Top 5 Belgian-style Sour Beers
Published:A style of beer, hundreds of years old, that has only recently caught on in the US, and is currently taking the craft beer world by storm! Featuring intense fruit aromas and mouth-puckering sour flavors, these brews are not for the faint of heart, but try one or two, and the truly BOLD will find they have a new beer addiction!
1) Cantillon Fou Foune
- Apricot lambic made with rare Bergeron apricots
- Rather sour, slightly turbid and has a pale gold color
- The apricots are stoned by hand before being soaked in 2 year old lambic
- Accepts apricot flavor quickly and is bottled after 2 months on fruit
- Only 3000 liters per year are produced
2) Drie Fonteinen Hommage
- Blend of lambic beers brewed at 3 Fonteinen
- With the addition 30% whole fresh raspberries from the fabled Payottenland and 5% sour cherries
- Unfiltered beer will enjoy a spontaneous refermentation in the bottle
- Lambic is brewed only from 60% barley malt, 40% unmalted wheat, hops and water
- In commemoration of the late Gaston Debelder, founder of the 3 Fonteinen blendings
3) Allagash Coolship Red
- Spontaneous beer aged with raspberries
- Bright red in color with raspberry and oak in the aroma
- Raspberries dominate the flavor of the this tart beer, along with hints of dried apricot
- Aged on raspberries for six months, in oak wine barrels
- 100 lbs of fresh Maine raspberries per oak barrel
4) Oude Gueuze Tilquin à L'Ancienne
- Spontaneous fermentation beer
- Produced from the blending of 1, 2 and 3 years old lambics
- Unfiltered and unpasteurized, and refermented in the bottle for at least 6 months
- The lambics used were fermented and oak aged in Tilquin’s installations
- Blended lambics are coming from worts brewed by Boon, Lindemans, Girardin and Cantillon breweries
5) Cantillon Gueuze 100% Lambic (Classic Gueuze)
- Pours a hazy yellow gold color with white fizzy head
- Tasting notes of unripened green apples and pepper/spices
- Unique production, every blending will produce a slightly different gueuze
- #1 ranked gueuze on BeerAdvocate
- Will still have an exceptional taste and flavor after 20 years
