New Year's Eve. You want a cork on New Year's Eve, right? This wee pal says it was bottled on 17 January 2006 but it's not going to make its fourth birthday. The Shelton Bros label assures me that it would be good for a full decade but who knows where we'll all be in 2016. And where would that bit of musty mould on outside the cork underneath the capsule have advanced it I had left it longer?

A fairly gentle pop leads to a glass filled with faintly oranged straw toned beer under an inch thick billowing egg white head. One the schnoz, there is tart Gravenstein apple, well balanced earthy barnyard funk and an odd note like sardines. All balanced within that g(u)euze sense of balance - meaning wildly unbalanced. I could smell this all day. Daub small drops on my wrists to get me through the workday. In the mouth, it is all where it should be. Modest carbonation, some juicy fruit that adds refreshment even with the seam of bone drying acidity, then in the second half of the mouthful, there is mineral in the Riesling sort of mineral way. No sardines but lots of unsweetened under-ripe white grapefruit pith - the white stuff. Good thing that there are no sardine notes as that is one thing I am not missing. Not acidic enough to warrant Rolaids or anything but pretty damn tart. Like a bubbly light fino sherry without all that sherry stuff.

It would have been good to allow it to play with others tonight for a little compare and contrast but my geuze stocks are down to one panic bottle of Girardin in case the radio reports we have 48 minutes to live. BAers have a fine romance going on. If I had started my sour beer studies with this rather than that bastard of a beer Bruocsella 1900 Grand Cru by Cantillon I might have gotten off to a better start. More from the brewery here if you can read -3 font. They refer to the "sennois" taste which, in my poor Wikipedia French seems to mean the sweat of working class recreational league athletes.