Brewmaster's Selection Wild Quadrupel

Geproefd met Roelzie1986, Inoven en Benzai. Het is een donker bruin bier met een volle wat fruitige smaak.

Pours dark brown, nearly black. Small, creamy, mildly off-white head. Smell is lactic sour, fleshy, dark malts. Taste is full, sharp, acidic, even more so by the addition of the acidity of the dark malts. Some fruity esthers, very thin, yet medium high carbo.

The third installment in this Brewmaster's Selection series, where classic Belgian beer styles are submitted to the Brettanomyces treatment - interesting, and too bad I missed the first two, hopefully I can still obtain them somewhere. This is the new quad in the series, with a very creamy and dense, yellowish beige, stable, very tightly 'membrane'-lacing head and a very, very dark chestnut brown colour with hazy wine red edges - but in practice as good as opaque black, looking almost stout-like. Aroma of raisins soaked in brown rum, lots and lots of caramel (sauce), treacle, dates, damp earth, a hint of liquorice, leather, walnuts and light hay-, cloth-, leather- and sherry-like notes which represent the Brett part. Sweet onset, lots of candied fig and dried banana as can be expected from a quadrupel, black cherries and treacle-like residual brown sugariness, bit cloying at first even, with a slight beef broth-like umami accent for balance; carbonation is on the fizzy side. Thick and almost syrupy mouthfeel, creamy, with a thick layer of caramelly malts, their sweetness accentuated by the residual brown sugars, deeply nutty and eventually a bit chocolatey too, with very softly bittering toasty edges towards the end. This bitterish-sweet effect reminds me more of a Scotch than a true quadrupel actually, but it matches well with a mildly peppery hop bitter note in the end, and with a long, warming, rum-like alcohol effect; light sherry and leather notes retronasally remind of the Brett factor again, but subtly so. I entered this beer here as a "wild ale" rather than a quadrupel 'pur sang' in order to keep in line with the same classification given to the earlier two Brewmaster's Editions, but the wild aspect in this young sample remains very limited - no worries though, I'm sure the wild yeast will develop more and more over time as it tends to do, slowly but thoroughly eating away all those sugars and releasing its own aromatic qualities; I therefore must find a bottle of this to store away for a year or so, see how it evolves. As for the basic beer itself: clearly this old family brewery had the intention to make it as rich and thick as possible for the style, as this is clearly a very generous beer in terms of maltiness, more so than average for the style, resulting in an unusually dark colour, creamier mouthfeel and softly bittering dark malt features, which in the end are a bit reminiscent of a Scotch rather than a classic Belgo-Dutch quadrupel. In all, rich, thick, interesting and generous beer, which I'd love to revisit at an older age, with more of the Brett effect seeped in.