beerfestival olen

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6

17/09/2018 @home - 33cl bottle from a trade with jerre. Clear golden, small white head. Nose is malts, grains, bit floral. Taste is malts, sweetness, banana, spicy, bit alcohol.

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 4 | Flavor - 4 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7.5

Light Yellow beer, small head. Aroma is sewage, yeast, dusty, Taste is the same, mediocre.

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 6.5

One of the two first brews from a new micro brewery in Diest (with the actual brewery being situated in an industrial park nearby), a classically Belgian tripel, with a label which mentions the bottle date (April 1st, 2017 in this case), a pleasant surprise in this country. Apparently both his beers won a bronze medal at the World Beer Awards in London last summer, which mainly proves he is ambitious enough to pay an entrance fee for this type of events, but I suppose it will impress the audience he is trying to reach - being the common local Belgian beer drinker, I presume. Opens with a lot of hissing, but doesn't gush. Thick and frothy, thickly 'papery' lacing, irregular, egg-white, creamy and very stable head over a misty golden blonde beer with lightly ochre-ish tinge, teeming with minute, darker dead yeast dots. Classic Belgian artisanal tripel aroma of ripe banana, strong 'coriander seed soap', butter, unripe pear, fresh camomile flowers, old white bread, powder sugar, baker's yeast, apricot, raw 'witloof', hot waffles, hints of cumin, spoiled potato mash, quite pronounced abbey cheese (deteriorating hops, in other words), pond water, egg yolk, withering lettuce, young 'jenever'. Crisp onset, banana ester but not too bubblegummy (though still a little bit), hints of pear, peach and a bit of starfruit soapiness, sweetish with souring edges, made more sour by a very sharp, almost painfully numbing amount of overcarbonation, very minerally. Full, lean mouthfeel, bready malt middle with ongoing esteriness but not overly so, cereally too with sharper grainy edges, overcarbonation keeps stinging till the finish, fizzing away on the roof of the mouth. Cumin seed-like phenols are highlighted by the expected 'dusty old' coriander seed effect, soapy and spicy and quite pronounced, before it is joined by a firm, dried wormwood leaf-like, spicy, floral hoppiness, providing a rooty bitterness capable of almost ruling out the banana ester sweetness and followed by an afterglow of 'jenever'-like, very explicitly warming but not too unpleasantly astringent alcohol, with some bready yeastiness lingering. Yet another easy, banana-estery tripel added to the Belgian beer map, which is already drowning in this kind of beers; the well-developed coriander part only adds further Belgian 'stereotypicality', the carbonation is painfully sharp even for a tripel, the coriander is overstated (as is all too often the case) and the alcohol, quite noticeable in the end, should have been better hidden even in this type of beer. That said, however, I have to admit that I had way worse tripels from new Belgian micro breweries and this one at least carries a confident, long-lasting, resolute amount of hop bitterness in its tail so apparently decided not to opt for the more popular, sweeter and even easier side of the overcrowded Belgian tripel population. I get that this guy wants to be a player on the traditional Belgian market and in that sense, this beer does what it is supposed to do. Could have been a lot worse, free of serious off-flavours (not even DMS is to be found) and quite pleasantly bitter, albeit in a subtle, 20th-century, noble-hopped way. Quite alright, in all. Just put it in context - and don't be fooled too much by that World Beer Awards medal issue, of course...