7.3

Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 6.5 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7.5

Commissioned beer (by Velt, an ecological association since 1973), brewed by Boelens for more than ten years now, using freshy harvested stinging nettles in spring; many thanks to my girlfriend’s mother for this one, big cheers to Annie! Egg-white, creamy, thick and membrane-like lacing, somewhat irregular but firm head on a hazy peach blonde beer with deep ochre-ish tinge and fine strings of visible sparkling at the edges. Aroma of apricot jam, banana peel, brioche bread, old dry apple cake, a green tea-like aspect I can only ascribe to the stinging nettles, Betterfood, honey, grass, cloves, field flowers, pear peel. Fruity, very estery onset, ripe peach and Durondeau pear with some banana and red apple, lively carbonation, rounded and supple, bit fluffy mouthfeel; honeyish residual sugars lay quite heavily on a cake- and brioche-bread-like malt body, with the sweet esters lingering about as well. Soft earthy and grassy hop bitterishness in the finish matched with a clear herbal aspect from the nettles, something raw celery leaf-, freshly cut grass- and green tea-like, accentuating the hops and subtly assisting to counter the residual sweetness; phenolic and bready-yeasty aspects further fill the final stage. Looks a tad messy, perhaps, but flavour-wise this is your typical Belgian style ‘kruidenbier’, very yeasty and residual-sweet, for me in a good way this time, with the nettles adding something sharpish-green, albeit subtly so. Still, they are noticeable and distinctive enough to make this a quite unique beer in its own way. Enjoyed it more than I was expecting, to be frank, but considering the generally low scores on other rating sites, quality probably has been fluctuating a lot in its eleven years of existence.