Credit: Cristina Bejarano
3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze
Where Spotted: De Vinos, 2001 18th St. NW
Price: $18/750ml bottle
When you yeast expect it: At the Savor craft-beer festival, geeks were forever hovering around the sour lambic beers, heralded by Lost Abbey’s Tomme Arthur as “the final frontier” of tasting. Lambics are fermented with wild yeast such as brettanomyces, ruiner of things fermented. While vintners furiously clean their equipment to prevent wild yeasts from contaminating their grape juice, some brewers are turning this acid-belching bacteria into a thing of art. 3 Fonteinen’s Oude Geuze—a blend of three vintages of lambic—has a citrusy sourness, like an extreme kumquat.
See? Warm beer sucks! Buying 3 Fonteinen supports a good cause. In May the renowned Belgian brewery lost 100,000 bottles—almost one-third of its stock—when a broken thermostat turned its store room into a kiln. The brewery’s hoping to recoup losses by distilling the spoiled beer into a liquor, but until I see “barley sours” catching on in Adams Morgan, picking up this Oude Geuze seems like a better form of support.