15 December 2019. At Brouwbar, Ghent. Shared with Anke! Pours hazy dark golden with a lasting, small, foamy, off-white head. Aroma of gooseberry, unripe mandarin, lemon peel, straw, yeast, pear, funk, I might add a faint 'Orval'-like touch to that. Taste has sourish gooseberry, lemon & unripe mandarin, sweetish fruity undercurrent with basic grapefruity, piney bitterness. Dryish, piney hoppy finish, lingering sourish fruit, yeast & bread returning retronasally. Medium body, oily texture, fizzy carbonation. Brouwbar creates a lot of accessible Ales but does a fine job at delivering them with an unexpected feat.

13/XII/19 - on tap @ Brouwbar (Gent), BB: n/a - (2019-2136)

Clear blond beer, small creamy white head, stable, bit adhesive. Aroma: lots of ripe banana, malty, some cardboard, bit herbal, dusty, cloves. MF: soft carbon, medium to light body. Taste: lots of banana, cloves, weird kind of sourness. Aftertaste: more sourish, red berries, soft bitterness, more banana, floral touch, weird, cloves, acidic finish, not my kind of beer…

‘Generic’ pale ale by Brouwbar but distinguished by making use of ‘wild hops’, so the botanical plant species Humulus lupulus (common here in woodlands, forest edges and so on), not any of its many cultivated varieties normally used in brewing – an interesting idea. Off-white, thin but mousy, opening head, hazy peachy, bit ‘dirty’ orange blonde robe. Aroma of fresh oranges, honey, sweetclover, tulips, caramel, lychee, minerals, sugared bread, ripe pear, sweet cherry tomato touch. Fruity onset in the typical clean, streamlined way I am used to from this brewpub, vaguely hinting at ripe pear, melon and lychee, lively and minerally carbonation, slick cereally and lightly caramelly malt body with a very light nutty touch, ending with only very mild hoppiness, a tad resinous and clearly floral (like sweetclover flowers), seemingly accentuating the beer’s own fruitiness with tones of apple, pear and melon, while actual bitterness remains very, very soft. Unexpectedly ‘unbitter’ for a modern pale ale – clearly wild hops contain way less alpha acids than its culvitated varieties, which should come as no surprise since those varieties are of course specifically selected and bred for their alpha acids; the hops do add an elegant, melon- and pear-like fruitiness I never saw coming. Interesting experiment in which the lack of alpha acids kind of takes away the whole APA / IPA paradigm one expects upon reading ‘pale ale’ these days – putting it closer to ‘historical’ English pale ale, in a sense…