Bottle. Hazy golden color with white head. Aroma is dandelions, Belgian esters, flowery, fresh, some dough and pistolets indeed. Taste is flowery, dough, but with some edge to it, super-balanced esters too, and quite the spiciness for character. Oily mouthfeel with quite a high carbonation. A very De Dolle beer with a lot of flavour, complexity, and character, there really is a lot going on here, but it still remains very Belgian Blonde-y. I am convinced.

Hazy golden with a big and lasting white head. Malty aroma of bread and biscuit, with fruity and spicy notes and a touch of bubblegum. Dry, malty and fruity flavour with bubblegum, ripe peach and grapefruit, and a quite bitter finish.

Bottle 2020-12-12 Göteborg AR: lime, coriander, AP: hazy coopery, frothy white steady head F: ime, coriander, semi sweet, dry, great aroma, would have apechieted it as a wit

Bottle @ Belgium. Pours hazy Golden with a large White head. Nose is Dolle yeast, funk and herbal notes. Flavor adds green Apples. A touch of barnyard. Dry finish with a vinous note. Can’t see the genius of it.

Mocno przyprawowy, troszke zbozowy, mineralny, wodnisty... niby chyba w stylu, acz bez specjalnej przyjemnosci

A new Dolle beer is not something you see every day, but this one has good reason to exist: it celebrates the 40 years that have passed since the Herteleer brothers brewed their first batch of Oerbier, unknowingly (at the time) pioneering independent microbrewing, what we now call "craft brewing", in Belgium. When I first heard that they were planning on a celebration beer and considering the winter beer tradition in Belgium, I thought they were going to come up with a heavy "bière de dégustation", a winter warmer so to speak, but it turns out to be a blonde ale, dry-hopped with Poperinge-grown Whitbread Golding (a classic English noble hop developed in 1911 but commercialized only in 1953) and spiced with curaçao. From a 33 cl Vichy bottle immediately recognizable as Dolle Brouwers thanks to the bow tie on the neck label. Very thick and dense, creamy, fluffy, egg-white, very thickly and tightly papier maché-like lacing, extremely stable head on a misty, warm peach blonde beer with pale orangey tinge and small but lively bubbles rushing through the mist. Aroma (suppressed a bit by the thick and dense layer of foam) of freshly baked bread or 'pistolets', old dried out orange peel, ripe apricot, rose petals, dried thyme, old bread crumbs, unripe mandarin and peach, wet hay, freshly picked dandelion leaves, subtler hints of grass, pumice, apple slices going sour, dry earth, motherwort, hard green plum, jute. Fruity, crisp onset, estery, restrained in sweetness with even a sourness running underneath, of a very fruity, 'genuine' nature reminiscent of unripe peach, sorrel leaf and something souring-minerally - the carbon dioxide, no doubt, as this beer is very effervescent, but something more 'deeply' minerally too (can't quite put my finger on it); I do assume, however, that this sour aspect is linked to the added dried orange peel. It softens a bit towards the end, underneath a filling, dry-bready and bread-crumb-like middle, merging maltiness and yeastiness. This combo meets an assertive hoppiness past the middle phase, earthy and leafy, with a long bitterrooty tail, mitigated by lovely yeasty breadiness; spicy yeast, phenolic and curaçao accents go along. I think I pick up a faint Bretty note as well, something 'horseblanket'-like tucked away deep at the back (and fleetingly in the nose), and this would account for the overall dryness of the beer as well - interesting... Let it be clear: in a country teeming with new blondes, one more boring and cliché than the other, this is not just "a new blonde", this is a very Dolle beer indeed, dry, spicy, yeasty and complex with something of a "wild" edge to it - a characterization that would actually fit the old saison style perfectly. Indeed this lovely old-fashioned newcomer, even under the guise of 'pale ale', is much more 'saison' than many new beers labelled as such in (and outside of) Belgium... But then, Dolle is of course one of those eighties and nineties style Belgian brewers completely and deliberately ignoring any style conventions so they probably could not care less about the fact that they accidentally brewed something very saison-like. Whatever: it's a good beer, one that constantly shifts in aroma and flavour while you enjoy it - let's hope it will be kept in permanent range.

Bottle @Luppolo Station (Rome). Servita (correttamente) in coppa. Dorata, mediamente torbida, schiuma bianca media, discretamente persistente. Al naso note di esteri, frutta gialla (pesca, passionfruit), scorza d'arancia, chiodi di garofano, leggero bretta (ma non cuoio). In bocca è equilibrata, con attacco dolce e chiusura amara, freschezza acidula, frutta gialla. Corpo medio, carbonazione media. Molto buona davvero!