5.5

Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 5

Limitedly produced burnet beer (a herb) for art gallery manager Pim De Rudder, a local celebrity in Assenede, hence the use of the burnet herb, the Dutch name of which is pimpernel. Thanks to Craftmember for bringing me this bottle straight from said art gallery. Paradoxically, the label states on the one hand that it can be kept till 2031 if stored cool, dry and stable, and on the other hand ’beperkt houdbaar’, which means it has a limited shelf life... An apt illustration of the fact that Belgian laws regarding shelf life are unrealistic when it comes to most beers I suppose, but anyway. Medium thick, moussy, off-white head retaining well on the edges and as a thin, light greyish veil over the liquid’s surface; hazy peach blonde robe with orangey hue, turning a bit darker and even more cloudy with deposit, as can be expected - becoming completely murky in the very end (puddle water). Aroma of overripe persimmon and papaja (with the same kind of weird ’smokiness’), soapy wheat, peach, cooked chicken, stewed apple, onsetting oxidation (wet paper), sweet pickled gherkins (which could represent the burnet), iron, hints of steamed white cabbage (but not in the DMS way), sweet red curry, honey, mouldy orange, urine, cooked rhubarb with brown sugar, hint chamomille. Sweet onset, vanilla sugar or honey even, with fruity notes of overripe pear, peach and mango, soft carbo (in fact a tad undercarbonated for this particular style, in my opinion), soft gooseberry and rhubarb sourishness underneath which manages to persist till the very end; very supple, light, sweet and slick middle phase, honeyish malt sweetness accentuated by residual sugar, caramelly touch as well as soft, soapy wheat malt presence; the burnet, already a subtle aromatic herb when fresh, seems to add some retronasal nutty and floral accents. Hops are clearly reduced to a minimum, just a subtle floral effect is there, but hardly any bitterness at all to counter this honey sweetness which bothered me already from the start. The result is that a slick, resinous, cloying sweetness remains in the back of the mouth after swallowing, and even a vague echo of ’young jenever’-like alcohol can be felt, fortunately not in an astringent way. There is something urine-like in the aroma, a kind of vague, ’stinky’ sourishness amidst all the stewed fruit and rhubarb-with-sugar sweetness, and this unpleasant effect does not do this beer any good; with the head largely reduced after a while and the deposit added, it looks like some home-made pear juice, lacks body due to undercarbonation, and the taste is clearly much too sweet, teeming with unfermented sugars and insufficiently hopped even for an ordinary ’Belgian blonde’. Comes across as very amateuristic, and even though Den Tseut is a small and fairly ’unambitious’ home brewery, I had beers from them which performed a lot better. Probably past its prime, granted, but I cannot imagine this having been a great beer to begin with. Funny label with Pim’s face on it and all those fake hop variety names, though...