(sample, bottle) Clear golden. Minimal white head. Light sweet, light spicy, malt. Medium body. Light bitter finish. Ok.

Pours clear blonde, scent is sharp, mildly malty. Taste is sharp, fairly bitter? Very estery BE yeast in the back. Sticky finish, medium on the banana. Minthy touch to it OK. tad too sweet for me, but true to style.

21/XI/23 - on tap @ HoReCa Expo 2023 (Gent), BB: n/a (2023-1099) Thanks to Erwin, Peter a.o. for sharing today’s beer!

Clear orange blond beer, small creamy white head, unstable, a bit adhesive. Aroma: ripe banana, sweet impression, fruity, very malty. MF: ok carbon, medium body. Taste: sweet touch, lots of ripe banana, very yeasty, a little bitter. Aftertaste: banana, malty, very yeasty, meh. Pretty generic and boring.

The blonde in this new series of ’pseudo-abbey beers’, actually more a tripel than a blonde at this ABV. Thick, frothy, egg-white, more or less regular head, stabilizing as a moussy foam around the edge and a disparate, landmap-shaped veil in the middle; warm peach blonde colour with almost salmon pinkish hue, hazy from the start, with strings of visible fizz here and there. Aroma of banana-flavored bubblegum (clear isoamylacetate), powder sugar, canned peaches, orange juice, pineapple, cooked potato, Kirsch, raw apple juice, camomile, sweetbread, dough, old dry ginger powder, green melon, honey, soap (coriander seed), hay, turnips cooked for too long, pond water and an unfortunate whiff of DMS. Spritzy, fruity onset, lots of detracting, initially even somewhat numbing carbonation, sweet banana, ripe pear and peach flavors with a thin rim of green berry-ish sourishness somewhere as well as some welcoming orange ’fraîcheur’, supple, ’full’ but notably soapy mouthfeel; this soapiness continues in the middle, with a soft, bready and slightly caramelly malt sweet core, the sweetness of which is accentuated by residual sugars, resulting in a somewhat honeyish impression. This sweetness and the aforementioned soapiness (again: coriander?) keep dominating the finish, where only a subtle hint of earthy hop bitterness is added, but insufficiently so to balance out the sweetness; it does, however, cling a bit to the throat after swallowing, but so does the sweetness and to a much larger extent. Some warming, wodka-like alcohol too, but nothing too wry or fatiguing; the DMS, however, does return retronasally, and I am very sensitive to it. In all, an easy-drinking, very stereotypical but technically decent tripel, once again one on the sweet side of the style (think Karmeliet and the other usual suspects), and in that sense at least obsolete - but if you want to sustain worn-out traditions by making a threesome of utterly classical Belgian styles, I guess this is a perfectly acceptable way to do so. Works relatively fine for me, all things considered.