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beer reviews Belgium

Pre-emptive stash raid

Because we want to be in gear when Stash Day is formally announced, we’ve started picking off some of the bottles we’ve acquired but deemed too special to actually drink.

First up, Cantillon Lou Pepe Framboise 2006, which we bought at the brewery early last year.

The Lou Pepe beers are a sub-range which, as Cantillon put it:

…deviate from [the usual Cantillon] principles. The Gueuze Lou Pepe is made with two years old lambic beers with a mellow taste, often coming from barrels in which only wine has been kept before. In July, the same kind of beer is used to make the Lou Pepe Kriek and Framboise. With these beers too, the fruits are soaked in barrels coming directly from Bordeaux… The second fermentation of these particular beers is not caused by the addition of young lambic but of a sweet liquor… The Kriek and the Rosé de Gambrinus contain 200 g of fruits per liter on an average, while the Lou Pepe beers contain about 300 g.

It fizzes violently at first, creating a huge mousse-like head which disappears almost immediately, leaving in the glass something that looks like red wine. It smells of… Now, the euphemisms are usually barnyard or animal related, but let’s be frank here: it smells a bit like poo. Once we’d got over that, however, we found a fairly gentle tasting, sweetish beer.

We enjoyed it but, frankly, not as much as the super-sour, popping candy of a beer that is the standard Cantillon Kriek.

3 replies on “Pre-emptive stash raid”

See, that’s the thing about beer bloggers – they always seem to have a stash, probably donated by brewers looking for PR. As a blogger of the lesser non-beer variety I can only boast a stash of one solitary bottle of Fullers Vintage ’09.

Maybe I should become a beer blogger too. No, hang on… what about a sports car blogger?

😉

We don’t get much free beer — delivery is a pain in the bum. The last lot we got was from Brodie’s. Our stash is mostly stuff like Marble Temptation that we picked up on our travels.

I have a decent-sized stash, but it’s all purchased for cash money from off licences, except for a few gifts from other bloggers I’ve met. Beer in the post is generally more trouble than it’s worth.

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