Koeruir van Sinaai

Thank you Alengrin! 330 ml. bottle sampled @ “Belgian Ticks Tasting Ghent”. Dark amber, huge creamy white head. Nose is sweet green unripe banana, candy, sweet, massive sugar,… Taste is massive yeast, banana, green banana, sugar, chemical, dough, sweet dough helps it a bit,… Banana, soap, green banana, yeast body,… Best of the triptych but still poor.

Imported from my RateBeer account as Donum Ignis Koeruir van Sinaai (by Brouwerij Donum Ignis):
Aroma: 6/10, Appearance: 2/5, Taste: 6/10, Palate: 2/5, Overall: 11/20, MyTotalScore: 2.7/5

21/VII/17 - 33cl bottle @ Belgian Ticks Tasting (home) - BB: n/a, but let's assume it's close to the other bottle in the series / same box: 16/III/19 (2017-1089) Thanks to Alengrin for sharing the bottle!

Clear orange beer, aery irregular white head, unstable, dissipates quickly, non adhesive. Aroma: lots of sweet ripe banana, fruity, some caramel. MF: lively carbon, medium body. Taste: lots and lots of banana, yeast, some citrus, pretty sugary, yeast. Aftertaste: more banana and yeast and that's pretty much it. Lacking malt flavour and depth...

Pours darker blonde, not very clear. Smell is rather malty. fresh, yet very thick. Taste is sweet, malty, rather thick body, medium bitter, high carbo. Very , very yeasty.

The oldest record of the town of Sint-Niklaas, basically the capital of the Waasland region between Ghent and Antwerp, dates from 1217 and eight centuries later, beer is obviously a good way to celebrate this fact. The three breweries of the city, none of them located in the centre but all of them in the ’suburbs’, have therefore joined forces and have each produced a 7% Belgian blonde in honour of this birthday, each to their own abilities. All three beers, with a similar label designed by the same artist, were presented in a pop-up store in Sint-Niklaas’ main shopping street today, and passengers got the chance to have a sample of each before deciding to buy a sixpack. I have been living in the Waasland area my entire life so I support the idea of these three breweries working more closely together from now on - unity is strength, to quote the ultimate Belgian motto. This ’Koeruir’ (local dialect for racing cyclist) is Donum Ignis’ interpretation, the micro brewery known for Noorder- and Zuiderbierke, located in Sinaai; I get the idea of real beer from Sinaai on the label since Van Steenberge (in the adjacent Meetjesland region) has promoted a ’Sinaaise Bok’ for this village - an alias of Augustijn, of course. Koeruir opens with a lot of pressure, but there is no gushing. Frothy, regular, egg-white head, cobweb-lacing, quickly reduced to a moussy ring and a couple of small islands in the middle, on top of an immediately hazy, deeply (almost amberish) peach blonde beer. Aroma of banana and chewing gum, melting powder sugar, honey, some caramel, sweetbread, cooked carrot, coriander seed, soap, yellow raspberries, sweet white grape, warm apple cake, ginger, white pepper, clove-like phenols, dandelion leaves but also a far less inviting hint of that horrible DMS (overcooked white cabbage), quite severely so at first, but luckily fading after a while. Spritzy onset, overcarbonated in fact, handing out mean ’stings’ to the surface of the tongue and adding unnecessary sourishness to an otherwise sweet banana-ridden ester profile with side notes of peach, ripe pear and strawberry; mouthfeel is evidently coarsened by this overly fizzy carbonation. Lots of residual ’white’ sugary sweetness, lending a honeyish colour to an otherwise bready, slightly caramelly malt middle with soft, ’fluffy’, bit soapy wheat; the esters continue over this, along with spicy phenols (those cloves again), eventually merging in a coriander aspect which - though even unadvertized on the label - adds a lot of strong soapy bittersweet spiciness to the finish. Banana ester is so strong here that it lingers even beyond the finish, ripe banana clinging to the throat after swallowing, inadequately balanced by a vague background dash of earthy hop bitterness and even made worse by badly hidden, ’jenever’-like alcohol in the very end. Bothersome DMS, too much coriander and a completely boring Belgian blonde profile: this brewery has done better things. Too bad these breweries didn’t make the effort to brew a more challenging beer style - thàt could have helped to put the sleepy Waasland area on the map - so I can only hope that the future collaborations of Boelens, Paenhuys and this Donum Ignis have a lot more in store than this.