Carbonated pickle brine

Geuze is what happens when you let perfectly innocent beer go bad creatively. It’s a wild beer, made in one region of northwest Belgium where the free-floating critters in the air are just so and infect the beer just so, and then it is barrel-aged and blended. The whole process takes about six years.

The result can only be described as carbonated pickle juice. It is dry, aggressive, and wildly polarizing. Nobody in the world likes their first sip of geuze. It is a horrifying abomination, a complete inversion of what is possible in beer, a doubling-down on all of the flavors that you’re conditioned to avoid. You are told to soldier on; after all, your glass is still full. On your second sip, your horror gives way to confusion, maybe a little curiosity. On your third, game over. The bit has flipped. You belong to the dastardly thing.

Relative to other beer styles, Geuze is extremely finite. Only a few breweries make it, and lots of people want it. Mostly this has resulted in Europe keeping the vast majority of the geuze for themselves, leaving the rest of the world to their own devices. The result is a new generation of craft beer drinkers who may have never heard of geuze, let alone been to a bar that served geuze, let alone tried geuze. We are, as a society, too busy drinking IPAs to consider geuze.

The best geuze tastes like buttery drinking vinegar, walking the line between the oak-aged savoriness of a white Bordeaux and the angry tartness of sour apple mash left in the sun. It is often called the champagne of Belgium. Every time I hear this phrase, I wonder if the originator ever drank Champagne, and whether Belgium is okay and should we check in on them.