Esdeepeeken Special hop
Boelens in Belsele, East Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪
Belgian Style - Strong Ale Regular Out of Production|
Score
6.69
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tderoeck (22711) reviewed Esdeepeeken Special hop from Boelens 9 years ago
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 6.5
Imported from my RateBeer account as Boelens Esdeepeeken Special hop (by Boelens):
Aroma: 7/10, Appearance: 4/5, Taste: 6/10, Palate: 2/5, Overall: 13/20, MyTotalScore: 3.2/5
3/XI/16 - 33cl bottle from a trade @ home - BB: 16/XI/16 (2016-1269) Thanks to Alengrin for the trade!
GUSHER ALERT!
Clear dark blond to orange beer, huge fizzy aery crackling off-white head, pretty stable, adhesive, leaving some lacing in the glass. Aroma: sourish, brett notes, lemony, thinking about an infection here... Pretty funky, bit grassy, reminds of Orval, actually. MF: very lively carbon, too much. Taste: definitely getting some brett now, wild yeast, sourish, pretty bitter, grapefruit touch, grassy, some fruity notes. Aftertaste: yeasty, bitter, some banana, bit medicinal, quite alcoholic, wild yeast, grassy, bit dirty, wonder if the infection is intentional or not. It sort of works, but not completely...
Alengrin (11609) reviewed Esdeepeeken Special hop from Boelens 9 years ago
Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 8
The guys from SDP in Sint-Niklaas already commissioned a tripel from Boelens last year - with only minor differences with Boelens’ own Tripel Klok - and with ’hop forward’ being trendy in 21st-century Belgium, it comes as no big surprise that this ’tripel hop’ version has now joined it. Not dubbed ’tripel hop’ though, so the number of hop varieties used remains unclear. Thinly cobweb-lacing, snow white, moussy head with good ’edge retention’ and thin patches of foam remaining in the middle; clear warm ’old gold’ colour with somewhat salmon pinkish hue and minute bits of yeast here and there, getting more numerous as the bottle progresses, eventually becoming a deeper ’dirty’ orange with a sediment of darker yeast bits at the bottom. Aroma of dry hay, dried apricot, field flowers, bread crust, straw, peach, toast, old ’jenever’, old paper, turnip, light green banana, unripe gooseberry, very old dry curry powder, earthy potato peel, white pepper. Crisp, fruity onset, the typical Belgian hints at gooseberry and peach, but low in banana ester, sweetish and sourish, spritzy carbo but actually fitting in well for a beer like this. Some spicy phenols dastardly creep up from behind and accompany the fruity esters over a middle phase of pleasantly bready, slightly caramelly malts, sweetish, but countered with bitterness at the right moment, when an earthy, spicy, floral, herbal hoppiness penetrates the whole, leaving behind a resinous, drying bitterness and lovely floral old ’noble’ hop aromas retronasally, along with a late but effective glow of warming, ’jenever’-like alcohol. I’ve seen more than one attempt at ’hopping up’ a tripel just because it is trendy in Belgium these days, but this one, I think, does it just about right; the regular tripel is decent enough, but this extra dosis of firm, proud, old European hops makes it a lot better - at least to hopheads. Sure, it remains very Belgian in its earthiness, yeastiness and phenols, but in that particular segment which should be categorized separately as "Belgian IPA", this is a very decent one in my book.