Triporteur Total Loss

Flesje gedeeld met Hillig. Donkerbruin bier met matig schuim. Geur is kruidig. Ook de smaak is kruidig. De nasmaak is iets pittig.

330ml bottle from RusBeerShop in Moscow. Great label. Pours hazy dark brown with a small but long lasting beige head. Aroma is chocolate, burnt coffee, hops. Taste is roasted malt, piney hops, caramel and some coffee. Medium bitter finish. Decent beer, and not for pussies.

Bottle from Belgian Beer Shop, Leuven. Hazy dark brown with a beigehead. Aroma is sweet, malty, roasted malt and moderate hoppy - fruity and citrus. Flavor is quite sweet and rather bitter. Dry and rather bitter finish. 030518

Bottle. Bronze color, yellowish foam. Aroma: malt, caramel, sweet, slightly fruity and a bit spicy. Taste: caramel, light spice, normal hop bitterness, hay.

(Bottle, 0.33 l - BB 29/03/2018, at Gastropub Tuulensuu, thanks olio, 20170808) The beer poured nearly black. Its head was medium sized and white. Aroma had dark chocolate, sweetness and fruitiness. Palate was medium bodied with medium carbonation. Flavours were burnt malts, sweetness, ash and bitterness. Aftertaste was sweet, ashy and bitter. A too burnt and ashy to be called a black IPA.

Bottle. Intransparent brown with two finger tall frothy head. Aroma: rich dark malts, citrusy and tropixal and resiny hops. Medium body. Medium dry taste. Roasted malts, chocolate, grapefruit, pine on taste. Medium strong long bitterness. Good

14th November 2016
Level 42 Bottleshare. Hazy deep amber beer, good pale tan head. Palate is airy and dry, decent fine carbonation. Tangy dark chocolate streaked malts, touch of dry malt cream. Tangy fruits into bitter mild spice. Fluffy dry finish. Malts from a nice place, hops missed the bus, but (cough!) not a Total Loss.

BOM’s black IPA, bottle from Deconinck. Very thick and frothy but regularly shaped, tightly ’membranous’ lacing, tightly knit, pale greyish white head, very dark, hazy burgundy robe with ochre edges, blackish from a distance but still translucent when placed in front of a light source. I already suspected "BIPA" upon opening the bottle and not knowing what kind of beer this was - cannot be a bad sign... Yields aromas of cedar wood oil - or, and this is probably just the date playing mind tricks on me, Christmas tree needles, butterscotch, soaked green peppercorns, grapefruit juice, coffee grounds, fragrant dried lavender, moldy walnuts, fermenting blackcurrant berries, ripe nectarine, red apple peel, treacle, soggy rye bread, banana, moldy tree leaves, white bread dough, hints of passion fruit, quite strong liquorish, damp forest floor, stewed mushrooms, tea, cloves. Fruity onset, sweetish and estery hints at (limitedly) banana, medlar and overripe pear, generic sourishness providing balance, some early ’stings’ of hop bitterness already apparent but very subtly so; very sharp, minerally and numbing carbonation, impairing the mouthfeel a bit, which, as a result, is a bit coarse but retains sufficient ’souplesse’ and a somewhat resinous character as well. Malty core, immediately bittersweet nutty, quickly shifting to increasing toasted bitterness but softened by a touch of soapy wheat, ending up in total bitterness coming from a firm hop dosis; the fruity esters remain, but not so much as to interfere with the rest too much. Some clove-like phenols appear as well, but hops get the last word, in an initially very earthy, ’damp tree leaf’ and eventually notably spicy manner, drying the back of the mouth, resinous and wormwood-like; traces of the toasted malt bitterness pass through and so do the last remnants of the Belgian esters and phenols; something quite notably liquorish-like accompanies this combo of flavors. A subtle afterglow of gin-like alcohol ensues and an ethereal, bittersweet liquorish-like flavor keeps hanging around in the background. I have argued before here that there is such a thing as ’European black IPA’ these days - in fact attempts at this ’Cascadian’ style by usually more traditionally oriented brewers, resulting in BIPAs with ’European’ influences (old noble hops, Belgian yeast traits etc.). Within that specific contex, this beer performs just fine, with sufficient hop bitterness positioned against the dark maltiness. I personally prefer BIPAs - or, probably less ambiguously put, Cascadian dark ales - cleaner and more straightforwardly Anglo-Saxon, but if a case can be made for "Belgian IPA" to represent a compromise between blond / tripel and actual IPA, I guess the same argument goes for its darkest family members. Good beer, in all, ominously dark and wry as is expected from the style, with a very expressive ’pine tree’-like aspect to the nose - all in spite of the traces of Belgian phenols lurking behind every corner.