Pours dark chocolaty brown. Smell is sweet, earhty, some caramelly roast. Taste is dry, roasted barley , thick roasty aspects like coffee and chocolate. No real aftertaste. Weak body and high carbo (sigh) as in most Belgian beers. I assume they used sugar to get the ABV up ? As it is added as a sweet stout, I expected lactose. Didn’t get lactose at all.

Like the bière de garde now released by this new Waasland brewery (which is basically a resurrection of a historical local brewery but with a modern, 21st-century range), I tasted this long before the opening as a test brew, shared with Jan. This ’preproduction’ version was a huge gusher and contained a lot of iron in the nose, as if some kind of iron-containing head stabilizer had been applied, but it wouldn’t be fair to rate this beer in its embryonic phase so here we are re-rating it in its commercial form. No gushing anymore, medium thick, creamy, pale yellowish beige head, very stable and dense with a ’membrane’ of tight lacing left behind; initially clear, very dark ruddy brown colour, blackish in its general appearance, but with a ruby red hue visible under bright light. Aroma of diluted coffee grounds, damp clayish soil, dead forest mushrooms, stewed plums, ripe pear, hazelnuts, blueberry juice, lots of caramel, liquorice, peppermint somewhere, moss, cloves, some manure - but no iron anymore. Sweet onset but nothing cloying, just your average Belgian dubbel-like dried fig, light banana and pear notes, with a sourish brambleberry accent at its sides; smooth, bit creamy mouthfeel, medium carbonated. Very nutty malt middle with an immediate toastiness to it, bittersweet but in a superficial kind of way, caramelly too, with still a thin metallic edge to it; more coffee grounds bitterness towards the finish but never shifting to the mouth-filling roasted bitterness one would expect from a stout in general - nor bringing any of the lactose creaminess one would expect from a typical sweet stout. Very earthy finish, juicy nuttiness persisting, clove-like phenols and a late dash of earthy, leafy, notably herbal hop bitterishness, yeasty and a bit doughy too, with that thin metallic accent continuing. Late bitterness, but more from hops than from roastedness. Clearly well-intended and an improvement compared with its pre-commercial self, but still not too impressive, a sweet stout the old-fashioned way, not far removed from ’dinosaurs’ à la Van Steenberge’s Wilson Mild Stout, Callewaert Extra Stout or the late Louwaege Stout. Alternatively put: in all their efforts of breaking with 20th-century traditions and introducing American craft beer styles into the Waasland region, these guys managed to do the opposite of their own intentions and created an Anglo-Flemish sweet stout of a particular substyle that had its heydays three generations ago... Drinkable though, if you keep this historical background in mind, but honestly I think this is not quite what they were up to and as with most of their other beers, this needs some restyling and technical finetuning.