De Ranke Kriek

Brewed by Brouwerij De Ranke
Style: Sour Ale
Dottignies/Dottenijs, Belgium

750ml bottle from WLV Liquors consumed on 5/25/08. Pours a pink red with a pink white head. Sweet sugars, fruit, pale malts, and hay in the nose. Sour cherries, fruit flavors. Sweet with slight tartness that is clean and without any funk. A little watery, but a tasty beer.

Bottle, green glassed and wrapped without a label, corked and capped. Best before end of 07-2009 implies this was bottled in 07-2004. Very tart, acidic nose with a little stale tire air. Big, dark (black) sour cherries and just a touch of lemon. Woody with some funk. The kind of nose that I know is going to taste amazing, but that requires stomach preparation. Noisy pinkish head on a lovely ruby-pink body. Extremely robust taste is extremely sour, mouth-puckeringly and head-shakingly so (with a few moments of single-eyed squinting thrown in), huge sour cherry and solid acidic lambic base. Medium-full body, very dry kriek ending. A simple thing done extremely, extremely well.

Bottle, 2005. I love my lambics/almost lambics, so I’ll never be rating such a beer all that low, but for me this one was pretty one-dimensional. Sour, sour, sour. Some cherry in the background in the aroma, but very little in the flavor other than sourness (although for better or worse depending on your tastes, quite the assaulting dose of sourness). A good drink, but at the same time a bit of a letdown.

Bottle, 2005. Pours a muddy brown/red with a small light tan head. Aroma is super sour, barnyard funk. Flavor is quite tart and sour with sour fruit (I can’t quite pick out cherries, just a general berry-like taste) and some oak/wood. The fruitiness keeps this from getting too sour. Even though I’m not really a fan of super sour beers, I actually enjoyed this a lot. A pleasant sour surprise.

Very bright red. Very sour taste. Lots of vinegar. Not much cherry... I wish the depth of the cherry flavour was more evident. As it warmed, it did help, but it never got to where I really wish it would have gone.

Big pink head; ruby-red hue. Bright nose; inhaling the releasing carbon dioxide almost burned my nose hairs off. Lively carbonation; champagne-like texture, though not as carbonated. Tart and acidic. Some vinegar. Bitter, salty finish. Faintly catty. Cherry notes were far in the background. Not bad, but I thought it needed some more spunk and funk, and I like it when the cherry is a bit more evident.

750ml bottle. thanks to holdenn for sharing. pours red with bright pink head. looks great! nose of cherries, bubblegum, a bit sour. flavors are cherry, bubblegum, oak, sour, vinegar. this is really nice.

Muddy (it was a gusher) red, with a disappearing pink head. Cherry, wood and almond aroma. Very tart with a good fruity flavour. Funky and very sour, extremely close to a lambic kriek.