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

Bottle from the brewery. One of Stanium's few regular beers, a less hoppy version of the ordinary Stanium Saison, "to please the average consumer" - clearly a fear for overt hop bitterness is still very much alive in the remote Waasland region, or Belgium in general. Slow gusher, but perfectly manageable. Initially towering high, very loudly crackling head, slowly and gradually collapsing to a medium thick, moussy, egg-white ring and a pattern of flat 'islands' in the middle, leaving little (if any) lacing but in the end vanishing completely; immediately hazy, deep orange-tinged peach blonde robe with dull ochre-ish hue, turning into a raw pear juice-like murkiness especially after the foam has gone. Aroma of canned peach and dito pineapple slices, freshly grated ginger, ripe banana, melting powder sugar, lots of freshly cut red apple, white grapes, soggy sandwiches, very pronounced rainwater aspect, pond water even, equally pronounced fresh mandarin peel, coriander seed, fresh grass and lettuce, raw white cabbage, stale - if not spoiled - plum juice, hard unripe Conférence pear, egg yolk. Fruity, estery onset, lots of red apple and green pear, sweetish with a sourish edge, the sourishness being accentuated by very sharp, fizzy, numbing overcarbonation; aspects of raw pineapple, banana ester (though not so much bubblegum) and apricot as well, something very thinly green olive-like, minerals. Some residual 'white' sugariness remains and lends a honeyish effect to a somewhat meagerly but convincingly bready, somewhat cereally malty middle, while the esters also keep guard, though not overly so. Ends with a rooty hop bitterness, a bit unrefined actually, fresh wormwood leaf-like, in fact not all that different from the regular version - even if, admittedly, more residual sweetness remains here. This rooty, leafy, floral bitterness dominates the back of the mouth under a wave of peachy, pineapple-, pear- and honey-like sweetness, with eventually a cold green Chinese flower tea-like effect, if mildly sugared. Minerally and mildly spicy phenolic hints remain, and so does the sharp overcarbonation. "Redundant" does not even begin to describe this beer: the differences with the regular Stanium Saison are so minute that I would easily mix them up, so what is the point of creating a very subtly sweeter, very subtly less bitter version of a beer that is already very accessible - and very limited in its geographical scope? Clearly the intention was to please customers who find Stanium Saison "too bitter" (dixit the brewer himself), but the basic recipe is only different from its so-called "hoppy" self in minor differences. I think this version clearly has very little purpose, if any at all. Viewed as such, so not taking into account its faintly more bitter brother: sharply overcarbonated with the carbon dioxide not very well 'bound', a tad dirty in the end and, as for its saison ambitions: it's not because you impose a 'French' saison yeast (whatever the French have to do with it is another problem) onto a basic Belgian blonde, that you automatically end up with a saison. It increasingly bothers me that these small Belgian brewers increasingly make abuse of this term without 'feeling' what the style is about - and believe me, there is a reason why any concluding technical description of the style still fails: saison is about a local, rural 'feeling' more than anything else. This, if I ever understood what this feeling is about, is no saison and has virtually no reason to exist next to its (barely) hoppier brother. An inferior version of Stanium Saison, but drinkable. Enough said.