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

One of several beers created by Brewmine TAP, the brand new city brewery in Hasselt, open to guest brewers as well and in dire need of a place rating here (I will deal with that later). From tap at the brewery. Creamy, yellowish pale beige, dense, regular, membrane-lacing head, black robe with bronze glow around the edges - so strictly speaking, not entirely 'pitch black'. Aroma of black chocolate, wet leather, espresso, dried prunes, Cuban cigars, dried blueberries, whisky, toffee, juniper berries, hint liquorice. Clean sweetish onset with faint umami edge, hinting at a mix of dried fig, dried blackberry and black olive, fizzily carbonated but in a tiny-bubbled kind of way, with full, oily body; thick black-chocolatey, toffeeish and cashew-nutty malts with toasty bittering edge, turning into quite prominent coffee-like roasted bitterness further on. Spicy elements of liquorice, black pepper and even juniper berry accompany the finish, which uses peppery hops to accentuate the coffee-like roastiness without losing contact with that nutty sweetness; some red fruit and black chocolate notes linger along. Nicely warming, gin-like alcohol in the finish, not intruding anything else. Basic but well-crafted, sleek and clean, very modern 'impy', adding more roasted bitterness than is usually the case nowadays (I guess we can add the term 'Russian' in that case); very well made for such a young brewery. I predict that we will hear a lot more from them in the coming months and years...