fruity beers are starting to piss me off. dunno if this is a problem anywhere out of aus, but here every pseudo craft beer is fruity and cloying.
Depends a lot on the kriek. Timmemans is very sweet and fruity, but generally the people who do good geuezes seem to make krieks and framboises where the fruit flavour dovetails beautifully into the sour lambic flavour - Cantillon kriek is about as full on sour as most geuezes, Marriage Parfait kriek is a bit sweeter but still beautifully balanced.I like beers that have that fruity/citrussy thing going on without actually containing fruit. Luka, do you mean fruit beers per se? I think they can be nice as long as the fruit isn't overpowering. St. Peter's fruit beers are good examples of ales where the fruit is an adjunct to the basic beer flavour, rather than the main event. I've come to the conclusion that Belgian-type krieks etc. are really just alcopops for beer drinkers. Very sweet, very fruity, don't really taste much a like a beer at all.
I'm not saying that they should be hauled in front of the ASA, more that you'd expect more people to think that they're self-important pricks.I guess you can say anything you like about your own products as long as it's not provably untrue, can't you?
Ah, I see. The beers with very aromatic hop tendencies tend to smell/taste more flowery than fruity IMO. Caledonian Deuchars IPA is a good one for this. I like them, anyway.
Geuzes are great too, good call. Sour beer shouldn't work but it somehow does.
so what exactly is geuze?
Basically beer fermented with natural yeast - kind of the beer equivalent of sourdough.
Specifically, I think geuze is naturally fermented in open vats with no added yeast, then stored for a bit, then combined with other ages of similarly fermented beer, then refermented.
It tends to be very sour, sort of like a mix between very dry cider and very dry champagne with a bit of a musty overtone - a flavour apparently known as 'horse blanket' by people who know about these things. It's kind of an acquired taste, but very addictive.
Flemish reds are another interesting sour beer, although a friend of mine described it as "Haribo sour" in comparison to a geuze...