Moinette Ambrée

Bottle 750ml - thought I was buying the Brune tbh. Didn’t know there was a new one. Didn’t have any foie gras but it went well with duck live mousse toast. Clear amber with an off white head that lasts very well. Aroma of baking bread, prunes, soil, mild spices. Medium bodied, medium high carbonation. Malty with bread crusts, dried fruit. A little sourness like cherry vinegar. Dough and insistent spices. Alcohol is well hidden. Not all that sweet with a dryish and quite bitter finish. This sort of beer can be a bit dull, but this has that Dupont thing: refined yet still rustic. A fair bit of sediment but it’s surprisingly easy to keep out of the second glass.

0.33l bottle. Hazy orange body with a white head. Aroma of dark sugar, caramel, cherries and a hint of vinegar. Taste of orange zest, dark sugar, sour cherry and some dried fruits. Nice beer.

330 ml. bottle. BBF 04/2019. An almost puzzlingly classical release from Dupont given their recent Lost Abbey collaboration & the current climate. Further proof that tradition still reins supreme at Dupont I suppose. Dark hazy amber, creamy fading tanned head. Nose is lightly metallic, wet leaves, honey, metallic dark bread malts, wet forest, dark fruits. Taste is old leaves, honey, lightly metallic, wet forest, old dark bread malts, sugar, wet herbal, most BE yeast imaginable, ultra BE profile,... Soft carbonation, honey, lightly metallic, wet leaves, faintest wort. A very solidly made ultra Wallonian Belgian beer, this would have impressed back in the late 1980 - mid 1990 I suppose, these days it is a puzzling release. It feels like Dupont is teaching me a history lesson, I am getting massive flash back from my early beer tasting adventures +/- 2009. This beer harks clearly way further back, way before my time. I am almost inclined to think that this is bound to weird out modern beer geeks but I assume that modern beer geeks have no clue as to who Dupont is. Food pairing suggestion includes Foie Gras, good luck getting an USA beer geek to eat that.

The first new addition to the classic Moinette range in a quarter of a century, strange Dupont has waited so long with this actually, as the triangle of blonde - ambrée - brune is about as stereotypical as it gets in Wallonia. From a 33 cl bottle. Thick and frothy, tightly ’membranous’ lacing, egg-white, dense head, retaining a high degree of stability on top of a misty, warm amberish orange-peach coloured beer, showing a ’fog’ of yeast and protein dots from the start, a fog perturbed by columns of lively fizz rising up from the bottom; deeper orange (but still not ’reddish’ amber) with sediment, with beige dead yeast residue sinking to the bottom of the glass. Rustic aroma of ripe peach, stewed red apple, ripe banana (without the offensive bubblegum, that is), cooked carrot, white pepper, dusty dry earth, straw, some caramel, unripe peach, ripe walnut, toasted bread, acacia honey, old dried peppermint leaves, ripe pear peel, cloth, old cloves, some grass, dried apricot, brown bread crust, fresh croissants, old ginger powder, dry hay, sweet potato and, far away in the background, a faint whiff of DMS (unpleasantly sulfuric cooked vegetables). Fruity esters in the onset, lots of peach, pear and a hint of purple gooseberry, sweet banana too but not overpowering the rest, with a sourish undercurrent but very softly so; medium carbonation, some minerally effects, soft and ’fluffy’, smooth mouthfeel. Fruitiness continues elegantly and restrainedly over a walnut bread-like malt middle with soft doughy and faintly sweetish caramelly edges and a slightly more pungent toastedness in its core, never becoming overly ’toastily’ bitter; spicy phenols set in right before the finishing phase, which otherwise includes an earthy, mildly peppery, slightly resinous, floral hop bitterness and a dash of warming, generically gin-like alcohol. Yeast lingers, in ’palpable’ breadiness and in spicy phenols, but never goes over the top; the drying, resinous and eventually even ’deeply’ tonic water-like hop bitterness becomes all the more enduring after swallowing, with the yeasty effects and maltiness as its allies, providing some complexity. I always regret the presence of DMS in any beer but in this case, I guess it disappoints me even more than usual - but then, I admit that I am overly sensitive to it and the rest of this beer is in perfect condition, well-balanced and expressive enough for what one would expect from an ancient - and ’authentic’ - farmhouse brewery. An amber-hued ’strong saison’, basically, but the nutty and caramelly aspects of it lend it a somewhat ’softer’ profile than one would normally expect from a saison. It seems this brewery can only do saison, but they do it to utmost perfection, to the extent that all of their non-saison beers, which probably includes this ’Ambrée’, all have something more or less saison-like. This one is no exception and more or less corresponds with my expectations. Very good old school Belgian, with an elegant balance of sweet and bitter, adorned with spicy notes. Quite nice actually and a perfect beer to introduce people to the Wallonian ’Ambrée’ substyle (if ever there was one).

A reddish brown beer, a head is big and blond. Aroma has dried fruitness with dark notes, quite strong spicyness, maltyness of waffels, some sweetness. Taste has fruitness, strong spicyness and earthy sourness, some alcohol. Medium bodied, high carbonation. The aroma is still nice but the taste is disappointment, too much of alcohol and also the tartness isn’t balanced.

F: huge, off-white, average to good retention. C: dark orange, amber, hazy. A: malt, caramel, orange peels, candy sugar, dried fruits, banana, raisins, yeast, light booze. T: very malty, dried fruits, orange peels, spicy, banana, dates, raisins, yeast, candy sugar, floral, medium to full body, medium carbonation, good balanced and enjoyed, 0,33l bottle from Carrefour market - Saint-Michel @ Etterbeek, Brussels.