5.8

Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 5

The dubbel in this young microbrewery's trinity of blond-dubbel-tripel, steinie bottle from the brewery itself. Medium thick but quickly opening and thinning, yellowish pale beige head, loudly fizzing head eventually all but disappearing over a cloudy caramel brown beer with 'dirty' burgundy hue, looking a bit muddy in the end. Aroma of old brown bread, damp tree leaves, caramel, coriander powder, cooked apple, medlar, light bubblegum, clove, vague background hints of manure, rotting potatoes, DMS and thyme. Fruity onset, sweet but not too cloying, some candi sugar sprinkled over medlar, apple peel and banana impressions, fizzy carbonation with minerally effects (yet, as described above, incapable of maintaining the head), rounded body, sourish undertone with a somewhat 'dirty' edge; caramelly and brown-bready malts, straightforward and sweetened by remnants of candi sugariness which in itself is balanced by this underlying dim sourishness. Old coriander seed powder in the end, paired with a tea-ish herbal hop touch that offers little bitterness; yeasty spicy effects of clove and nutmeg, paired with lingering sweet 'overripe' fruitiness as well as this sourish 'dirtiness'. Teeming with off-flavours and not looking very pretty with its 'badly bound' carbon dioxide and lack of head retention, this feels like an amateur brew concocted in somebody's kitchen - not a beer I would release onto the market in our time and age. The tripel in this series was not all bad, but this one certainly needs work. Oh well, I guess I can still use the leftover bottles of this one in my Flemish stew or something...