Fancy Pants Sunday: Oude Geuze De Cam
Welcome to Fancy Pants Sunday, Peaks & Pints’ weekly devotion to beers that refuse to slum it in tallboys or speak in monosyllables — beers brewed with patience, intention, and just enough wild-eyed weirdness to merit a velvet rope. This week’s exalted pour is Oude Geuze De Cam, a tart, effervescent blend of oak-aged lambics from Belgium’s tiniest geuzestekerij, where beer ferments not with control, but with surrender. It’s the kind of drink that tastes like the inside of a monastery and the echo of a thunderstorm — which just so happens to pair beautifully with tonight’s Jambic & Lazz session: a live jazz set from Tacoma’s sax sorcerer Kareem Kandi, whose solos shimmer with the same wild mystery that lives inside every bottle of De Cam.
The Brewery: De Cam
Housed in a 1515 farmhouse in the village of Gooik, De Cam Geuzestekerij has been blending lambics since 1997 with an eye on ancient ways and a palate sharpened by patience. They don’t brew their own wort — they collect young lambic from Belgium’s legendary producers (like Boon, Girardin, and Lindemans), age it in wooden barrels older than some religions, and blend it with the care of a symphony conductor who prefers bacteria over brass.
They remain tiny — fiercely so. Every bottle is a quiet act of resistance to industrial speed. Their Oude Geuze is a blend of 1-, 2-, and 3-year-old lambic, bottle-conditioned into something living, wild, and thrillingly unpredictable. It’s beer at its most elemental: open windows, oak staves, wild microbes, no apologies.
The Gueuze: Ancient Bubbles and Barnyard Champagne
Oude Geuze De Cam pours with a hiss and a halo — pale gold, alive with microfoam and the scent of time itself. The nose offers orchard apples, hayloft funk, oak tannins, maybe a touch of lemon peel dragged through wool. On the tongue? Tart citrus, cider tang, delicate oak, lambic earthiness, and a sparkle that lands somewhere between a bonfire smoke ring and a vintage Cremant.
This isn’t beer that asks if you like sour — it demands to know if you’re ready for transformation. It’s fermented memory. It’s complexity in cork and cage. And tonight, it has a soundtrack.
You fancy, Oude Geuze De Cam!
Jambic & Lazz with Kareem Kandi
The month’s first Sunday night at Peaks & Pints tips into the deliciously unusual as Jambic & Lazz returns — the monthly communion where lambic’s tart sorcery meets Kareem Kandi’s molten jazz lines in a slow, ecstatic swirl. Lambic, born of open air and ungovernable microbes, pours like time made drinkable. Kareem, meanwhile, bends swing, blues, and celestial mischief into solos that don’t play for applause — they haunt. His saxophone doesn’t ask questions. It levitates them.
It’s less a concert than a séance. Less a beer flight than a fermentation ritual where the yeast seems to listen, and maybe even riff along.
🕔 Jazz, 5–8 p.m. | Sunday, Dec. 7
📍 Peaks & Pints, 3816 N. 26th St., Basecamp Proctor
🎟️ Free (but not forgettable)
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
