Brewery: OWA Brewery SPRL
Country: Belgium
ABV: 5.5%
Style: Lambic – Fruit
Other Notes: Brewed at Brouwerij De Troch

Brewer Description: (from bottle) Japanese Kriek.

My rating: 3
My beeradvocate.com rating: 3.89
My ratebeer.com rating: 3.7

Intro: A 375ml red paper wrapped cap bottle, 2019 vintage, with a best before date of December 2024. Poured into an OWA short stemmed glass.
Appearance: A clear golden colour with a thin but big bubbled white head that dissipated fairly quickly, and left only sparse lacing.
Aroma: Light funk, sweet cherry, black tea, grapefruit zest, and a touch of wood.
Taste: Sour, tart, black tea, lemon, oak, grapefruit peel, herbal bitterness.
Mouthfeel: Medium bodied with only soft to no carbonation.
Overall: An interesting and/or strange one depending on how you look at it. Generally I couldn’t find much information about the beer though. The bottle says “Japanese Kriek” and under ingredients it says “cherry”, and there is a picture of a cherry on the label, which might be somewhat misleading. Now “Sakurambo” as spelt in the name of the beer, appears to be a black tea with Japanese cherries. There does seem however, to be a Japanese cherry with the name “Sakuranbo”. Which one is used with the lambic, I cannot say for sure. But based on the aroma and flavour, while I do get a good whiff of cherry in the aroma, it seems to be missing in the flavour, whereas the black tea notes are throughout. So seemingly, it’s the black tea with Japanese cherries being used, and the appearance and colour of the beer seem to support this theory as well, with no sign of any red that you’d expect from a kriek lambic. It’s definitely not what I was expecting before opening the bottle, but the aroma was nice, and it was an interesting experiment.