Bottle - Light sweet fruity notes with cocoa. Cloudy dark brown with a nice beige head. Light booze, touch a fruity with a bit of a lacklustre finish.

Dark brown. The sherry and wood come through in the aroma, and the dark sugars on the base beer. A bit fizzy and thin. The sherry comes through nicely, but the base is definitely light, and in this case the wine takes over, and there's even less of the base beer character. In terms of size and complexity, it's definitely a let down.

Flanders mocno owocowo-drewniany, ze sladami czekolady, chleba, pieczonego jablka ii drewna. To drewno daje takise posmak, taniczny. Ale bdb

Very dark brown colour. Aroma and flavour are very sweet with dried fruits. A little dry and woody too.

At Ghent Beer Festival 2017. Cloudy dark brown with a small, tan head. The aroma contains wine, porto, vinegar, sherry, some roasted malt. It tastes light sweet, light vinegar-like sour and medium roasted bitter, especially into the finish. Medium body, oily texture, soft carbonation. An unusual Imperial Stout; quite complex and likeable.

No head but some ochre rim over black beer. Sweet, alcoholic nose, with sweat, meat, vanilla, oak. Meaty esters obvious, alcoholsweetness, human sweat. Well-bodied, slick, alcoholheat. Feels a bit thin for what it is supposed to be. Not much sherry either. 7/4/7/3/15

Vliegende Paard has been ageing Marius, Andy Dewilde’s take on imperial stout, on sherry barrels for months and I have been looking forward to the end result all that time, so I’m glad it finally reached my tasting table today - in a generous 37.5 cl ’geuze’ bottle with crown cap (a cork would not look bad on this bottle, actually, but anyway). Opens with a hissing sound but no gushing. Medium thick, pale yellowish beige, creamy head, leaving pretty ’veils’ of lacing and quickly showing gaps in the middle, but retaining well, over a very dark beer, blackish in general appearance, but actually a very sombre bronze with hazy mahogany brown edges. Strong, quite complex and ’noble’, inviting bouquet of rum-soaked raisins and candied figs, medium dry sherry, wet leather, quite some phenolic cloves but not over the top here, wet oak wood including that typical ’vague vanilla’ oak tends to breathe, butterscotch, dried prunes, some liquorish and indeed ’dropwater’, black cherries, cassis, shoe polish, fainter hints of dry earth, whisky, pipe tobacco, damp tree leaves, Moroccan krachel, ginger powder, walnut liqueur. Fruity, sweetish onset but not exagerratedly estery, banana but in a refined, candied kind of way, pear, raisins, some blackcurrant sourishness underneath, but almost completely lacking in the (lightly) ’meaty’ umami character I found in (the first batch of) the basic beer; supple, ’full’ body with quite lively carbonation, feeling more like a hefty quad than an imperial stout, falling short in ’oiliness’ for that, like the basic beer. Stings of carbonation remain scarce and very subtle, while dried fruit sweetness and a thin berry-ish sourish factor travel on top of a big, mouth-filling malt middle with bready and caramelly character, developing bittering toastedness towards the end. Actual roasted bitterness comes in very late all the way in the finish, where it blends with a peppery, earthy hop bitter touch, drying woody tannins though not overly so, and the expected wave of alcohol, bringing forth an accent of dry sherry as well as a lot of boozy, peppery heat and a slight astringency on the root of the tongue. Toasted malt bittersweetness, dried fruit flavors, some sherry and this strong alcohol warmth combine to form the last impression after swallowing. Quite complex, warming sipper, very well-made indeed, with the sherry barrel adding oaky and - evidently - drying sherryish aspects to an otherwise very decent beer; I only had Marius very young from tap at a Bruges Bierfestival edition so far, first batch, and apart from a somewhat thin mouthfeel, I must say I was pleasantly surprised by it. I would therefore have to re-rate it in order to get a complete view on it, but in any case I thought it somewhat excelled the level of the many recent Belgian attempts at this prestigious beer style; in this form, I think this is best viewed as something like ’Belgian style imperial stout’ - in other words, a compromise of actual ’impy’ on the one hand and the old familiar trappist-coloured quadrupel on the other hand. Many beers like that have arisen in the past few years and if seen from this perspective, this is certainly among the finest of them, offering a complex and well-developed palate and bouquet in which the sherry barrel ageing has been applied in a well-balanced manner. Expect a highly profiled, classy and generous Belgian sipper of high technical quality here, rather than a smooth, clean and super-intense American BA stout - and then you will not be disappointed. This beer to me is another argument for recognition of a hybrid ’Belgian imperial stout’ style, which would be yeastier, earthier, a tad paler and less oily and thick than Anglo-Saxon imperial stout; heck, if the Americans already use this concept (think of Weyerbacher’s Tiny or - implicitly - the Spencer monks’ imperial stout, for example), why shouldn’t we Belgians?

F: thin, off-white, not long lasting. C: dark, opaque. A: dark roasted malt, liquorish, dark cherries, woody, vanilla. T: malty, liquorish, coffee, milk chocolate, dark fruits, full body, low carbonation, good, enjoyed, thanks to tderoeck and kraddel for sharing beers today! Sampled from tap @ ZBF 2017 Leuven.