Gueuzes are native to Belgium, and are a blend of young and old lambics, in which the yeast is revived and the beer is naturally carbonated. The dominant character of a gueuze is sour, but are intended to be quite complex. Due to fermentation with wild yeasts and bacteria, some flavors are unexpected and the overall outcome is unpredictable. Unlike most beers, old hops are used in gueuzes and are intended only to function as a preservative (which hops do, if you didn't know) and are not for flavor. The blending of young and old is meant to take some edge off and round out flavors. So, now we dive right into the gueuze.
I stumbled upon this beer at one of my local beer stores, since I can't always shop at Eli's shop, and it was the only bottle I saw. So I had no choice but to pick it up. To my surprise, this beer was bottled on 16/12/2010 (that is 12/16/2010 for those of us who don't do the European dating system). That is old, especially for a beer I had never seen before. Coming in at 5.5% ABV I wouldn't have expected it to have sat around that long (I'll talk more on aging beers at a later date). Standard 750 mL, corked and caged bottle.
Oude Gueuze, which I think is a fairly common name for such beers, pours out translucent golden with a rather small, super fizzy white head that vanished quickly (that astringency thing again). The aroma is pretty much sour, but if one smells hard enough there are some yellow fruit aromas that linger beneath, mostly lemon. Taste is seemingly one dimensional, sour, but a few more sips in to get acclimated to the sourness there are some other, very subtle notes of funk, but sadly this is not very complex. But it is solid on the lemon and sourness.
Timmermans
Oude Gueuze
TCSH - 7.5/10
Aka - Good, but there are better.
Dallas
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