Chapeau Mirabelle

Brewed by Brouwerij De Troch
Style: Lambic - Fruit
Ternat-Wambeek, Belgium

Bright, cloudy orange with soapy looking head. Aroma is plums, astringency, laundry detergent and apricots. Flavor is sour drops with a plumy outer shell. Very drying finish with some sugary residuals. It’s drinkable, but barely.

Muddy, orange to light brown hue with a sudsy white head that fades into nothingness. Aroma is intense and packed with overripe plums, decaying garbage, rotting flesh, crotch sweat and diapers (used). There’s also some half-caramelized, half-burnt sugar, funky cheese and moldy bread. Nauseating. The flavour is only marginally better because it’s got some decent acidity and all of the nastiness isn’t quite a strong. Still, it’s disgustingly sweet and tastes like used underwear pulled out of trash dumpster sitting behind a restaurant, baking in 100° sunshine. I’m guessing. Also, I get some burning pink erasers as it warms. Sticky texture, lively carbonation, medium bodied. So yeah, this is pretty terrible stuff. 25cl, Leffe goblet, bbe 13/06/09, 3.5% abv.

Bottled. Poured clear apple juicy-yellow with a dusting and a loose ring of white head. The aroma was very sweet with plum juice and mild vinegar as the driving forces.. very sweet, but non-offensive. The nose did not deceive me… very sweet plum juice at the core with a lightly tart back-end.. as I felt the diabetes rising, the score kept going down. Lighter-bodied and waaaaay to sweet on the palate with too long of a finish.

Bottle shared by Jason of unknown vintage. The beer pours to a murky pale yellow body with a thin white head and huge chunks. The aroma is funky plums. Light notes of sweat and barns. The flavor is plums and artificial sweetners. Overly sweet. Plums and cork. Overly sweet palate. This was a drain pour. I did like the aroma, however.

Four years old. Hazy orange pour with golden appleskin hints, cluttered with yeast clouds, browned oils and nearly opaque. Only a thin head forms, fully diminishing quickly. The aroma is sweet, with notes of sun-scorched and wilting plums, mildew, unrefined and unused brewing sugars, light yeast and wood that’s scattered randomly about the farmyard. The flavor is quite surprising, certainly a complexity that is unintended, a result of a wacked out recipe and cheap(it would seem) ingredients. Very light tartness and very soft, mild funk, both surely only present due to an unintended infection in an infant stage. The aftermath of a mistake from the start is a rather intriguing taste. Plum notes mingle with flour, flowers, berry-infused yeastiness, caramel, lemon and wood. Sweetness is high but this particular sample is about four years old so it’s dried out some and isn’t cloying, it’s actually really drinkable. No bitterness, though acidity is mild to medium. The finish is lightly soured, fruits lingering with unmatched brevity, mildew-glossed wood notes taking over shortly thereafter. The mouthfeel is softly and randomly carbonated, light-medium bodied, sticky and a touch syrupy, with a strange sugary texture digging into small pockets in the corners of the mouth. Definitely not a lambic, but then again, no Chapeau "lambic" is. This is one of the few beers this brewery makes that is even drinkable. A fun fruit beer it is, one-of-a-kind, so at least that makes it an interesting departure from normalcy in this style vein.

Bottled. Golden colour, not much head. Aroma is vanilla, sugar, fruits and some sour notes. Flavour is sugary sweet fruits and that’d pretty much it.

I cant really say much about this particular beer, it doesn’t really have any really negative qualities yet nothing positive either. Its the basic tart and fruity lambic that you would expect.

The aroma has fruit, barnyard, and sugar. The appearance is hazy gold with a small head. The flavor is tart and like the aroma. The palate is average for the style. Overall it’s one of those beers thats not too good but has a couple of redeeming qualities.