6.8

Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 6

New local Waasland bier commissioned by a Facebook group centered around the village of Kruibeke, the zip code of which is 9150, hence the name. According to the home brewer who developed it, this is hopped with East Kent Goldings, Cascade and Citra and intended as an English style bitter - a very classically European ale genre, but classic for England, not for Belgium, so this is among the very first attempts at this old style I find here, not counting the old school Belgian pale ales that have been inspired by EPA since the turn of the previous century. I guess this beer looks both backwards to the 20th century when Belgium readily adopted English beer influences, and forward to the 21st century by applying New World hops. Irregularly lacing, pale beige-tinted white, very moussy head, slowly breaking in the middle but well-retaining on the edge; pure, warm, orangey amber colour, clear with almost invisible dots of yeast throughout; becomes a deeper, slightly more brownish amber and equally cloudy with sediment added. Quite expressive aroma of grapefruit peel, dry cookies, strawberry jam, chestnuts, tulips, red apple, marmelade, lavender, honey, pink pepper, sweet cherry tomato, fried egg, warm toast, mandarin, pineapple, jute, cooked carrot, wormwood. Fruity, crisp, lively onset, sourish redcurrant and raw pineapple hints with some light banana and peach sweetness running through it, encased in a sharply carbonated, minerally, spritzy environment, numbing the tongue and coarsening an otherwise slick, supple mouthfeel. Fruitiness ’cleanly’ and restrainedly lingers over a nutty malt middle with soft bready edges, becoming mildly toasted bitterish in the end, adequately propping a drying, resinous, slightly wormwood-like hop bitterness with both floral and grapefruity aspects, though remaining relatively subdued in terms of retronasal aromas; I was hoping for more expressive New World hop aromas (orange) after reading the hop varieties on the label. Yeasty and phenolic notes too but not overly so, with some yeast bitterness. A bit overcarbonated, but otherwise quite well made; basically an updated Belgian amber ale more than anything truly English, but they did manage to keep the fruity esters at bay (though still unmistakably there and Belgian for sure) and convey a clean, hoppy, very quenching English feel to it. Enjoyable.