(sample, bottle) Brown color. Medium beige head. Sweet, malt, chocolate, spicy, alcohol. Good, strong, spicy.

Sampled @ Zythos Beer Festival 2022. A dark brown beer with a beige lacing. Aroma of dark brown malt, caramel, raisins. Taste of strong caramelized dark malt, raisins.

Zythos 2022. Very dark brown colour. Aroma and flavour have dark malts. Rounded dry hoppiness. Well balanced.

Süßer röstiger Beginn mit erkennbarer Bitterkeit. Süffig, zum Ende etwas trocken, mittellanger Abgang. Okay. 10/8/8/8//8

The third OBAA beer, this time not executed at Belgo Sapiens like the previous ones, but at Arever in Evere (Brussels). Strong gusher: did not explode the moment I opened it, but foam began to flow out of the bottle neck one second later and stopped only after several minutes - luckily this process happened slow enough for me to prepare and reduce the loss (and cleansing of the tasting table) to a minimum. Irregular, hardly lacing, medium sized, pale brownish beige, uneven-bubbled 'ugly' gusher head on a murky dark chestnut brown beer with mahogany hue - not quite as 'black' as promised. Aroma of old damp coffee filters, moldy acorn shells, forest floor, moss, old walnuts, fresh thyme, dried prunes, wood ashes, fresh fig, dried blackberries, moist white pepper (strongly so!), caramel, soggy brown bread, blood, wet nutmeg, background hints of burnt rubber, rotting tree leaves and old tea bags. Estery onset, sourish (blackberry, elderberry and fig but all in a very muted way) with a dash of dried porcini-like umami, sweeter notes of peach and red apple too, coarse carbonation with souring and minerally effects, disfiguring an otherwise smooth mouthfeel; hard-caramelly and soggy brown-bready core, dryish, with a strong burnt toast effect to it that becomes roasty and ashy in the end, yet without delivering the elegant coffee bitterness I tend to expect from a stout. Strong phenolic spiciness (clove, nutmeg) overrule the finish alongside lingering fruity esters, lots of 'dirty' earthiness and roasty bitterness, the latter enhanced a bit by a herbal hop bitter factor. At 8% ABV, the alcohol remains remarkably well hidden, at least in flavour; the roasted bitterness (and sourishness!) remains the dominant factor, along with this rather 'wild' esteriness and a thin 'metallic' effect appearing on the tip of the tongue, adding insult to injury. After swallowing, a very peppery kind of 'piquanterie' burns: a fermentation effect this time, rather than e.g. added chili peppers, but I'm fine with it. Still, something very obviously went wrong here - I think OBAA would have made a better choice staying with Belgo Sapiens but who knows what their motivations to change were; dirty, overcarbonated, gushing, muddy mess of a beer, even if the 'core' balance between the main flavours is quite alright, hence my relatively mild score on this site. Second time this evening that I have a ruthlessly gushing, overcarbonated Walloon stout - it seems that the southern half of this country still has a lot to learn about this beer family, notable exceptions aside of course (classic Hercule and Minne's Ardenne Stout, to name a few). Note that the label on this one stubbornly refuses to mention the word 'stout' even though this was clearly the intention: I have seen this with French breweries as well and everybody around here knows that Wallonia is very France-oriented; I can only assume that the term 'stout', with its Anglo-Saxon roots, is still lacking commercial 'elan' in the 'francophone' world (see e.g. Franchimont's Chinelle Black for another example). Too bad for this one: I would love to see another decent stout / porter coming out of Brussels after the efforts in this field already made by BBP, No Science and L'Ermitage, for instance. Have an extra point for hiding your alcohol load very well, though.