Cantillon Lou Pepe Gueuze

Beer sellers: Cerveteca

ABV: 5%
Origin: Anderlecht, Brussel-Bruxelles, Belgium
Website: www.cantillon.be

Cantillon Lou Pepe Gueuze

Cantillon, with its unforgivingly dry oude geuze, has a reputation as the most hypertraditional of the lambic breweries, but proprietors the Van Roy family have developed quite a repertoire of innovative variations on the traditional techniques. This special edition Lou Pepe Gueuze is one good example.

Standard geuze is blended from lambics of between one and three years old, with the youngest beers still lively enough to awake a secondary fermentation in the bottle. The blender aims to produce a year-on-year consistency from these famously unpredictable spontaneously fermented beers. This beer, in contrast, is an annual blend of specially selected two-year-old lambics, most of them matured in former wine casks, allowing more of the character of mature base lambic to come through. With no younger beer to add sparkle, the blend is dosed with sugar dissolved in water at bottling to reawaken the yeast.

A 2001 vintage I tasted when it was seven years old poured a hazy golden with some white foamy head and a relatively low carbonation. A tart, complex aroma had musky lambic sharpness with lemon and pine notes. There was more lemon alongside apples, elderflowers, wine and woody, pippy flavours on the chewy palate, with a long development in the mouth. A tart, chewy woody finish has lemon sherbert and twiggy notes. This very complex beer is full of authentic lambic character but notably mellower than the regular Cantillon.

Lou Pepe, incidentally, is an affectionate nickname for a grandfather in southwest France, but the label, with its period townscape of the Vossenplein/Place du Jeu de Balle in Brussels’ historic working class Marollen/Marolles district, is distinctly bruxellois. A kriek and a framboise also appear under the Lou Pepe name.

Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/cantillon-lou-pepe-gueuze/7501/