Amber Kelderbier
Dageraad Brewing

Cloudy dark amber color. Has small brown blobs of sediment that settled to the bottom of the glass. Poured a huge fluffy head that is taking forever to collapse. Even with it so cloudy, I can see an extreme flow of of tiny bubbles from the bottom of the glass. The bubbles rising from the center of the tulip glass look like a small tornado swirling in the middle. Only leaves small dots of lace; most of the foam just slides back down into the main mass. After 20 minutes the head had died down a bit. Giving it a swirl pops it back up like the original head on most beers. This second head leave large mats of lace on the side of the glass.

Strong funk smell tending towards musty. Has a blend of fruit and floral, but with a sharp sour smell. Every so often I smell a light barnyard for just a second. Swirling the glass did very little because the dense foam is still a couple of centimeters thick after 10 minutes and no new smells can escape. After another 10 minutes the head was thin enough that I could see a bit of color under it, so I gave it another swirl. Again, the head popped up thicker than most beers on the initial pour. I could smell a stronger barnyard for a few seconds and then it dropped back to mostly the original profile.

The extreme carbonation damped the flavor for a while. Strong funk and an oxidized apple flavor were the first to cut through the foam. Mild to medium bitters that do not taste like they came from hops. Funk. Mild tart. Yet more funk. Yeast funk. Bacterial funk. Funk. Yes, there is funk. There are many dimensions to these funks. The aftertaste is mostly funk with a sharp cheese added. This slowly fades down leaving the mild tart behind. However, after letting this warm up a lot closer to room temperature than my normal cellar temperature, I note that the flavor profile has changed up. The funk is still there, but the whole seems slightly more complex, with more fruit and some wood coming through.

Instantly turned into foam with some fluid at the bottom. Eventually the foam turned into large bubbles and I was left wondering if I swallowed the fluid or did it all convert to bubbles somehow. When I smelled it in the glass, something made the inside of my nostrils feel a little bitey, like the burn from smelling fresh cinnamon.

The flavor is a bit one-dimensional, or actually 50-dimensional, but only in the funk spectrum. I was hoping for more of a sour lambic, but I guess this is one of the first steps along the way to that destination. Now that I think of it, and after tasting the Negen, this might be best used as one of the 3 vintages blended into a future Oude Gueuze. Blending this with the Negen would tame some of the youthful exuberance of the Negen and add a multi-spectrum set of flavors.

This was only recently released for sale. It was on the menu at the brewery, but they had not yet pulled any bottles into the tasting room when I was there. There was a handwritten date of bottling on the label: 2018-07-10. I assume this is July 10, 2018, a few months past 5 years ago.

This is the second bottle of this I have tried. The first bottle had a warning label that said it must be cold or it would overflow. I opened the first bottle at a nice cellar temperature of 12 degrees C and lost almost half the bottle. There was an initial fluid explosion followed by a continuous flow of foam out the neck until I was able to pour enough into a glass that there was some extra room in the bottle.

This bottle was put into the fridge from the cellar for a couple of hours and then into the freezer for another 30 minutes. I only lost a couple spoonfuls of foam this time before I could tip the bottle into my glass. Then I let the glass warm up for about 20 minutes before starting smelling and tasting.