Lost Abbey: Cable Car 2020 (USA: Sour Ale: 7% ABV)
Visual: Lemon juice coloured body, with a thin white rim of a head.
Nose: Lemon juice. Horse-blankets. Vanilla. Light custard. Apple pie with sugar dusting.
Body: Apple pie. Lemon juice. Sugar dusting. Sugared almond. Sour lemon. Sour lime. White chocolate. Slight peppery. Soft pineapple.
Finish: Lime. Yeast funk. Sour lemon. Buttery pastry. White chocolate. Slight white pepper. Sour rises over time. Tinned tropical fruit.
Conclusion: Ohhh this is so soft, but so rewarding. Initially this was so gentle on the tongue that the sour character from a wild beer only hit in the finish, where it rises to a reasonable but far from powerful punch in a very pleasurable way.
Also in these early days it is a very lemon juice fresh body, but then slowly rounds out a gorgeous soft apple pie filling character and then out into soft tart, sweet pineapple. It feels like the opposite of the Cantillons I had just had. So easy to get into, so gentle, and yet like the Cantillons it is so rewarding and rounded, just in a completely different and more approachable way. As you get used to it the barrel aging starts to show with burst of tinned tropical fruit amongst a building zestiness.
Then, to make sure it has that slight grounding, it has a light peppery character,especially white pepper – a lovely savoury spice, and this is from someone who doesn’t like spice notes too much in my beers. It is so drinkable, dangerously so for its elevated 7% ABV. Unlike so many sours, which I treat as slow sipper and cannot have too many of, this goes down so very easily – it is so open and easy to get into the fruit notes and fully appreciate.
This is a fantastic easy to drink sour and a fantastic beer in general, worth its high reputation.
Background: Well this was deeply unexpected, after the joy of all the Zwanze beers at Moor, a visitor from America we had been talking with offered to to share some of the beers he had brought – including this one as the first! Cable Car is a wild beer with an incredibly high reputation, currently highest rated wild beer on ratebeer, and to my memory was once part of their top 50 beers in the world. Now as always ratebeer has some biases on its top beers, but this has always had a buzz everywhere. Lost abbey – the Belgian beer side of a brewery also known as Port Brewing have done incredible beers in the past. Back in the mid 2Ks I managed to try a whole bunch of them and they were amazing, these days world beers are far harder to get and I’ve not seen a Lost Abbey beer for a while. Anyway thank you so very much to our kind American visitor, I know bottle shares is a bit of a tradition in USA beer events, and I felt so bad that we had nothing to offer in return as it is generally not something that happens here. Also, the smaller pour is my choice, he offered as large measure as we wanted, but i went with a restrained measure for a) my own survival and b) So as many people as possible could try as possible as with a rarity like this it is only fair to make sure people get to try when it is so kindly on offer . It was plenty for me to enjoy and not overdo the alcohol on an already heavy drinking day. Anyway yes, a barrel aged sour of high reputation and I was so excited to try it.
