5.4

Appearance - 2 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 4.5

Older 33 cl bottle bought online. Opened carefully over the sink but the gushing was so violent that I still had to clean the kitchen afterwards: the beer literally spouted out of the bottle neck with strong force - if I hadn’t known any better, I’d swear this was brewed at Gaverhopke. Expectedly, the captured head was towering high but loose and papery in structure, off-white, collapsing to a very irregular, lacing, coarse layer of large and smaller bubbles on top of an orangey blonde beer with ochre hue - looking completely cloudy and ’milky’ from the start and becoming even darker and murkier with deposit, like the content of some muddy rain puddle. Very estery, but not truly off-putting aroma of overripe gooseberry, pineapple, apple sauce, peach, orange peel, hint of banana, raw rhubarb, damp earth, honey, buttermilk, hint of freshly fermented farmland or rotting hay, sweet white wine, faint chalk hint but no real presence of the "lots of hops" promised in the ingredients list on the label. Very estery onset, unfermented sugars suffering under clear infection-induced but still more or less tolerable sourishness, sweet banana, tons of gooseberry acetaldehyde, peach and stewed apple, gooseberry galore, strong carbonation, bready malt sweetishness in the middle with an ongoing chaos of esters above it; finishes with retronasal esters, persisting carbonation with a mildly souring effect further reinforcing the infectious sourishness (though again, this effect remains fairly tolerable) and a very earthy yeastiness; there is a late, deep, earthy and somewhat peppery hop bitterness in the end, but briefly and mildly so. Unfermented sugar sweetness and a ton of misplaced esters remain, in a very earthy environment, after swallowing. Technical failure for sure, and an unforgivable one, though admittedly the taste is still more or less okay (I expected a lot more phenols too, for example); the orange peel touch in the nose manages to maintain a certain freshness in all this muddy, dirty chaos. I doubt whether a technically perfect execution of this beer would make it a lot more interesting, though: considering the name of this beer company and the promise made on the label, this is just as hoppy as your average, fruity, sweetish, crisp Belgian blonde, of which we have a few hundred too many in this country anyway. Disappointed, again, in Fulltime Hops, and I have an ominous feeling that Belgo-Russian thing will not be much better. There’s a lot of technical work afoot, guys!