25/XI/22 - 33cl bottle @ Mash of the Titans tasting, Gentse Biervereniging, bottled: 10/I/21, BB: 10/I/24, BM MOTT 001 (2022-1688)

Clear red brown to dark amber beer, solid creamy beige head, stable, little adhesive. Aroma: nice, lots of chocolate notes, caramel, vanilla, a bit sugary impression, vanilla notes, dried fruits. MF: ok carbon, medium to full body. Taste: bitter start, quite some alcohol, a bit sourish, malty, soft roast, more malts, hoppy. Aftertaste: bitter and dry, spicy, earthy touch, some caramel, ripe banana, bitter, malty, hoppy, a bit oxidized, decent beer, nothing extraordinary though. Smells better than it tastes.

One of six strong ales d’Oude Maalderij brewed in collaboration with another Belgian craft brewery, Minne in this case. Medium thick, moussy, yellowish pale beige head lacing in shreds over an initially clear, deep amber coloured beer with darker brownish-bronze tinge, misty with sediment. Aroma of wet toast, dry old biscuit, dried apricot, ‘graanjenever’, soggy brown bread, red apple peel, baker’s yeast, jute, straw, old walnuts, nutmeg. Dried-fruity onset, remaining very restrained in sweetness, dried apricot and apple peel with a vague touch of peach, softish carb, full and smooth body. Bread-crusty malts with rusk- and peanut-like aspects, becoming quite strongly toasty and hoppy bitter in the end, the bitterness heightened by ‘jenever’-like alcohol; the hop bitterness lingers on and on, in a leafy, earthy, spicy way, matching well with the bready and spicy effects of the yeast – but failing to provide the New World aromatics I was expecting, as after all, Chinook and El Dorado have been used here… The same effect could have been achieved with a bittering noble hop variety I think, but the bitterness in general is certainly strong enough here to convey the American barleywine idea, albeit in a bready-yeasty, mildly phenolic, altogether still quite Belgian kind of way. Not bad at all for a strong Belgian ale, but I hesitate to identify it as a true barleywine.