Summer beer from Oude Maalderij made at Gaverhopke and lo and behold, we have a gusher again. Not a small one even: the foam ejaculated from the bottle with great force and kept creeping out of the bottle for five minutes on end. The remainder of the beer, which I managed to capture in my tasting glass, showed an enormous behemoth of a head as a result of it, ’papery’ in structure, slowly collapsing, thickly lacing, coarse and off-white in colour. The beer itself has a cloudy amber colour with somewhat pinkish hue and a fog of yeast suspended in it; it becomes completely murky, with an orangey brown colour after adding the deposit. Aroma of home made apple juice, walnuts, toasted bread, freshly cut nettles, some peach and banana, honey, white bread dough, sourish hogweed, cloth, earth, and, importantly, unpleasant menure as well as a lot of volatile but obnoxious glue- and at some point even naphtaline-like phenols which keep bothering me. Estery onset, peach, banana, overripe gooseberry, sourish orange peel, medium carbo, sweetish caramelly malts with a toasted accent, bit nutty, yeasty with some lightly astringent alcohol already from the middle onwards, earthy and leafy hop bitterness in the end, phenolic, spicy and drying. The alcohol is a bit wry, which should never be the case, let alone in a 7% ABV beer. Something has gone very wrong again here - I admit the old Gaverhopke beers (under the former brewer) were horrible, but they still had a kind of beauty in all their ugliness; the new Gaverhopke seems to be the other way around. The taste as such is manageable alright, fruity and malty like so many other Belgian ales, but I passionately hate this extreme degree of gushing. Not too much ’soleil’ here, rather a direct route to the dreary, mudsoaked autumn days which are upon us in Belgium.

Bottle picked up at Dranken Geers, Oostakker, Nr Gent, Belgie consumed at home Thursday 26th March 2015 Cloudy amber with a white fluffy head. Some candi sugar, with a spicy edge, in fact too sweet, caramel also and a bit of corn flake. The aroma has a rather industrial chemical taint. Not great. A4 A3 T4 P2 OV 8 2.1

Towering, ultradense & -fine yellowish head over fully hazy darker amber beer. Weird herbal/greenery nose, canned veggies. Awful vegetal/insectoid flavour; agressive, but unaromatic hops, yeast byproducts; finish however being sugary sweet. Very slick, near fizzy carbonation. Route du Soleil??? Traffic jams at the toll gates, yes! I’m staying home this year. But not with this, ugh!