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7

Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7

12th December 2016
Level 42 Bottleshare and no Mark King in sight. Very hazy gold beer, good pale cream colour head. Palate is airy, semi dry and has decent fine carbonation. Softish malts, mildly sweet. Fair bit of seltzer and mildly bitter brett. Nice light winey tang and winey grape. Little grapefruit citrus. Semi dry finish. They packed a lot in to this one.

6.6

Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6.5

Bottle from Dranken Geers, Oostakker, nr Gent, Belgium, consumed at home Monday 26th Boxing Day, December 2016 Pours warm gold with a slight urine type haze, a bubbly white atop. Lemony, but also really hoppy in a very floral way, unusual in some respects with a little parma violet thing going on. It’s sour and tangy. This is an unusual beer, decent, strange and you think that at first it doesn’t meld together very well but give it time, btw Loz says that she is getting brett’, I hadn’t really picked that up but now she’s said it perhaps she’s onto something. A6 A4 T7 P3 Ov13 3.3

7

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 8

Bottle shared in London - many thanks to Kenneth. Pours hazy gold with a frothy, white head. The nose holds melon, grapefruit, moderate funk, lemon peel. Light sweet flavour, dry and musty, with some hay, pine needles, hay, wheat, more funk, tangerine. Light bodied with lively carbonation. Dry finish with some diapers, tangerine rind, more musty funk. Good one.

7.2

Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7

Bottle shared on Level 42 12/12/2016. Many thanks to Padraig for this one. A hazed golden orange coloured pour with a a lasting frothy white head. Aroma is bretty funk, pineapple, funky, petrol. Flavour is composed of semi sweet funky brett, pineapple, tangy, horse, woody, hint of Belgian. Palate is frothy, highish carbonation. Dry finish. Straw. Nice bretty funk.

7.1

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7.5

Bottle thanks to Kenny. It pours hazy dirty blonde with a medium white head. The aroma is sweet, sour, sticky, tangy, juicy, green, sherbet, Irn Bru, marmalade, orange chewits and tang. The taste is crisp, dry, bitter, vinous, woody, leather, alcohol warmth, pine, funk, grassy, very dry, leather and booze with a dry finish. Medium body and moderate + foamy carbonation. Decent.

7.2

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 8

Bottle. Etre Gourmet. Orange gold. Soft haze. Film of lively, white head. Nose is all about the barrel. Very nicely tangy, juicy red grape. There’s a little brett like twang, too, which I’m not sure is intentional, but it’s certainly interesting. Hop presence is quite subtle, although there’s a hint of peach stone in there. Taste is light, tangy bitter. Some dryness. Really crisp mouthfeel. Light and bright. More of the is it or isn’t it brett! Crisp, light bitter finish. Dries out as it goes along. Nice one.

7

Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7

Origame 4, Brabant’s session IPA and among the very first session IPAs ’tout court’ in Belgium, but aged on Fronsac barrels (a red Bordeaux wine) and then dry-hopped again to re-establish the IPA character - unusual concept typifying Brabant’s current experiments with craft beer, but not a bad idea per se. Gusher - quite strongly so. Initially medium sized, regularly shaped, egg-white head quickly thinning and breaking open in instants, eventually reduced to a wafer-thin bubbly ring around the edge and some diffuse patches in the middle; immediately cloudy, pale peach blonde robe with ochre-ish hue which becomes deeper and darker as the bottle is gradually emptied. Aroma indeed reveals the wine barrel ageing and the re-dry-hopping in a more or less equilibrated way, with impressions of fermenting grapes, moldy lemon peel, lime juice, cheese spread, unripe green kiwi, crisp orange peel oil, fermenting green apple, dandelion juice and other bitter garden weeds, sour cream, wood tannins, sourdough, wormwood, old dry ginger root, tonic water, unripe nectarine and some light ’stale sweat’ funkiness of rather obscure origin. Fruity onset with (very) restrainedly sweetish hints of white grape, some apricot and green banana and (much) stronger sourish impressions of gooseberry, redcurrant and unripe plum (including the latter’s wryness), spritzy and gently tingling carbonation and supple, lean, light, somewhat oily mouthfeel, which - thanks to the carbonation - feels fuller than expected for a beer which does not even contain 5% ABV. The hop bitterness becomes apparent at a very early stage while the fruit tartness and wryness - clearly derived from the wine barrels in combination with esters - continues over a soft, lightly bready, bit grainy backbone towards an increasingly bittering finish, becoming notably dry in the end, when the tannins and the somewhat wry fruitiness (or fruit peel effect, so to speak) grow stronger at the same pace as the hop bitterness, which eventually acquires a resinous, tonic water-, dandelion- and dried grapefruit peel-like effect, lasting for quite a long time along with the tannins. Red wine flavor, as is usually to be expected from a wine barrel aged beer, is completely covered by the hop bitterness, which sticks to the back of the mouth and the throat for quite a long time. Perhaps a tad harsh in its rooty, weedy bitterness (almost reminiscent of that Saison des Prairies) which seems to be accentuated by the dry tannin effects, but altogether quaffable, if you like really bitter, dry but alcoholically light beers with a somewhat ’wild’ twist to them. A kind of Belgian IPA, in all, but of quite a unique concept - in fact, this is probably the first barrel aged session IPA I have had to date (I’d have to check but I cannot think of another example at this moment); also ’Belgian’ in its ’messiness’ and - frankly - insufficiently controlled yeastiness, lending it a notably saison-like character, one of the messy kind you either like or dislike. But then there is of course the technical issue of carbon dioxide management, which is unfortunately so often the case with these new Brabants (either too flat or strong gushing), point off for that... Still, I can appreciate this beer for its originality and boldness. The renewed Brabant is hit or miss, it seems, whereas in its old form the beers were a lot less exciting, but at least technically reliable; still mr. Magerat’s new beers keep fascinating me and impressive things have come out of his experiments every now and then (Plato’s Chariot!), so I intend to keep following them.

7.3

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 9

Sampled at Zythos 2016. Thnx for sharing, everyone ! Pours unclear blonde, small white head. Smell is bitter, some oak, bourbon. Taste is bitter, nice and full, some bourbon, mild oak notes ( vanilla, mostly) very interesting, and out of the ordinary, since usually I don’t like the combo between Barrel ageing and IPA’s.