Small but rather stable off-white head over orange-ochre beer. Honey, but in a strange, dry, aged way, honingbollen . Dry, seems pretty attenuated with just the non-fermentables of the honey left. Felt, dried yellow fruit, dry sweets. Medium bodied, very slick, good carbonation. Better than decent.

Had this one before a couple of years ago but at the request of Craftmember, now re-rating from a comparative tasting: a 75 cl bottle from March 2017 versus a 33 cl bottle from November 2016, apparently each made with a different (local) honey. In general, a beer with a moussy, thickly lacing, egg-white and well-retaining head, a bit more loose and less stable on the 33 cl than on the 75 cl, over a warm peach blonde beer with amberish hue, lightly hazy at first but slowly shifting to a mud pool-like ochre as the sediment is gradually added. The 33 cl version looks a tad paler than the 75 cl version. Both have hints of bread, orange peel, peach, dried apricot, recognisable honey, red apple, caramel, dough, chestnut, camomile, baker’s yeast and dried herbs in the nose, with the 33 cl more ’bright’ and floral than the 75 cl, which comes across as more bready, more caramelly and more ’candied orange’-like, suggesting that perhaps a darker variety of honey has been used; the 33 cl also has more actual honey aroma. Fruity, mildly estery onset, dried apricot, apple and peach, crisp and vivid, with the 33 cl a bit more ’fresh’ (in spite of being older) and radiant, with a sharper, more coarse carbonation and a tad more sourishness than the 75 cl. Pleasantly bready malt sweetish middle, the sweetness accentuated by an elegant caramelly edge as well as by residual sugary sweetness which I assume is a remainder of the honey - with again the 75 cl being more ’sedate’ and more rounded than the 33 cl. This delicate sweetness lingers in the finish without ever becoming cloying, balanced by the breadiness of both malts and yeast (the latter especially after adding the sediment, obviously, even a bit ’clay-like’ in the very end especially in the 75 cl); an earthy, rooty hop bitter touch shows up at the very end and provides background structure against the sweetness. Its bittering properties are more obvious and outspoken after adding the sediment (no surprise, of course) and more so in the 75 cl than in the 33 cl. In all, I’d recommend this from a 75 cl bottle, which is a bit ’deeper’ and better balanced than the 33 cl. A pleasant enough beer especially in the context of southwestern France; could pass for any Belgian honey ale, really - if I hadn’t known that this is brewed by an Irishman in the Dordogne, I could have easily believed that this was made by some traditional Belgian ale brewery.