Cantillon Mozart?

Mozart is more of a ghost whale than those turbowhales. Those are all still out there in the wild and pop up every so often. I'd be hard pressed to think another Mozart is out there outside of a VERY deep Belgian cellar. Dont know much in terms of bottle count or when it was released, but it was a framboise. Here is the label:

 

Pretty sure that Mozart was just a regular beer part of their offerings.
It is just extremely rare because Cantillon wasn’t very known, popular or respected back then. According to some rumours not that good either. Only a very, very small handful of crazy people were hoarding lambic’s back then. I am pretty sure these people have bottles of this beer still. 10 years ago you could still find bottles of some extinct lambic breweries, some of these people also have those. Names you have never even heard of. The biggest of these, Eylenbosh is still popping up a lot. I am one beer close to actually trying their full line-up now.
I also had Hey-va Ale & geuze a year ago or so. No one just cares or even knows about this stuff, I had never heard of Hey-va even up until then.
Pick any random Belgian brewery from back then of a similar size & trying tracking down a discontinued beer from them. It is going to be just as difficult.

 

Sounds legit.

The rarity mix for old Cantillon bottles is just perfect really. Small batches back in the day, and rising stardom since nobody used to care about gueuze/lambic at one point. Especially not Cantillon, since they've been the only one active in the Brussels municipal area for the longest time. Funny how people associate lambic with Brussels even today when most of the gueuze brewers/blenders are active in Flanders (and Tilquin in Wallonia).

They just did what lots of Belgian brewers do: re-name the same beers, tweak the recipe slightly and slap a different label on it, etc. Lots of people make it sound like some of the ghost Cantillon bottles one day fell from the sky after they were excreted from God's very anus. They were "just beer" back in the day, and I'm holding out hopes that one day, they might be again.

Imagine if a brewery like De Molen would ever hit it remotely as big as Cantillon. Their older batches were TINY (I'm talking 150 bottles for some 750s). Those bottles might be rare trinkets one day too, but then again: they're not lambic AND they're not aliases on "the other site". So they'll never fall into that kind of obscurity and whale jizz category.

 

I love Cantillon but this kind of shapeshifting, everything being a special one-off kind of thing, explains why it's the cult favorite over rock-steady brethren like Girardin. But the old stuff is fascinating on a totally different level. I've even gone out of my way/usual price range for the Eylenbosh, although I gather it's reputation was a bit run of the mill back in its day.

 

Eylenbosh was sweetened and pasteurized muck back in the day, probably raking even below Mort Subite. That stuff was so laced with artificial sweeteners that it actually has changed little and become a bit more tolerable from what I hear. The effort that people put and the amount of money that some people pay for sweetened & pasteurized beers from the 70s continues to blow my mind. The regular geuze is okay actually as far the fruit stuff goes there is a lot of variation bottle-wise. I have had nothing that was better than okay, a lot of it is not even worth drinking. The whole thing is pure hype, no one is going after sweetened bottles of Lindemans from the 70s, I have had them, the experience is not too different. The ratings on here are truly, truly baffling to me. Mind you, I never prayed more a lot of money for the privilege of trying them, maybe that is what I am missing to appreciate them?

Eylenbosch Gueuze Festival was never sweetened or pasteurized, only filtered. The one I had was spectacular, these are actually worth seeking out.

Girardin Fond Gueuze Bierpallieters is a trully spectacular beer.

 

Is there any evidence to suggest this is just Rose de Gambrinus before they called it Rose de Gambrinus?

 

Per the Cantillon website, the Rose de Gambrinus name has been in use since 1986.

 

and is there any conclusive evidence that Mozart was in production after 1986?

 

I love how Jean threw a shit fit about douchebags re-selling the new jeroboams of Cuvée Saint-Gilloise. Make people buy a season football pass for a second-grade soccer team that nobody gives two shits about. Way to keep the whale hunters at bay there.

Exactly the same with Three Floyds really. They supposedly hate it when people offer bottles of BA Dark Lord for sale, but they secretly love the fact it's such a "thing". If not, why bother going through the Dark Lord Day motions?

 

andy has a pic -

 

He got mad about people reselling them for absolutely absurd amounts of money.

 

Not from me.

 

He would sell the jeroboams for 1k if he could, however there's no way he could do it on a broad scale without suffering damage to the company's reputation.

 

Did he tell you something to that effect? It just doesn't seem like their/his thing. If they really were that money grubbing, they could just double the price of everything they have and ship it all to the US.

 

Nah, you are pretty wrong about this...I don't know what to tell you (or any other dumfuq that agrees with you) to make you believe me, but brewers don't get into the brewing world to become rich. It is an absolutely terrible way to make lots of money. He isn't pricing his beer in order to preserve the company's public image, it's priced on cost & standard mark-up percentages. Read what he wrote about the online sale of his beer (http://beeradvocate.com/community/threads/cantillon-comments-on-1-000-jeroboam-of-beer.111058/) and you will see that he was disappointed and "felt sorry for" the seller. Why? Because the seller doesn't understand the true beauty and nature of beer, in all of it's unifying-bonding power. Some people who don't understand beer end up commoditizing their bottles, and these are food products that are meant to be enjoyed by people and not to sit on trophy shelves in your basement.

 

Also I think that the first lambic brewery to abandon Belgium and focus only on export is basically going to shoot itself in its own leg in the long run. Yes lambic breweries almost disappeared from existence between 1970s – 1990s due to lack from interest in Belgium. Foreign interest is now always going to be as big now and in probably going to start falling in the new 10 years and if not then sooner or later it is. Lambic popularity has always been fluctuating, once USA has several acclaimed lambic producers interest is going to fade. When t hat happens they will have to fall back upon Belgium to survive. If they have abandoned that marked many years ago, that is going to be hard.

History repeats itself, geuze was originally invented for export. In the 19th century it was exported to Constantinople and to Rio de Janeiro. Did that last? Can anyone even remember that? Lambic breweries are meant to last for many generations, they need to plan for a much longer period than non-family breweries.

 

Cantillon has become world-famous over the last few years because of the US market. The US market is frequently driven by hype and in many cases inflates to bubble status. And when makers of products have kowtowed excessively to the US market and the bubble bursts, the economic situation is disastrous - eg. Australian shiraz, or Madeira. Trend can move even quicker for a small market product like lambics.

For beer, significant price rises are difficult to explain to the public as the cost of production is low, there are minimal land holding requirements, and breweries can be set up almost anywhere. So there's not a lot of BS/hot air that a brewery can spin to justify price hikes, unlike wineries (biggest hot-air industry in the world).

Cantillon wants to remain sustainable over the long term and diversify its risk by retaining its popularity in all its markets, hence the current pricing strategy. If Cantillon were to chase the short term money in the US, it would alienate its existing clientele in Europe...and if the US bubble for lambics/Cantillon was to burst, Cantillon as a brand would be finished. Let's not forget that prior to the US discovery of Cantillon, lambic makers were closing down at a rate of knots due to lack of demand in the traditional European markets.

I'll put it to you this way:
1. If you could sell a bottle of beer for $1,000 and no one would know about it, would you?
2. If Cantillon could sell a bottle of beer for $1,000 and no one would know about it, would they?

It's all about business, and Cantillon is not a charity.

 

As above, concentration of sales to one market is never smart business strategy in the long term...especially to a market as wily and trend-driven as the US.

 

He would? How do you come to believe that?