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

More recent addition to the already existing blonde Sinay 1217, launched six years ago for the 800th birthday of the village of Sinaai near Sint-Niklaas in East-Flanders; the idea comes from a local in Sinaai but was and is still executed by De Graal in Brakel. Steinie bottle from Van Callenberge. Thick and foamy, frothy, off-white, large-bubbled but firm and stable head on a misty caramel brown beer with ruddy glow. Aroma of ripe banana, ripe pear, dried apple peel, dark candi sugar, ground hazelnuts, caramel, chewing gum, cheap brandy, burnt sugar, coriander seed, some toffee, cookies, candied cherries. Sweet onset, clear candi sugar with fruity notes of ripe pear, peach, banana and blueberry, medium carbonated with quite full, rounded, slick body; candi sugar sweetly fills in the gaps and adds a smooth, somewhat bubblegummy and slightly resinous effect to essentially caramelly and somewhat hazelnutty malts, showing a very light toasty-bitterish, even dark-chocolatey edge faraway in the finish. Leafy, tea-ish hops and warming, ‘jenever’-like alcohol accentuate this bitter part, the latter becoming a tad (too) boozy perhaps; generally though, this beer conveys the old school trappist-fuelled quadruple tradition quite well, with certain similarities to Chimay Bleue and others. Solid enough for the style, sweet with an interesting bitter element; not the most enduring quad I had, but certainly good enough to serve its very localized purpose.