Chapeau Abricot

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

Serve in Flute, Tumbler

Light orange color, spritzer like high carbonation. Quickly fading white head. Smell is funky musty spoiled yeast (i guess what people call "barnyard" perhaps, some apricot like fruit juice and sugar. Wow, extremely sweet tasting. More like soda pop than beer. Kids would like the taste of this, I’d bet. Just smells rancid though. Sweetest beer I’ve ever had. Fairly tart as well, which is sort of nice, but too sweet to drink much of. I dumped the last 3/4 of the bottle.

Cloudy amber, large initial off-white head looks actually decent and is the strongest point. Honest apricot vapours walk side by side with a soapy sugariness that is obviously fake. Ridiculously sweet powder sugar meets apricot flavours. Luckily, fake carbonation reduces the sweetness impression a bit, but expect no fun when you enter the realm of the chapeau.

Bottled. Poured clear, orange-tinted apple juice yellow with just a few loose bubbles sticking around for head. The aroma picked up some sweetened apricots, but they came across as stale, and were backed by stale oaky notes.. some soap in there, too.. not good. The flavor was of super-sweetened apricots (fresher, more pleasant use of the fruit, but still stale on the back-end) with old, wet oak and a little barnyard funk in there too.. lots and lots of sugar! This was way too sweet on the palate, muting the nice acidic/tart notes that pop through intermittently.. the stale notes really took away from the enjoyment.

UPDATED: APR 5, 2008 Name: De Troch Apricot
Date: 08/12/1999
Mode: Bottle
Source: Wild Wing Cafe, Marietta

amber, slight sweet tart aroma, strong sweet flavor, slight tartness, almost balances, too souripy

Aroma: 5/10; Appearance: 5/10; Flavor: 5/10; Palate: 5/10; Overall: 10/20
Rating: 2.6/5.0
Score: *4
-------- /> Date: 03/15/2008
Mode: bottle
Source: Tasting, Cellar Party

Appearance: cloudy orange, wispy off white head, bits of lace,
Aroma: dry fruity aroma with a moldy character and a woody tartness,
Body: thick body,
Flavor: sweet malt flavor, lots of fruity sweetness, balanced by a fruity tartness, light musty character adds depth, syrupy sweetness,

Aroma: 5/10; Appearance: 6/10; Flavor: 6/10; Palate: 8/10; Overall: 11/20
Rating: 2.9/5.0
Drinkability: 7/10
Score: *4

Bottled. Hazy orange colour, mediumsized white head. Aroma is dishwater, soap and artificial apricot. Flavour is big sugary apricot and paper. Not worth the money.

I’m not really getting much flavor from this one. While the is some apricot flavor. The rest has some sugary sweetness contrasted with tart. Not the worst, yet not the best.

The aroma has apricot, sugar, and yeast. The appearance is deep, cloudy, gold with the thinest head. The flavor is weak but it is like the aroma. The palate is thin. Overall it’s OK but thats it.

Aroma is sweet and stinking of tropical fruits. Taste is similarly overly sweet like god knows how they managed to get this much sugar in it.