Waardamse Framboos

Bottle, 5.8%. Lagery aroma with some OK raspberry notes. Hazy deep red colour. Small semi-stable head. The flavour has some sweet raspberry along with a quite citric note and bitterness. Fairly well-balanced, though.

Bottle. Pours hazy reddish brown with airy but stable white head with pinkish touches. Clear aroma of berries and yeast, with some touches of malt. Sweetish flavour of strawberries and malt, with notes of caramel and touches of hops. Acidic, estery and malty aftertaste. Not bad!

Red beer, small head, aroma is raspberry, fruit, saeet, lemonadeish, taste same, sweet, light bitter, ok

Stable fine & dense pink head over cold-hazed deep burgundy beer. Intense fruity nose, partly as the real thing, partly artificial smelling. Bit gassy, malts and a hint towards the wheat. Again fruity, and again not quite the real thing, thinned jam, children's sweets, acidity as a citric afterthought. The acidity relieves the sweetness, jam-like, but cannot overcome the sticky feel. Syrupy, partly masked by the good carbonisation. Medium bodied, oily. Hmm. Not fully conviced.

‘Framboise’ by Stokhove, in fact a witbier with added sugar and raspberry concentrate (not actual raspberries, as some of the ratings below seem to suggest - perhaps the recipe has changed meanwhile?). Bottle from the Prik & Tik in Zele. Membrane-lacing, medium thick, pale lilac-tinged off-white, slowly dissipating head over a misty ruby red beer with vermillion glow. Aroma of raspberry coulis and grenadine, raspberry ice cream even, sugared tomato juice, pink chewing gum, bread crumbs, background notes of old lemon peel, coriander seed, potato mash. Sugary sweet onset (as feared, I might add), with estery banana and red apple notes drowned in an artificial, almost grenadine-like raspberry flavour with a sourish edge, while at the same time the sugar sticks to the teeth; very sharp, painfully stinging overcarbonation destroys the actual flavour to a large extent – which in this case probably isn’t even a bad thing. Bubblegum- and grenadine-like effects accompany a soapy, wheaty malt basis, with coriander and citrus zest aspects still very recognizable in the finish, as well as a late, brief, bit leafy hop bitterish accent. Tooth-cloying sugariness, however, remains the annoyingly dominant factor. An old school sweet fruit beer the Belgian way, ‘zoete kriek’ with raspberry instead of cherry, but the sugariness and artificial raspberry overload clash with the basic features of the witbier that was used as a base and – even disregarding my old-time aversion of this type of ‘candy beers’ – I am left wondering what has gotten into the brewer’s head to create this… Let’s hope these disgustingly sugared ‘fake’ fruit beers, once immensely popular but fortunately having gone downhill in the past fifteen-odd years, will soon be a thing of the past, as they are no compliment whatsoever for the already struggling Belgian beer culture.

Imported from untappd on 02-05-2020

F: thin, off-pink, not long lasting. C: dark red, hazy. A: raspberries, red fruits, bit lemon. T: sweet raspberries, red berries, aroma is better than taste which is quite simple, medium body and carbonation, bit yeasty. Sample shared with tderoeck, 77ships and Bierridder_S @ Bruges Beer Festival 2018.