Groen! Vert! Green!
Kleinbrouwerij De Glazen Toren in Erpe-Mere, East Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪
Belgian Style - Blonde / Pale / Amber Regular|
Score
6.07
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Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 5.5
When I first read the name of this beer on ZBF’s beer list, I reckoned Glazen Toren had changed their ways a bit to dip a toe into the vast craft beer ocean, and crafted some ’careful’ Belgian IPA with green hops or something along those lines. I could not be more wrong: when one of the brewers took the bottle to pour me the 15 cl I had asked for, he ironically stated "we were first thinking about naming it ’Blue’, but that would have made no sense". The true meaning of his words quickly dawned upon me: under a thin, quickly loosening, off-white head shone the greenest beer, or maybe even the greenest consumable liquid I had ever seen. I had a few green beers before, the greenest of them all being Fantôme’s Magic Ghost, but this was even more ’poisonous’, bright, pure and eye-catching mint green, like the greenest of green jellies, with a slight haze to it. The brewer would not tell me - and apparently no one else either - what they put into it to make it this green, my best guess is that it was some plain industrial green food colouring applied to a pale blonde beer in much the same way as pale lagers are sometimes coloured bright green for Irish pubs during Saint Patrick’s Day. Aroma of soap, light banana, cereals, apple peel, unripe pear, some DMS (cooked white cabbage); the soapy aspect is notable, but nothing in the nose seems to be linked to the unusual appearance of this beer. Same for the taste: mildly fruity with apple, pear and banana hints, very fizzy carbonation, minerally, cereally and grainy pale malt sweetish middle with a slight metallic edge somewhere, very lightly hoppy finish, a bit dryish and herbal but most of all very soapy, suggesting wheat - maybe a wheat beer (Jan De Lichte in some or other form?) was the starting point here; banana ester sweetness lingers. As some of my esteemed colleagues have argued below, this beer is hard to grasp within the context of this brewery’s normal house style, which is determined by traditionalism and looking back at 20th-century Belgian ale culture (including reviving old school ’tarwedubbels’, Scotch ale and the like). Weird that a traditionalist Belgian brewery comes up with something gimmicky like this, especially considering the fact that this beer does not seem to have any other purpose than look different enough to attract attention at a busy beer festival - I cannot but conclude that this was the only goal for taking a relatively ordinary blonde beer and cheaply making it bright green with green food colouring. Jef Van Den Steen, founder of this brewery and a prominent author on Belgian beer traditions, has notoriously fulminated against the international craft beer movement on public television and seen in that context, this beer is indeed a clear but unexpected statement against it, a one-trick pony only distinctive in its artificially and cheaply added colour rather than a complex, original or in any sense creative craft beer. I’d rather have Glazen Toren keep brewing simply decent tripels and saisons than this...
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 5 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
F: small, white with light green hue, not long lasting. C: crazy green, hazy. A: malt, fruity, a bit of herbal, weak. T: malt, fruity, herbal, peach, medium carbonation, medium body, green is funny here and that’s all, taste nothing special, thanks to tderoeck and kraddel for sharing beers today! Sampled from bottle @ ZBF 2017 Leuven.
Appearance - 10 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 5
Thank you for sharing German speaking RB Crew! Sampled 750 bottle @ ZBF 2017.Glazen Toren might make some very solid Belgian styled beer, great examples in execution where many fail but Jef Van den Steen makes these guys a joke in many ways. This is the guy who made so many public ridiculous comments about the modern "craft" beer scene being unbalanced, all about gimmicks etc. While championing Belgian tirpels as a sessionable & easy drinking style (to whom? alcoholics? sexual deviants?) and now these guys made a beer that looks like nuclear waste from a 60s B-movie. I suppose that I shouldn’t be feeding the troll. This shows their ideas as being worthless, they are capitals whores just like me, they will push a modern dogma of traditionalism if they think that it will preserve their sales figures,... They will just as gleefully release label beers, dry hopped beers & gimmicks like this that appeal to Delirium Party Animals. Anyway,.... Totally unnatural green B-movie / horror movie green, it makes Fantôme Magic Ghost looks golden. This beers looks like it escaped from the movie "Re-Animator" or one of its sequels. Might be a cool stage prop if they every do a remake or if Brian Yuzna decides to make another one. Head is sadly not green but white & small. Beer itself is sadly bland, subpar & boring, expected more from these guys. Dull BE yeast smell, bland, sweet, stale grains. Taste is fizzy lightly vegetable green, poor soap, bubblegum, vegetable, bland BE yeast, far, far too carbonated. Maybe they just coloured a sub par batch of one of their other beers?
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 5 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 5.5
Hell herber Antrunk. Deutlich hefig, etwas bitter, spritzig. Erhöhte Karbonisierung, leicht würzig, okay. 10/8/9/8//8
Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6.5
75 cl bottle. Pours hazy green with a green head. Aroma is estery and slight phenolic. Mild fruity. Bitter, estery and lingering fruity. Medium dry, slight estery and dry finish.
Appearance - 10 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7
At Zythos 2017. Pours aggressively spooky green. Aroma is citric, lemon, some malts. Body is light, citric, tart, hints of sourness, crisp carbonation. Palate is dry. Good.
Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
Glow in the dark neon green colour. The brewer won’t tell me why, it’s a secret. Tastes like a typical witbier. Slight soapy, citrus hop.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 5 | Flavor - 5 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7
So lets be honest here, what kind of bullshit is this ? The brewer that was complaining about imperial stouts being black, lambics being sour, american beer being automatically black. The brewer that sais tradition is king, and westmalle trappist is the best beer there is. The same brewer that called us ratebeerians liars , and sheeps to the herde of hype. This brewer is making a freakin’ green beer. Hype , you’d think ? Or does it contribute to the taste ? If so, there must be a special ingredient thats really a plus, but makes the beer green, right ? Apparently not, since the green ingredient is secret ’otherwise all brewers would make a green beer by next year’ . It doesnt taste anything else than a mediocer blonde beer. I’m not even taking the effort to type over my notes here. Just look up my 13-in-a-dozen average blonde belgian beer rating to see how it tastes, and add the fact I really hate the unrespectfull attitude of this brewer towards the community. Yes, the beer is green. Hahaha. Congratz, you had your five minutes of fame, now lets go back to drinkin real beer.
Appearance - 2 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 8
Sampled @ Zythos Bier Festival 2017. Trübes grünes Bier. Geruch nach grünen Früchten, sehr floral, Tee. Geschmack floral hopfig, grüner Tee, bitter hopfig.