May tasting evening

Yes, yes, I’m still catching up on old notes... So, here are a few lines about a tasting evening we organised last month.

The menu included four beers I’ve written up before: the floral Gulpener Korenwolf, the sublime V Cense, the strange Liefmans Goudenband, and the darkly rich Floreffe Prima Melior. We also had two beers new to the 40b40: Brunehaut Bio Blonde and Oude Geuze Boon.

Brunehaut Bio Blonde is a decent blonde and a solid representative of its class, though somewhat surprisingly low in alcohol for this style of beer at 6.5%. It’s “bio”, so that means it’s organic and healthy.

Oude Geuze Boon is a Belgian classic that I’ve strangely never tried before, despite many personal recommendations and three and a half years of writing about this country’s beers. Of course, at the tasting evening, I gave everyone the spiel about the tradition of spontaneous fermentation and how Louis Pasteur came along and changed everything -- the Cantillon lecture, as it’s becoming known to those who have had to endure me delivering it more than once.

The Boon Brewery, located in a small town just outside Brussels, has, like the Cantillon Brewery, maintained the old ways, and their geuze is wonderful. I got the impression I liked it maybe even more than Cantillon Gueuze, but I think without a side-by-side test, that’s unfair. An all lambic and gueuze tasting evening is needed...