De Molen Morellen Lambiek

Aroma: 8 | Appearance: 8 | Mouthfeel: 6 | Flavor: 8 | Overall: 7

Bottle number 154 of 216; bottled October 2008; Sampled January 2009
As I pour this I get a solid raspberry note. The beer ends up with a prodigious three-finger thick, amber tinged, light tan colored head in my large Tripel Karmeliet tulip. The beer is an opaque plum color that shows a nicely hazy, bright red color when held up to the light. An inspection of the aroma leaves with the scent of fresh cut sawdust, some toasty pale grain towards the finish and a non-descript fruitiness that isn't nearly as distinct as when I was pouring this beer. The fresh cut sawdust note it easily the most noticeable thing about this aroma, and it is quite interesting.

The taste is lightly sweet up front, but picks up a bit more sweetness as it rolls across the tongue (this is not cloying though). The sweetness accentuates a general fruitiness that tastes more like cherries than anything. This is amply carbonated which provides lots of texture and helps this beer to be reasonably refreshing. It has a bit too much body to be totally so, and definitely could use some drying out. There is a bit of the sawdust note to this beer up front, but it quickly disappears under the sweetness. There is a touch of astringency to the finish, as well as some underlying phenolic notes and a touch of herbal / vegetal character to the finish, all of these are fairly subtle though. Speaking of subtle, there is a touch of tartness here, but nothing that one wouldn't expect in a standard fruit beer; it really makes me wonder what process the Brewer used to call this a Lambic.

As the beer warms the fruitiness starts to come out more in the aroma and the sawdust notes start to come out more in the flavor. I have finally realized that the bottle says that this was brewed in September of 2008 and bottled in October of 2008, so this is really Lambic in name only. Not a bad fruit beer though, and it has just hint of funkiness to it, I wonder if this will get more interesting as time goes on (it might also get more explosively carbonated, which wouldn't be good). This beer is so weird (from sawdust to brewing methodology), that I find it quite interesting; it definitely gets extra points for being so interesting.