Bottle @ weekly tasting shared with Joes and Dutchdrebus. Clear golden color, small white head. Smell and taste malts, grainy, a slight tart hint that’s not intended I think, slightly yeasty as well. Not very nice.

Buckwheat honey beer made for the tenth anniversary of the Antwerps Biercollege, the local Antwerp Zythos club. I don’t think the recipe is as authentically ’Antwerpian’ as the label claims, but we are still far away from the abuse of the word ’authentic’ here in Belgian beerland, I’m afraid. Frothy, creamy, snow white head, thickly lacing but thinning in the middle, over a cloudy peach blonde beer with tiny dead yeast bits everywhere. Aroma shows some form of infection, I get a strong scent of rotting lemon, mouldy bread, old chicken soup and even stale urine, apart from friendlier impressions of peach, grass, orange peel, white grape, young cheese, sourish grains (the buckwheat?), green apple peel and white bread; honey is surprisingly as good as absent. This beer was launched five months ago, I assume the bacterial infection must have been there from the start, but only developed months after bottling. Estery, ’uncontrolledly’ fruity onset, overripe peaches, green apple acetaldehyde, sour berries of which the acidity is further enhanced by the infection, fairly strong carbo especially for a Belgian honey beer - which usually benefit from a more ’quiet’, smooth mouthfeel. Body is effervescent as a result, smooth, a bit coarse in the end; there is a lot of bready maltiness in the middle, as well as basic buckwheat sourishness, but again the honey, which probably has something to do with fermentation going out of control, remains very subdued, as a kind of smooth sweetness all the way at the back and a kind of creamy odour retronasally. Finish is sourishly drying, again that infection, with juicy, sweetish fruitiness of the malts persisting along with the deep buckwheat tartness and the soft bready malts; there is a very faint grassy hop bitterishness hidden somewhere, but even for a honey beer it remains too weak to provide any balance. Needless to say, that off-putting infection smell returns retronasally, and quite strongly so. I can imagine this tasted okay from tap when it was launched in February, but I cannot recommend buying any more bottles of this now, this is a clear failure in terms of fermentation. I have a suspicion the honey was not boiled and therefore caused the infection. And why combine buckwheat with honey in the first place?