5.5

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 5 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 5

Blonde ale flavoured with hemp, brewed since the summer of 2019 with hemp cultivated by De Bronne, a hemp and cattle farm in Herzele ('Flemish Ardennes') run by a Mathieu Hendrickx and his wife. Hemp has of course been cultivated for ages and for many reasons, including fibres and bird seed, but also as a soft drug (marijuana) so it should come as no surprise that the beer's name refers to the latter (the international marijuana holiday, April 20th), even though De Bronne obviously does not cultivate it for recreational purposes - the beer does not contain any psychedelic substances, which would be forbidden by law anyway. This is not the first attempt to make a cannabis beer without the drug effects, not even in Belgium, see e.g. Vliegende Paard's Cannahopper and - older still - Hopperd's Cannabier, so I wonder what the purpose of this 0420 is... Anyway: eggshell-white, frothy, very mousy, cobweb-lacing, thick and stable head on an initially lightly misty peach blonde beer with vague orangey tinge, turning cloudy orange blonde with sediment. Quite distinct, weird but not necessarily inviting aroma of cloves, rosewater, allspice even, sweet-herbal and perfumey clearly from the cannabis flowers that were used here, over a background of green tea, dry straw, white bread, halfripe banana, cold pumpkin soup, stewed carrots, elderberry leaves or even elderblossom (the cannabis returning, I guess), exotic green peppercorns of some kind, old gingerbread, moist white pepper, parsnip, chicken broth touch (a sign of oxidation - I may have kept this one aside for a bit too long), eucalyptus, 'drop', green cough syrup - but again, the last three are probably the cannabis talking again. Sweetish onset with thinly sourish edge, very vaguely citrusy but adding impressions of dried peach, halfripe banana and freshly cut red apple as well, lively carbonated in a typically 'Belgian' manner and not stinging too harshly; slick, supple body, cereally maltiness with a certain (white-)bready edge and something very thinly caramelly as well, a tad oxidized already, sweetish but not overly so, aromatized by the hemp in a very herbal way, again reminiscent of green tea, cloves, green 'drop' and even eucalyptus - very flowery, in a way, but not quite evoking that typical smell of, well, a joint. Minerally aspects from the carbonation remain till the end, where a floral hop bitterness also operates, suffering under this heavy ethereal-herbal load; slight bready-yeasty and more obnoxious phenolic aspects (the latter mingling with the hemp effects) show up in the end as well. Some hop bitterness lingers, but that goes for residual, honeyish sugars as well, and the (female) hemp flower effects accentuate the sweetness rather than any bitterness. Quite a mess, if you ask me: I do not do soft drugs to begin with so even in its non-psychedelic way, this beer was never meant to appeal to me personally, but the main issue I have here is that it remains sweet, flowery and perfumey without ever truly reminding of the hemp plant at all. Granted, this flowery and perfumey effect cannot be ascribed to anything else than the use of hemp blossoms, but it could just as well have been a combo of meadowsweet, yarrow, green peppercorns, cloves, liquorice and / or something else as well, at least to the beer taster not particularly trained in distinguishing between the many herbs and spices that are used in beer nowadays. I never liked overly spiced beers to begin with and this is really very heavily spiced - or 'aromatized', put more accurately; it ends too sweet and its general structure remains too simplistic for me. Even if the hemp plant is botanically closely related to hops, after several hemp-flavoured beers I remain unconvinced that Cannabis sativa in any form - no doubt even including its psychotropic properties - was meant to be used in beer at all. An ill-fated idea, all things considered, executed in a very mediocre way. Not my beer at all - I even had trouble finishing it due to this extreme herbalness, which automatically sets the score well below 6/10 for me.