Verhaeghe Caves

Brewed by Verhaeghe
Style: Sour Ale/Wild Ale
Vichte, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium

Serve in Snifter, Tulip, Tumbler

Bottle. Cloudy amber colour with a slim off-white head. Aroma is sour, fruity and woody. Quite a nice sour taste with some complexity behind it; fruity, malty, wood, tart, spicey. Medium bodied, high carbonation. It walks a fine line - but I like it a lot.

Like the aroma, sour cherries, vinegar, and iron. Good looking, too, amber with pink highlights and a sizeable fizzy white head. Light and bubbly in the mouth. Nice and sour without becoming overbearing, it has an iron-like taste with softly tart cherries, light malt, mild fruit tastes, a touch of vinegar, and a hint of citric acidity. A bit thin, but most enjoyable. We need this in the Chicago area.

<font size=-4><a href=http://www.ratebeer.com/Places/ShowPlace.asp? Belgian Shop, Verviers, Belgium<font size=-1>

10oz bottle from Madsberg. Pours a very cloudy light amber color with a small white head. Head recedes to leave a fizzy off white ring around the beer. Nose is pungent to say the least. very much smells like bbq sauce and a great open pit pig roast, then there are notes of soy sauce, teryaki, stuff ive never come in contact with I guess. Taste is somewhat pleasent. Has a very fizzy feeling to it, comes off nice and sour at first, with some good hints of fruit, then kinda goes back to the bad sour and spoiled, over ripe tastes. I love and loathe this beer at different moments. Taste is deffinately semi solid, nose is pungent off and unique, I dont even know where I am ! thanks to madsberg for turning my world upside down...

Bottle from Beers of Europe. I found this quite odd. Hazy amber with diminishing off white head. The aroma was unpleasant and made me think the beer was off - notes of rotten fruit/veg with some stale malt. I’ve had a fair number of Flemish reds and browns and this didn’t smell like any of them. No balsamic notes or soy or cherry. There was something which might have been oak, but the overall smell was not good. I dared a sip and the beer itself tasted very different than expected - initially sweet but with a lactic sourness, an oakiness and something reminiscent of a sweetened lambic ala Timmermans. I had expected a drain pour, but the beer redeemed itself in the taste. Very odd. Hmph.

Unclear amber colour, small diminishing offwhite head. Fruity sour aroma, oak and butter. Little carbonation, some sour taste,Finish is sweet sour, with a strange astringent aftertaste(some sweet banana or mango?)

Bottle. I complety forgot about this one for a few months, so I was pleased to find this one way back in the closet. Nice sour aroma with hints of candy, puts a smile on my lips and gives me some expectations even before tasting it. Ahhh...the way the provoking tart (pun intended) dances with my tongue! Sour ales just brings an excellent freshness, that hasn’t been around, since Will Smith first went from Philly to bel-Air in 1990! Light, easy to drink, yet tasty. A fine example of sour ale.

Was sour. Especially the aroma was acetic. Flavor is week, mild. Palate thin.

Botlle, at home. Golden with large white creamy head. Aroma moderate malty (fruit). Flavor moderate sweet, heavy acidic/sour. I still prefer Duchesse de Bourgogne, but very fine.