Zythos 2022. Very dark brown with quick fading head. Aroma is pleasantly smoky, meaty. Flavour has some smoke which contrasts nicely with the sweet banana esters of the base beer.

Sampled @ Zythos Beer Festival 2022. A hazy orange brown beer with a beige head. Aroma of strong smoked malt, ash, wood. Taste of sweet strong dark malt, wood, bacon.

Sample at Zythos 2022, black beer, small head. Aroma is smoke, smoked sausage, malt, roast. Taste is the same, smoke, smoked ham, malt, roast, chocolate, very nice

Starke Karbonisierung. Deutlich malzig-rauchiger Beginn mit unterstützender, nicht übertriebener Süße. Die starke Karbonisierung stört, zwischenzeitlich außerdem sprittig. Dunkelmalziger und kräutriger Abgang. 8/11/4/10//10

Quadrupel with Rauchmalz, 75 cl bottle from the “Bère Brouwers” in Gistel near Ostend. Extreme gusher: foam began to creep out of the bottle about a second after opening, slowly so but very steadily so as well, an unstoppable stream as it were – it took more than ten minutes for it to stop, at which point about ¼ of the bottle was lost. The only upside to this, was that the overflowing happened slow enough for me to take measures, grab the nearby glasses and catch most of the beer in them. Anyway: tightly cobweb-lacing, frothy, stable, pale greyish beige head on a misty dark chocolate brown beer with deep vermillion red glow. Aroma very strongly smoked – hence the classification here as a smoked beer rather than a quad: smoked bacon, smoked mackerel, smoked prunes, chewing tobacco and even a whiff of freshly extinguished bonfire from beech wood, next to underlying impressions of apple peel, clove, nutmeg, caramel, apricot, brown bread, plum. Fizzy, estery onset, apple, plum and fig aspects, clearly overcarbonated for a either a quad or a smoked beer, but with full, rounded, bit glueish body. Brown-bready malt soil smashed under the weight of a huge amount of Rauchmalz – Aecht Schlenkerla is never far away here – reminiscent of smoked bacon and smoked mackerel again, with this roasty bonfire aspect also returning in the end; the spiciness established by the smoked malts is further sharpened by a spicy hop bitter note and spicy phenols, while a glow of ‘jenever’-like alcohol highlights it all – even, showing up very late and only after a bit of warming up, a sweet brown sugary and treacle-like aspect reminding me that the ‘basic’ intention here was indeed that of a quadrupel. Still, the main theme here is clearly the smoked malt, overtaking so much of the beer that ‘Rauchbier’ will probably inform consumers better than ‘quadrupel’ (a genre I never even had ‘in smoked form’, apart of course from Van Steenberge's newish Gulden Draak Smoked); my girlfriend hates Rauchbier and had trouble enjoying this one, but I absolutely love it, I think there are not nearly enough of these heavily smoked beers on the Belgian market so it is not even too difficult for me to forgive this Grizzly the huge extent of gushing. If that issue can be fixed, then this beer is a notably original and potentially important addition to the Belgian beer map. If only more of these small and beginning microbreweries had this much audacity! Cheers to that, guys!