Lindemans Cassis Lambic

Brewed by Brouwerij Lindemans
Style: Lambic - Fruit
St Pieters Leeuw-Vlezenbeek, Belgium

Red with a huge rosé head. Sweet and acidity aroma and flavours of black currants and sugar. Very refreshing!

Good lord, why would someone make a beer with black currants? They suck, and so, in turn, does this beer. It also seems more sugary-sweet than the much better framboise and kriek. Thumbs down.

750ml bottle. Pours an opaque dark purple with a light pint frothy head. Sharp berry aroma. Light body, full mouthfeel, slightly sweet (berry) flavor balance, late very slightly tart finish.

12 oz. bottle at Zeno’s, Penn State. Poured deep ruby with pink head. Unexpected bitter, sweet berry flavor.

From the bottle, this is tasty and enjoyable, but too sweet and fruit dominated for me, with too little complexity. It is a deep, deep purplish red with a big, thick, pink head that lasts forever and leaves pretty good lacing. The aroma is heavy blackcurrant (esp. creme de cassis) with a hint of yeast and mustiness. The taste is predominantly blackcurrant, sweet at first with a more tart, light finish. Overall, though, it is rather one-note and dominated too much by the fruit. I taste almost nothing of the lambic itself and even the tartness in the end is just a fruity tartness as far as I can tell, wihtout a sour, yeasty quality. Maybe it’s just the blackcurrants since blackcurrants are very strongly flavoured. It is good to drink after a meal or something like that but it’s lacking.

Bottle. Pours ruby-red with a foamy pink head. Aroma and flavor are both sweetish-sour blackcurrant. Reminiscent of similarly flavored carbonated fruit drinks, but with smoother carbonation and a hint of the yeast. Pretty good, although really more for when you want a blackcurrant beverage than for when you want a beer.

Garrafa. Coloração vinho, com creme vinho claro consistente e persistente. Encorpada. Sabor forte. Aroma: vinagre, salgado e cassis. Carbonatação média. Ácida. Azeda (da fruta). Boa cerveja!

It was a long time coming, but I finally had the opportunity to try the last unsampled Lindeman’s flavor of the four available in the Denver region: the Cassis Lambic. The last three, roughly cherry, raspberry and peach flavors, were easy to pinpoint and easier to relate to. All three are common flavors in American pastries and confectionaries. But black currant is a little bit rarer, and considered something more of an exotic treat from across the Atlantic. I doubt we’d find ourselves comfortable with black currant dum-dums or black currant muffins, but we do know about it because overpriced and overhyped patisseries use it as an official seal of sophistication to sell their delicious goods. I went into it thinking about blackberries and blueberries as the closest related flavor. The Cassis is a surprisingly dark beer, rivaling a fair number of stouts with its very, very dark maroon shroud. The head is more frivolous with its sugary sweet personality, taking on a rare yet majestic pink-purple cotton candy color. The head actually looks like cotton candy too, and for all I know a glob of the stuff on top of this might actually make for a good pairing – sort of like an even unhealthier root beer float, with more sugar and more alcohol. A tired wisp of cherry, blackberry and boysenberry reluctantly sighs as it approaches the nose, alongside an unwelcome bit of company that smells sort of like chlorine. I wonder if they had just done a bit of spring cleaning prior to brewing this batch. I wasn’t put off by it, but it definitely stood out as “The one that didn’t belong” alongside all the berries. Still, the aroma is unfittingly meek. It’s very gaseous, but empty compared to most beer aromas. There might also be a tad bit of acrid artificial vanilla to help screw up the nose a little bit more. A lot of tartness invades the tongue before any berries come through, so that by the time the initial raspberry and cherry appear I’m already reeling with sour pungency. These flavors are nice, mind you, but somewhat unfocused when my tongue is being laid waste to by concentrated tart. A rolling rapid of sudsiness further entrenches the chemical onslaught, whose appreciable efforts are foiled by a heroic charge of blueberry, blackberry and artificial watermelon flavoring. The aftertaste wraps things up with a blank bubbliness before whisking the entire foamy mass away. The combination of cheap sugared tastes and hyper-active texturing numbs the tongue like a bag of pop-rocks or really hot and spicy nacho cheese could, only at many times the price. Mostly I remember gourging on candy as a kid until I got sweaty, a bit dizzy and my vision warped in and out of focus. I had a similar sensation finishing off this Cassis Lambic, and between fits of I made up my mind that it was far too much sugar. I was hyperglycemic for sure. Sweet beers don’t always induce hysterical fits and strange dietary symptoms, so I think I’ll be sticking to their more moderate sugar mass, which delivers a more realistic and mannered experience.