29/II/24 - 33cl bottle as a gift, shared @ home, BB: 29/III/27 (2024-130) Thanks to Cybu for the bottle!

Clear red brown beer, creamy beige head, pretty stable, adhesive, leaving a nice lacing in the glass. Aroma: ripe banana, very yeasty, more overripe banana, caramel, dried fruits, raisins, yeasty. MF: ok carbon, medium body. Taste: malty start, surprisingly sourish, yeasty, bitter and hoppy, gentle roast. Aftertaste: ripe banana, very malty, grains, overripe banana, yeasty, bitter finish.

Tasting with tderoeck and Marina

Explosive gushing to small glass of amber-purplish brown beer and a small(!) cream head. Chocolate, dark green leaves, wood. Sweeter chocolate, liquorice, fake milkchocolate à la Cadbury's , if slightly less sweet. Finish sports a nasty, harsh vegetable bitter. Medium bodied at least, overcarbonated (putting it mildly), very slick to viscous. Not what it ought to be. Thanks to Barbara & Tim!

The blonde Betsy - an ordinary Belgian blonde with a somewhat sexist image if you ask me - has been brewed by this coastal brewer at various places before it found its current home at Beer Society, and apparently got the company of at least two new ones very recently. Unsurprisingly, these new ones are a dubbel ('bruin') and a tripel - sigh... Anyway: quite the gusher, this one, with foam streaming out of the bottle neck upon opening. After managing this issue and pouring the beer in a proper tasting glass, it shows a medium thick, quite dense and small-bubbled, creamy yet slowly opening, yellowish pale beige head and misty dark chestnut brown robe with glowing purplish-ruby hue. Aroma of brown bread dough, candi sugar, dried figs, lots and lots of iron shavings (quite dominantly so), old raisins, hard caramel, blue plum, wet toast, stewed pear, cloves, sugared tea, old rope. Restrainedly fruity onset, hints of dried banana, dried fig, red apple and some date, sweetish with a clear candi sugar effect yet nowhere cloying, clean and 'taut', with lively yet not annyoingly stinging carbonation; very slick, slightly resinous body, brown-bready and hard-caramelly maltiness, sweetish at first but acquiring a softly bitter toasty edge along the way, in the end reinforced by a peppery, leafy hop bitter element that stretches into the finish with a gently drying effect; meanwhile the metallic aspect from the nose clearly manifests itself along the edges, while obvious, yet pleasantly spicy phenols (clove, nutmeg, touch cinnamon) rise up retronasally. 'Clean' dried-fruitiness and candi sugar aromas linger at the back, contributing to a softly bittersweet ending. More toasty malt bitter than your average (macro-brewed) dubbel, an aspect I have seen showing up in many small-scale, new dubbels in Belgium lately, but a tad more hoppy as well, with a pleasant spicy effect to it; both the strong gushing and the strong metallic aspect are obvious flaws here, but if this brewer manages to solve these two issues, he will be left with a more than decent dubbel and one I might even revisit if I ever find myself in some outdoors café in Bredene...