Aarschotse Bruine

Brewed by Brouwerij Huyghe
Style: Sour Ale/Wild Ale
Melle, Belgium

Serve in Snifter, Tulip, Tumbler

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Aged bottle from 1980, brewed by Tielemans, tasted at the Kulminator, Antwerp. Clear amber, small head, aroma is sour, taste of sour Palm-beer. Huge succes!

A hazy orange beer with an off-white head. The aroma is primarily of oranges, slightly over ripe, combined with light metal notes, and so is the flavor, while the body is a bit thin.

Vintage bottle (old, dirty with a rusty cap) courtesy of Joris - thanks!!
Thin white head that lasts well, hazy orange golden body. Fruit, berry and wet woody aroma with a sourish edge - rather old and fusty. Extremely dry and woody flavor probably helped by the age - with a fresh sourness to back the dryness up. Quite thin and watery body. Definately over the top but still drinkable.

Bottle. Sweet stale caramel flavours, and slightly on the sticky side of the scale, ever so slight sourness. This tasted old/gone to me.

[bottle at LCRBM] smelled slightly herbal, some sherry notes. Don’t know hold old this was but it tasted too old, had a thin body and generally wasnt my cup of tea. Interesting stuff though.

No#76. What an unexpected find. Aroma is fruity with a alround well balancedness coming off it. Taste is very similar though thin and the slight sourness gives it a great refreshing character.

(Bottle 25 cl) Hmm, label doesn’t say Huyghe anywhere, only Biertoren. But since the latter closed in 1993 and this bottle was bought in 1998 I reckon it’s the Huyghe version. I believe it was a blending beer originally (Speciale & Lambic?) but don’t know if that’s still the case. Dark, reddish brown - not much head, or carbonation for that matter. Very quenching acidity but a lot less sharp and metallic than other sour ales. Vinous and very light-bodied with some roasted notes from the malt. Very interesting. 150298

Pretty aged bottle, might well hail from Biertoren in Kampenhout Good ochre head, not lasting; slightly hazy amber beer. Caramel, artificial sweetener or cassonade nose, and a very, very faraway acidity (which was the hailmark of the original Aarschotsen bruinen), yoghurt and some nuttiness. Much more lively acidity, metallic and probably lactic acid, yoghurt again, and some biscuity-nuttiness. Light bodied, not thin however, rather refreshing. Metallic aftertaste. Nice, but nowhere up to the stuff of old (Tielemans,...)

had this with eczematic. started with a challenging metal and tobacco aroma and had lots of gunk in the bottle that looked like unstrained tea. and it tasted a lot like sweet tea - rusty with old ashtray

another of the very ancient dusty bottles with ripped, decaying labels that we got from the excellent Bert's Bierhuis in Utrecht. According to my sources on the web, this used to be made by de Biertoren but is now made by Huyghe, but the bottle we had was probably Biertoren. It was (dunno if Huyghe still make it this way) a mixture of "high fermentation beer" with lambic - so I guess it's a Duchesse de Bourgogne type of thing. After many millennia in the bottle, this was monstrously chunky, with blobs of yeast making hearty plopping noises into the glass. The taste was pure malt, like a mild or something, very smooth and sweet and datey, with only a slight suggestion of something Rodenbachy in the finish.