Kerel India Pale Ale

Pours nearly clear, darker blonde, big frotthy white head. Medium Stability. Smell is mild grassy, hops, rather green. Medium intense. Taste is rather full, bit medicinal bitter, tad of aromatic features. Bit grassy. OK ;

Imported from my RateBeer account as VBDCK Kerel India Pale Ale (by VBDCK Brewery):
Aroma: 6/10, Appearance: 3/5, Taste: 6/10, Palate: 3/5, Overall: 11/20, MyTotalScore: 2.9/5

22/X/17 - 33cl bottle @ Alengrin's Tasting (Goedele's place) - BB: 3/IV/19, brew: 1721 (2017-1803) Thanks to Alengrin for sharing the bottle!

Clear orange beer, small creamy yellowish head, little stable, bit adhesive. Aroma: sweet caramel, butter scotch, grains, bit yeasty. Where's my tropical fruits? MF: soft carbon, medium body. Taste: very bitter, some citrus, very grassy, resinous, bit buttery, way too bitter. Aftertaste: quite some bitter grapefruit, really bitter, almost chemical and definitely unpleasant, some caramel, bit of diacetyl. Quite the disappointment, their grapefruit ipa is much better...

VBDCK kicked off with a set of six beers deliberately - but unfortunately not very successfully - rejecting old Belgian clichés (or, to quote the brewer's lovely wife: we have no business brewing tripels, everybody does that), in a region not known for its beery experiments at all - my home Waasland region, in the northeastern corner of Eastern Flanders. This is the seventh beer they commercialize, released less than two weeks ago, an attempt at modern 'international' IPA. Bottle straight from the brewery. Fairly thick, tightly 'papery' lacing, egg-white, moussy head slowly thinning in the middle but otherwise very well-retaining, over an initially cristal clear, warm autumny amber-hued orange blonde beer. Aroma is more promising than anything else I tasted from this brewery, with a still rather careful, but in any case convincing and modern, even somewhat dank IPA character: toasted onions, frying oil, yellow grapefruit and the white underside of its peel, pine nuts, cedar wood, sweet pancakes as it warms up, toasted bread, green olives, moist barbecue spices, hints of old garlic, pink pepper, rainwater, bitter honey. Fruity, crisp onset, well-carbonated but not overly so for this style, bit minerally, alongside dried apricot, bitter orange peel and redcurrant impressions, subdued in sweetness with a sourish undercurrent to it, green olive-like touch; supple, even somewhat oily mouthfeel. Very nutty maltiness, toasted peanuts with a slightly softening caramelly side to it, quickly ascending to a full-fledged hop bitterness, resiny and wormwood-like, very long and drying, with a notably spicy aspect to it; meanwhile retronasal aromas of dried grapefruit peel, toasted sweet onions and even some pine resin appear. Ends bitterly dry and spicy, utterly quenching, with pronounced minerally aspects to it (spring water) but hardly any bothersome Belgian yeast side effects. This exceeds my expectations, which were admittedly low after that Grapefruit IPA, to a large extent: this is clean, to the point, aromatic (even in a somewhat 'dank' way) and uncompromisingly bitter, like an old school West Coast IPA - or indeed many of these new Dutch IPAs, which this beer reminds me of, much more so than of the countless estery and phenolic 'Belgian IPA' attempts made by both small and larger breweries in its home country nowadays. Both in terms of 'truth to style' and flavour as such, this is by far the best VBDCK offering so far - if they manage to continue on this path, I predict a bright future for them in the face of the global craft beer movement translated to Belgian proportions. I could not expect much more from a local, Flemish IPA than this. Big cheers to that - finally this project is starting to convince me of its potential. I remember tasting a DIPA from them when they were still in their preproduction phase and that one did suffer a lot from undesirable 'Belgian' yeasty side effects - but if that recipe is cleaned up, a more 'beefy' follow-up to this modestly alcoholic (almost 'session') IPA could be very promising.