Spontankoppi

Brewery: Mikkeller

Type: Lambic

Alcohol: 5.3%

Country: Denmark

What can't you add coffee too? Well if you are talking about beer styles, and you happen to be Danish maverick brewer Mikkeller, the answer seems to be: Anything. Now when I saw "coffee lambic" amongst the lineup of Mikkeler's spontan series, I had to have it. I ignored all common sense, online reviews, and friends protests and ordered that sucker anyway. It can't work right? Coffee...sour beer...seems so crazy, but sometimes crazy works. I have held on to it for several months waiting for a good time (or maybe someone crazy enough to share) to drink it. Well my Jittery June month of coffee beers seems as good a time as any. Cracking it opened. Here goes nothing.

Pours a pretty clear yellow color, not exactly what you would expect from a coffee beer, although nothing about this is normal. Pretty decent white fluffy head sticking around on top. Starts immediately perfuming the room with that distinct lambic fruity lemon juice tart smell. Smells pretty typically sour beerish, clear tart fruits and citrus juice but with a little bit more of a metallic background. Metallic might be the coffee? Well the smell is pleasant enough, so hopes are slightly higher for the taste now. This just in: Hopes for it tasting good instantly destroyed. Not just destroyed, but dashed into a billion small pieces, then set on fire. There is a moment when it tastes like a normal lambic, slightly tart with a weak citrus fruitiness, then things go off the rails. Coffee takes over almost immediately with this weird bitter, slightly metallic, and definitely bitter and astringent taste. The taste is oddly dry, like licking coffee grounds before they get brewed with. Coffee grounds are exactly what I would describe the coffee taste as in this beer. Just a really distracting bitterness on the end, but not like a pleasant hop bitterness, more like an over-brewed pot of bad coffee. The mouthfeel is also hard to wrap your head around, medium, but weirdly dry, difficult to explain if you have not tried it. This beer lures you in with its misleadingly pleasant smell, then it savages your tastebuds with weird sour coffee grounds and barnyard espresso beans. I can confirm, without a doubt in my mind, that coffee lambic should not be a thing.