Caña en el Scotland Yard la Virgen del Camino León 01..09..2017. (r29). Cortesía Mimi. Color amarillento tostado turbio con espuma blanca persistente. Sabores cereales y maltas dulces con final herbáceo suave que deja también suave amargo no muy intenso verde fresco. Cuerpo ligero a medio algo espumoso. Refrescante, buena.

Imported from my RateBeer account as Haacht Super 8 IPA (by Haacht):
Aroma: 8/10, Appearance: 4/5, Taste: 6/10, Palate: 3/5, Overall: 12/20, MyTotalScore: 3.3/5

25/VII/17 - 33cl bottle from Willems (Grobbendonk) @ holidays - BB: 15/XI/17 (2017-1123)

Clear orange beer, big creamy irregular yellowish head, pretty stable, bit adhesive. Aroma: citrus, orange peel, mango, pretty fruity, some caramel malts. Actually smells very pleasant! MF: soft carbon, medium body. Taste: quite some citrus indeed, grapefruit, some orange peel, bitter touch, bit watery. Aftertaste: grapefruit, hoppy, bit malty, grains, pretty bitter, some citrus. All in all it's a half decent ipa. Which is better than a bad ipa. ;-)

On tap at bar dante. Amber color thick creamy white head. Hoppy resiny aroma, light malts, light caramel a but of spices. Relatively light body, clean dry finish.

At Het Spijker, Gent. Pours clear golden/amber with a small, foamy, slowly diminishing white head. The aroma contains hops, yeast, orange, grass and cooked vegetables. It tastes medium bitter and medium sweet, with a finish that is strangely sweet and dry at the same time. Light body, watery/slick texture, fizzy carbonation. To me, this is a Pale Lager with IPA features. Nothing special, moving on.

33 cl. bottle @ Rock Café, Leuven. Clear amber pour with an off-white head. Malty aroma with flowery hops. Nice bitter aroma. Nice uncomplicated IPA.

Very good, fine & dense yellowish head, stable, over clear copper-amber beer. Floral, citrussy hops bursting with exotic fruit (passion mainly). Also cat’s pee, valerian, going over into crustacean (DMS?). Dry, strawlike hops, with a lot of citrus, lupulin/hopoil retronasal. Unfortunately, the flavours peter out fairly quickly, leaving sweeter, dull malts (if still citrussy) behind. The aftertaste is downright sweet. Medium bodied, quite spritzily carbonated, Honestly? I’d never guessed Haacht would prove to be able to turn out something even halfway decent. This is better, even when far from a Westcoast work of IPArt. Leeggoed: 4 FR. Wattuh???

Draft @ café des Arts, Ghent. Clear blond colour, white foam. Nose of tropical fruit, citrus. Taste is bready, malty, citrussy. Light sweetness. Light bitter finish. Not bad,nothing exceptional.

Lo and behold, the most conservative of Belgium’s industrial breweries has apparently noticed IPA is sweeping the world these days, and decided to introduce their customers to their own interpretation, which is incomprehensibly incorporated in the same ’Super 8’ brand as their extremely old-fashioned ’export’ (in the old Belgian sense of the word). Expectations are low, but let’s give this a shot, bottle from a Delhaize supermarket (sitting in fourpacks right next to the identically packed, now relaunched Super 8 Export, with the exact same label it had decades ago, a label which is copied in green for this IPA ’version’ - something anachronistic is going on here to say the least). Medium thick, irregular but fairly stable, snow white, ’papery’ lacing head slowly dissolving, over a bright orange blonde beer with amberish hue, cristal clear with some strings of lively sparkling here and there. Aroma of dried orange peel, dry biscuit, hard butterscotch candy, sweet paprika, dried wormwood leaves, old lemon zest, minerals, white pepper, fried potatoes, soap and the unmistakable smell of pasteurization, embodied by a whiff of cooked Brussels sprouts. Crisp onset, ’clean’ fruitiness, hints of apple peel, green banana and dried apricot, subdued sweetishness and some underlying but effective sourishness, very minerally which is accentuated by strong, ’pearly’ carbonation, a bit souring and over the top for the style, but tolerable. Smooth, slightly oily mouthfeel, nutty maltiness, only restrainedly sweetish with a vague biscuity touch but quickly shifting to softly toasted bitterishness which is then emphasized by a peppery, wormwood- and somewhat tonic water-like bitterness which dries the finish without blocking the juiciness of the nutty malts; low in retronasal aromas, though some floral, grassy and even vaguely citrus peel-like accents are noticeable, albeit without the ’lushness’ of fresh New World hops. Some soapiness lingers too. Industrial and clean, ’generic’ interpretation of IPA, actually feeling close to the old English variant of it, much more so than to the modern, international but essentially American variants. The latter would have astonished me completely from this brewery, but the fact that they are attempting anything labelled ’IPA’ is already noteworthy by itself, as Haacht is very conservative and old-fashioned in their range and this style, contrary to classic English pale ale, has no history in 20th-century Belgium which is basically embodied by this brewery (as well as others). Saying that this is likely the best Haacht beer I tasted so far, is not saying a whole lot, clearly, but I have to admit that they managed to pull off something that could have come from some larger foreign brewery just as well: this is an ’international pale ale’, not so much the typical, estery and phenolic, tripel- or blond-like ’Belgian IPA’ compromise I was expecting and which I’ve seen from other traditional Belgian breweries failing to understand what IPA is about. That said, it remains a very industrial, pasteurized, generic and uninspired IPA (or rather: hop-forward English pale ale, which is basically the same as English style IPA) - only worth mentioning in the context of what it means in Haacht’s portfolio rather than in the context of IPA in general. Could have been a lot worse.