Bios Vlaamse Bourgogne

Brewed by Brouwerij Van Steenberge
Style: Sour Ale
Ertvelde, Belgium

The nose is tart and pungent with aromas of iron and blood. The palate is dry and tart with a distinct under ripe cherry acidity. The finish is lemony and refreshing. Overall, a nice quenching beer for warm weather drinking.

330 ml "Monks Cafe" at Hopleaf in Chicago. This is the kind of Flemish sour I like. Perfectly balanced sweet cherry/sour yeast flavor profile. Not cloyingly sweet and not overpoweringly musty or sour. Very well balanced Flemish sour.

330 ml ’’Monk’s Cafe’’ version. Pours a clear chocolate brown with large tan head that lasts, and leaves nice frosting on the glass. Aroma is tart cherry. Taste is not as tart as the aroma suggests (hooray!) and is a nice mixture of dry sour cherries and malt, and some metallic notes. Malt becomes more present as my tastebuds get accustomed to the acid, and even seems to have some faint sweet estery qualities. Palate is medium-light, dryish and tingly refreshing. I like the less sour quality of this one, and definitely like the absence of a strong vinegar taste.

Pours clear brown with a moderate head. Smells sour and yeasty. Moderate mouth feel with a yeasty, spicy, fruity quality. Very unique.

Pours a nice clear dark read with a white creamyhead that quickly disappears. Aroma is sour and fruity. Tastes mostly of cherry. Sour, but not overpowering.

25cl bottle. Pours deep red mahogany with short but creamy head that quickly dissipates to a thin film. Slightly hazy. Apple cider vinegar, plum, and sweet berries dance around in your nostrils followed by a wood must. Sometimes the sweetness really hits your nose but then seems to fade a little with the next sniff, then comes back. In the mouth, this is quite a lively beer. The dryness and carbonation helps to bring the right amount of "sting" in the back that hits you just before the sourness dazzles you. Just the right amount of vinegar. The beer takes on a bit of a cabernet character in the finish with a slight metallic edge. By the end the aroma does start to seem a bit one dimensional, and becomes sweeter. Overall a great example of the style.

Cloudy red/brown with a very small white head. Nose is quite tart, with a touch of cherry, plum, some tannic, oaky notes. Powerful effervescence gets in the way of the flavor a bit. Taste is quite dry, very sour, with some vinous notes, and a bitter woodiness.

Monk’s Cafe Flemish Sour. The nose is quite sour as one would expect. The color is clear but dark reddish brown. The flavor is quite sour as one would expect, with very little sweetness. I think this is a quality product, but I think perhaps the style is not quite to my taste, though it did grow on me slightly by the end of the bottle.