orchards fell derelict. 3 Fonteinen tracked down some of these wild orchards and turned the harvested fruit into a traditional kriek. This particular beer is a 35% blend of schaerbeekse and the remainder regular morello cherries. I picked it up at Brewdog Edinburgh in a 750ml bottle.

Here are my notes: Pours pale scarlet with slight fluffy head. Sweet cherry, raspberry, acrid hay, lemon, malt, barnyard. Dry tart cherry, lots of stone character (think almonds and bakewell tart), very sharp lactic, long cherry stone finish.

The cheese is one I picked up from Tesco (they have a much better range in Scotland than here!) not knowing much. Its called Le Chevrot and is quite similar to Crottin apparently. To me its dry and chalky, with a goaty richness and perhaps the tiniest hint of lemon.  A bit dull perhaps.

Works nicely with poppy-seed crackers

When paired with the beer however it comes alive with creaminess and accentuated by the funk to transport you to the dairy at milking time. That light lemon note plays well with the tart cherries and the beers carbonation is more than a match for the slightly clacky texture. I'd like to try this cheese aged as it should be even better.

More Vintage Ales

Extreme cellaring alert! My friend Alan (of Neill & Ross Brewery) is a Belgian beer nut and has amassed a sizable collection of aged beers, including some no longer brewed. This weekend we cracked open a number of them. Here are some thoughts:

First up were a couple of 1970s rarieties from Bass, the 1977 Jubilee Strong Ale & Bass Princess ale 1978. 

Both of these were well past their prime, with oxidation, wet cardboard, sod all carbonation and just not generally very nice. The Princess Ale did have an interesting touch of red fruit and toothpaste to differentiate from the former, but both drain pours unfortunately.

La Choulette Biere Des Sans Culottes 1990 is a dark biere de garde and not one I was too keen on either.

Straffe Hendrik 1990 was well past it and was a straight drain pour.

The Chimay Premier was also past its prime. I preferred the fresh version (which is so far one of the only doubles I've actively enjoyed).

So far, not so good but the better beers were to come in the form of a Felix Kriek from 1972 and Belle Vue Selection Lambic 1989. The kriek had held up fantastically and paired well with Stilton as suggested in the Vinken and Van Tricht book. A nose and taste reminiscent of rodenbach with cherries still lingering in the background. A surprising amount of condition for its age too. This beer is still produced today albeit in a much diminished form.

The Belle Vue lambic, today well known for being overly-sweetened was also a good beer. Obviously it started off sour and fairly dry, so there wasn't much more it could do to develop. Very dry, funky nose and lots of citric acid, just how I like them.

 Another interesting comparison was fresh Rodenbach to a bottle ~50 years old. Undisputably the same beer, the older bottle had lost some of the vinegar tartness and become more rounded. This worked well with mimolette, another win for the cheese and beer guide.

Another highlight for me was the 1960s Rochefort 10. Just as good as the fresh stuff and fantastic with Fourme d'Ambert.

 

A Westmalle Tripel of similar age was also sampled, but having neglected to make notes I don't recall how it had held up! A 2011 Westvletern 12 did nothing to shine, reinforcing the view that this beer is very over-hyped due to its rarity.

The big surprise of the evening for all of us was that Weston's Cider from 1985 tastes pretty much indistinguishable from fresh stuff. This makes sense as the wild yeast used to ferment it already succeeded in outcompeting any other wee beasties in 1985, so not much scope for infection and all the sugar had fermented out in any case.

A mixed batch then, as you would perhaps expect but a fun evening nonetheless.Thanks Alan and Olly for supplying most of the bottles.

The Session #54: Sour Beer

 

I’d been meaning to work out how the session works for a while, so when I got an idea for a session topic I Googled it and found the necessary details (see here). It’s a monthly beer blogging event held on the first Friday of the month blogging about a topic “hosted” by one of the participants. I decided it’s high time I got involved and this month’s entry is as good as any, “sour beer”. This month it's hosted by John at the Brew Site.

Lee from Hoptopia recently tweeted “What was your first sour beer” and I replied Boon Oude Gueuze at the Boon Brewery November 2009. Though, on reflection, this wasn’t strictly true now I come to think about it. No, for my first experience of sour beer would have been a few years earlier than that in the form of a kriek or framboise from the excellent Southampton bottle shop Bitter Virtue. I tried a few different fruit lambic beers but nothing that made me want to go back for a second one and I ended up largely sticking to British bottled beers.

The beer festival is in the spectacular Belfort Van Bruge

I decided I needed more of an education in the Belgian beer styles and my chance arose in November 2009 when a group of us visited Bruges for the beer festival. It was an eye-opening event to say the least. So many different beers that I didn’t know where to start. In my excitement I forgot to keep notes, so other than a few ticks in the program I’m not sure what I tried and what I thought of them.

What have we here?

One of the highlights of the trip; however was a visit the Boon brewery. We boarded a coach to the small town of Lembeek and scurried out through the rain into a courtyard where we were met by our tour guide. We could see what was definitely an industrial site, but it could have been making anything. There was however a clue to its contents in the shape of the letterbox outside. We were met by the jovial guide who led us through the gates and onwards into the brewery.

A clue to what lay within

 Once inside we were given an interesting and intriguing tour of the brewery including of the mash tun, the fermenting tanks and the barnlike maturing room filled with massive Brandy barrels filled with beers of varying ages. Much better accounts are available elsewhere and this post isn’t about the brewery but the beer.

 The gigantic aging barrels at Boon Brewery

After the tour we all sauntered up the road to a beer cafe where we could choose between Boon Oude Gueuze and Boon Kriek. I picked the former and this was certainly the biggest eye opener of the whole trip. I’d been told what to expect beforehand, that the beer would be sour, that it “isn’t for everyone”, but this still gave me no idea of what was in store for me!  A tongue tingling lemon with sour and still more sour and a whole mix of other new and exciting flavours besides. I loved it. I also tried the kriek which I much preferred to the sweetened versions I'd tried so far.

Shortly afterwards I moved to Northern Ireland and had no chance to further my sour beer experience. Through talking on rate beer I found someone locally who is a sourhead and he recommended The Vineyard in Belfast as the place to try and I picked up some Mort Subite beers from there. He has a sour beer project of his own which I may get a chance to blog about later in the year. My realisation is that I’ve merely scratched the surface with lambic beers and other sour styles and need to rectify that urgently!

I am making this post go live whilst working at the Great British Beer Festival and yes, I’ve had a chance to try some other sour beers here too. We have some crazy beers by revelation cat on draught. Three year old Boon lambic taken from Belgium and aged in laphroaig whisky/ marsala wine casks. There's also a superb Fruity kriek

I’m hopefully going to visit the Cantillon brewery when in Belgium next year too so plenty more sour beer ahead of me.