I have a soft spot for stupid macho chilli beers, even though they're almost always awful plasticky messes. The awfulness doubles down today with one from English brewery Fallen Angel, a regular on Pumpclip Parade back in the day, for its cringeworthy soft-porn branding. In my defence, I didn't buy this one, I was given it, and its label is not pornographic even though the beer is called Fire in the Hole. The artwork is cringeworthy, in fairness. One final note before we go in: the beer is coming up to twelve years since the short shelf-life was up, but it is bottle conditioned, so should be fine right? Right? Let's see.Zero points for the visuals. No head formed for more than a second and under where it was there's a horrible looking swampy mid-brown soup. I'm only drinking this because you're insisting on it. "Cajun vinegar" probably best describes the aroma: a sharp sour tang with a sprinkling of paprika and black pepper. Maybe things will be OK. Fire in the hole!
Pepper and vinegar is pretty much the extent of it. It's good that I like both of those things. It's not unpleasantly acidic -- it's good vinegar, acceptable for a Flanders red or the like. An initial pepper piquancy leads on to a back-of-the-throat burn. Though the body is thin, there's a base of vanilla and banana which doesn't go, at all, but I don't hate this.
The world of high-end Belgian beer is changing. There's a sudden rush of new authentic lambic producers, and established producers of traditional sour beer making daring recipes, all of it plainly driven by the insatiable market on the other side of the Atlantic. If one of them produced a chilli lambic, this is how I imagine it would taste.
You won't like this, and I don't for a second think it left the brewery like this in 2008. But I drank all of it and quite enjoyed it, sip by sip. Go figure.
