6.4

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 5.5

Hobby brewer in Limburg going commercial with a tripel named after his grandmother's nickname, brewed at Boelens - how on earth does this deserve its own 'brewery' status here? I would have placed this simply under Boelens along with countless other contractors, but anyway: very thick and frothy, cobweb-lacing, off-white, pillowy head resting on an initially clear 'old gold' robe with 'metallic' orange glow and enthusiastic strings of sparkling, turning misty with sediment. Aroma of red apple peel, ripe peach, sugar loaf, honey, young 'jenever', dried banana slices, freshly ironed cloth, dried out brioche bread, sweet cookies, moist white pepper, orange peel, hints of dried camomile, iron, coriander seed, old potatoes, 'herbes de Provençe', unsugared chewing gum, ground peanuts. Sweetish onset, relatively clean with some fruity esteriness of dried banana, apricot and freshly cut red apple but all in a somewhat 'muted' way, spritzy carbonation with minerally effects but nowhere harshly stinging; drier middle, cereally and a bit caramelly with sharper grainy edges but generally smooth and even a tad oily, not too many residual sugars left but still some, leading to a leafy and floral hop bitter finish, with a classic coriander seed spiciness to it but also a strong, very 'jenever'-flavoured alcohol effect accentuating this end bitterness to the point of becoming wry and rather unpleasant. The initial sweetness also sticks a little bit in the end, somewhat annoyingly. The alcohol needs to be better hidden here, but otherwise a correct tripel, like most of Boelens' venturings in the genre (his own Klok Tripel upfront, of course); this is, however, as stereotypical and old-fashioned as it gets, clearly the 21st-century craft beer revolution has not yet reached Wellen (though it has clearly reached the province of Limburg, at least in sour beers...). There are just too many of these boring new tripels around these days, a rather uninspired final rinse of the global beer revolution in a country stubbornly clinging to its traditions (which, admittedly, have been very important and influential, but that is a whole different story in my mind). We live in different beer times now, and I for one am sick of having to taste the umpteenth bland blonde or sweet tripel in Belgium - this country needs innovation and a refill of its own former passion in beer in order to catch up with the momentum that countries like Denmark, the U.K. or the Netherlands have reached already years ago. This kind of eternally repeated clichés are not going to help - but that said, I also gladly admit that this is not the worst tripel around, technically speaking, so have a mediocre score for that.