6.4

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6.5

White IPA flavoured with tea, made for a tea shop in Charleroi (with a second branch in Mons), boasting almost 500 different choices of tea. Thick and frothy, thickly cobweb-lacing, egg-white, very stable head on an initially clear, pure and deep 'old golden' beer with pale orangey tinge and a column of fierce sparkling in the middle, shifting to a misty apricot with sediment. Aroma of sweet-scented jasmin tea, even lavender-perfumed ladies' soap, apple juice, orange peel, dry lemon cake, old bread crust, tea indeed, hints of unripe peach, banana peel, nutmeg. Fizzy, fruity onset, apple again, green pear, unripe peach and banana peel returning, lots of carbonation with minerally effects (too much for IPA really), supple and slick wheat-soapy and bread-crusty maltiness, sharper grainy edges. Retronasally, that exotic-flowery perfume returns, along with indeed a clear dry tea bag association; something grapefruit peel-like appears too, but more in terms of downright bitterness than in terms of aroma. Slight spicy phenolic effects further disturb this hop aroma, so that the hop effect remains largely limited to a long, lasting, very leafy, wormwoody bitterness, accentuated by an astringent, very tannic effect from tea leaves. A sweetish orange touch pops up at the back, vanishing again as quickly as it came. Bitter blonde flavoured with tea indeed, and not subtly so - the tea even adds an almost wry effect and I cannot honestly say I like wry plant effects in my beer. As for the IPA part: another textbook case of an ignorant Belgian brewer thinking that a lot of bittering hops turn any blonde or tripel into an IPA. I classified this concoction as a white IPA here out of respect for brewer's intent, but do not be fooled: this is a spiced Walloon blonde, the spice in question being, well, tea. Not my cup of tea (pun intended this time), but drinkable still, just because I can take a strong dosis of bitter in my beer - thanks to the many experiences with old school IPAs before the haze craze took over - and because it is clean enough without obvious technical errors, as is usually the case with this brewery.