Lambic #2: Belle-vue Kriek
Served: Draft, into a Belle-vue Kriek glass.
Appearance: Sorta purplish red.
Smell: Lightly of cherries
Taste: It's very light and refreshing, and mostly just tastes like a fizzy cherry juice drink. If I didn't know better, I would swear this was brewed for the sole purpose of getting 15 year old girls drunk. It is more alcoholic than Budweiser, but tastes like a refreshing fruit juice with no alcohol in it, and is eminently drinkable. If you are a 15 year old girl, and you have been invited to a house party where there's going to be alcohol and that cute sophomore boy from your Spanish class, you'll want about two of these, or maybe three if your mom is cool and lets you stay out past 11:30.
Price: €2.90 for a 25 cl glass. Could be cheaper, but since it rarely crosses the pond, okay.
Overall Rating: 5/10. Bit light on flavor, but very refreshing.
Lambic #3: Belle-Vue Gueuze
Served: 25 cl bottle into Belle-Vue Gueuze glass.
Appearance: Amber brown. Looks like normal beer.
Smell: Like normal beer.
Taste: Now it's about to get as funky as the pronunciation of this stuff ("ger-zuh"). At first, it tastes a bit like the kriek, sour and fruity. Then, all of a sudden, BAM! It tastes like normal beer. The reason for this is that gueuze is a blend of old and new lambic, some of which is the young kriek, and other stuff is older, where the fruit flavor has been replaced by that of the wild yeast used to make it (yeah, all lambics are made without yeast and then allowed to sit uncovered so that wild brettanomyces yeast can get in there and do its stuff). If you are a 15 year old girl, this stuff will be fucking awful. If you have a more sophisticated beer palate, it's actually surprisingly good.
Price: Same as above. This is more worth it though, because while I have seen kriek at specialty beer stores, I can't recall ever seeing a gueuze. Chalk up another one for the "stuff you gotta go halfway around the world for" column.
Overall: 7/10. Be warned though, this one is a sour beer, and you may recoil from it in horror.
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