100 Belgian Beers: 48 - Drie Fonteinen Oude Geuze Vintage
OK, I've no real idea what my favourite beer of last year was. There's such a wide range of styles and tastes, and that's before you factor in the whole "ambiance" of where and when you drank a beer, that can also affect your judgement. But this has to be a strong contender, just slipping in at the end of December and being quite perfect.
Drei Fonteinen (Three Fountains, aka 3F) are up there with Cantillon in my favourite makers of lambics; the strange, sour, "third-way" of making beer still practised by a few Belgian breweries. Basically, anything from them is going to be really good. There are some lambic brewers who make "really good" beers and then some slightly lesser ones. 3F and Cantillon, on the other hand, make "really good" and "fucking superb". You really can't go wrong with anything from either of them.
3F was originally a blender of lambics. This meant they bought in the base beer from other breweries and then mixed their own geuzes and steeped fruit for krieks and so on. This is what the very fine Hanssens do. But in 1999 3F added a brewery to their operation; the first new lambic brewery for eighty years.
Their "normal" geuze is very fine (hm, been ages since I had one), but this is the superior Vintage variety. This particular one was bottled in April 2005. Considering geuze is normally a mix of beers aged from one to three years then part of what I was drinking was getting on for eight years old. So it's hardly surprising it had developed the mellowness and depth that it had.
Whilst undoubtedly sour it was smooth with it. The smack-you-round-the-face tartness had faded to an inviting pool full of sherry, green apples and about six hundred other tastes which I gave up trying to jot down being a) rather rubbish at that sort of thing, b) it was just too complex and c) I was enjoying the beer too much.
Suffice to say, it was absolutely fantastic.
Are you getting the idea that I liked this? Right. Just checking.
And now for the bad news, as far as the brewery goes. At some point last year the thermostat went haywire in the storage rooms where thousands of bottles of beer were maturing, and "cooked" it, rendering it undrinkable. It wasn't quite a dead loss as some of the ex-beer was salvaged and distilled to make a spirit, but it did cause the brewer to re-think things. He decided that as he was getting on in age, and brewing is pretty knackering, he'd give up that side of things. So 3F are once again going to be a blender buying in their lambics from elsewhere, with Boon brewing some to his recipe. It's likely they'll taste a bit different, but also likely they'll still be great. Oh, and he's going to be doing some more distilling. It's easier work apparently