New porter / stout (apparently they haven’t been able to make their choice about this yet) from a new beer company located in the northern Kempen region (Turnhout), from a Steini bottle bought at Willems in Grobbendonk. The name is elaborately explained on their website and is linked to the Latin name of the Germanic tribe that once inhabited the region - see the Taxandria website for the whole story. Quite a lot of pressure during opening, but no gusher. Creamy and dense, regular, lightly lacing, pale beige head the colour of which reveals that indeed dark malts have been used, comfortably sitting atop a very dark mahogany brown beer, the true colour being shown only on the sides as its general appearance remains jet black. Aroma of cold black coffee and - low quality - coffee grounds, damp tree leaves on a forest floor in autumn, fried porcini, old dried figs, wet earth and quite some FFF even (manure), butterscotch, cloves, soaking wet shoe leather, old dried bayleaf, burnt toast, elderberry juice, dust, raw green cabbage, mud pool, moldy walnuts, hints of dusty industrially packed pecorino powder, dried blueberries, black tea, stewed cornucopia mushrooms, vegetable stock cubes, cured meat, old dried out apple skin. Fruity onset, bit estery with a touch of banana isoamylacetate but no exagerrated bubblegum flavours, roasted barley sourishness way below, hints of unripe peach and red apple, some blackcurrant sourishness too, medium carbonation, minerally accents; smooth and supple body, bit resinous and mouth-filling, established by a deeply nutty malt character quickly shifting towards toasted bitterness and eventually turning into a cold coffee-like bitter roastedness, but lacking a bit in ’mellow’ chocolate flavours. Lots and lots of ’Belgian’ phenols in the end, fortunately remaining spicy and agreeable instead of descending into chemical or medicinal effects - but still irrelevant and even obnoxious in a beer with clear Anglo-Saxon ambitions. The generic coffee grounds-like roasted bitterness lasts in the end, along with a leafy, herbal, almost black tea-ish hop character adding further - and slightly more vivid - bitterness on top; some of the rounder ’nuttiness’ and dried fruits-like sweetness lingers too, but the alcohol, in all, remains fairly well-hidden, though a wodka-like warmth heating the throat is certainly very detectable; nutty malts, traces of residual (brown) sugar, herbal hops and this very alcohol warmth are what remains after swallowing. Here we go again: an attempt at making an Anglo-Saxon style ’black’ beer drenched in ’belgicism’, way too phenolic, too ’dirty’ and estery and falling short in the ’black (malt) beauty’ one tends to expect from the porter-stout family, at least those who are familiar with the American and English celebrities in this broad segment of beer culture. Modern-era Belgian stout at best, like there are many others now, but ambition is put at the expense of technical and conceptual finesse. Not a bad beer in se, if you look at it, but this needs a lot of rethinking and finetuning before ever coming close to the international standard of stout - heck, the fact that this brewer could not even make up his mind whether this is either a porter or a stout, says enough. It seems a blonde Taxandria beer is afoot now - I’m guessing IPA, curious to see if that one will do away with the clichés of Belgian fermentation, because I am convinced that this is something we need a lot more of in our country, provided we intend to remain relevant in comparison with the rest of the rapidly evolving beer world.