Kerel Original
VBDCK Brewery in Tielrode, East Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪
Belgian Style Regular|
Score
6.78
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tderoeck (22711) reviewed Kerel Original from VBDCK Brewery 7 years ago
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 8
Imported from my RateBeer account as VBDCK Kerel Original (by VBDCK Brewery):
Aroma: 7/10, Appearance: 4/5, Taste: 8/10, Palate: 3/5, Overall: 16/20, MyTotalScore: 3.8/5
29/I/19 - 33cl bottle from a trade, shared with the misses @ home, BBE: 2019 - (2019-142) Thanks to Alengrin for the trade!
Pretty funny how this brewery, that's always making fun of tradition, old school beer styles, etc... is now themselves going back to their roots, and making a beer with a story based on it's past. :p Not sure if they got the irony of this concept themselves. :p
Clear dark orange to amber red beer, huge thick creamy off-white head, pretty stable, bit adhesive, leaving some lacing in the glass. Aroma: malty start, bit fruity, yeast, banana, some marzipan, little spicy, caramel, bit oxidized maybe. MF: lively carbon, medium body. Taste: malty start, bit sweet, some caramel, banana, bitter, spicy, coriander notes. Aftertaste: bit spicy, some citrus, fruity, banana, nice bitterness, bit of an alcohol burn, actually this is pretty nice.
Joren Monnens (3486) ticked Kerel Original from VBDCK Brewery 7 years ago
Sloefmans (15389) reviewed Kerel Original from VBDCK Brewery 7 years ago
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 8
Slow-building to small, yellowish head, dwindling over hazy brownish to amber tinted golden beer, not very carbonated. Chocolate, dark green leaves, caramel. Some hints at wild yeasts (Pediococcus?), faint suggestion at sourishness, lactic acid. Sourish-bitterish; again notes of bitter chocolate; vegetable bitter too. I get again a mix of more classical Saccharomyces with wild yeasts (pedio, brett, ?), and lactic acid. Finish has a faint arachide streak. Despite lean body and acidthinning, presents a certain chewy aspect. Again long-lasting bitterishness, more vegetable than hoppy. Problem is that after a while, it highlights get dulled, and it does not really incite to drink more,even acquiring some uneasy liquorice-like sweetness. Yet, I rather like this, as it is quite original and far from the trodden paths, new and old. IMO, it might have benefitted from a more generous maltgift. Looking forward to their other creations! Thanks to Liliane and Eddy! 7/4/7/3/15
Alengrin (11609) reviewed Kerel Original from VBDCK Brewery 8 years ago
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 5.5
This enthusiastic young brewery in my home region of the Waasland, the north eastern corner of the Eastern Flanders province, is a peculiar case: what they basically try to do, is renovate and revive a local brewery that closed its doors in the sixties, but at the same time apply the original Kerel brand name to new, non-traditional craft beers. They claimed from the start that they managed to literally resurrect yeast DNA from the original beer and use it in their beers - but this one, their eighth official creation so far, is the first where this original yeast strain, woken up from the dead with the help of science, is actually used; the beer as a whole is intended to recreate the original Kerel beer probably only the senior citizens of the village of Tielrode may remember. Bottle straight from the brewery, with a new style of label. Irregular, pale greyish white, sparsely lacing head, thinnish but settling as a stable moussy ring and some 'shreds' in the middle, over an initially lightly hazy, warm orange blonde beer with vague vermillion hue - qualifying as pure amber indeed, turning into a deeper, more misty, almost metallic amber with sediment, the sediment produced by this 'zombie' yeast so enthusiastically described on the label. Aroma of freshly baked bread, peanuts, dried apple peel, a lot of obnoxious DMS (cooked cabbage) that just won't go away, raw carrots, spoiled vegetable soup, ripe apricot, banana mush, cooked turnips, faint hints of damp earth, ketchup, old cookies, sweetclover. Fruity, lightly estery onset, hinting at peach, apple and banana but fairly restrained and cleanish, low in sweetness with a sourish touch, softly carbonated, slick and thinnish body, vague metallic accents at the sides. Slim peanutty and bit caramelly malt body with softer bready and very subtly toasty aspects to it, bread crust-like in a thin and subtle way, with a slightly resiny effect in the end. Only light and shy floral and earthy hoppy notes in the finish, not providing much bitterness at all - the result of which is that the finish lacks in 'body' and fades away a bit watery, with that thin nutty and - more pleasant - cookie crumble-like malt sweetishness lingering; the hops do show up very late, depositing a mildly spicy bitterishness on the root of the tongue. The DMS is strong and disturbing here - I am allergic to it - but otherwise, this does remind me of the type of old school, English (Bass!) inspired pale ales that were immensely popular in Belgium in the sixties. I assume the original Kerel was such a beer, one of the countless regional 'Belgian pale ales' (or amber ales, if you will), not far removed from e.g. Palm Spéciale, of which this Kerel Original is very reminiscent. The problem is that we do not live in the sixties anymore - beer has undergone an incredibly vast amount of changes and evolutions precisely from the seventies onwards - and apart from old folks still drinking Palm and the like out of habit, I am a bit in doubt whether this experiment will find any audience at all. This beer is a far reaching throwback in time - it's been a long time since I had anything like this, it reminds me of the previous century, when I was utterly oblivious to beer and drank Palm and other, similar Belgian pale ales by the gallon. Anachronistic is the best way to describe this, as if you'd put an ancient Roman artefact in a modern arts museum - interesting as a standalone experiment perhaps, but I'm sure the people that drank the original Kerel regularly, have long been gone now, bless them. In this day and age, if you put forward "yeast" as the defining feature of your new beer, craft beer people expect something quite opposite to this - the yeast doesn't even add a lot of character here, which is perfectly in line with the rather 'clean' and low-profile yeast strains used for English - and indeed Belgian - pale ales back in the time when this was a local success. I need a time machine back to the 21st century after this but could have appreciated it for what it is, if it weren't for that DMS, which I am highly sensitive to. So far the least successfull of all the Kerel beers for me, including the test brews I had before they officially started - but I still support what they do, and if the rumours are correct, their next release will be quite the opposite of this beer's bland simplicity... Enough said!