Gents Bier Festival 2023 - Clear, light brown colour, thin head. Aroma and flavour have a gentle smokiness. Smooth and malty. There's a background jammy sweetness too.

Textbook lace over clear copper beer. Old wooden casks, lightly tarred, smoke, peat. Same in the flavour; tarr, peat, smoked, smoked herring. Medium bodied, medium to good carbonation, very slick to oily (the herring?). Good, but a tad unidimensional - smoked.

Each year, ‘t Verzet brews a new and different beer for its membership, the so-called ‘Verzet Brigade’, and this one, a strong ‘whisky beer’ in the 20th-century sense of the word (i.e. brewed with whisky malt rather than aged on whisky barrels), is this year’s edition – so big thanks to Leopold for sharing. Thick, egg-white, membrane-lacing, stable head on a clear orange-glowing amber-blonde beer. Aroma of bread crust, hard caramel without the sweetness, dry peat, smoked kale, unripe peach, wet cigarette tobacco, young birch tree leaves, gin, dry tea bags, touch unsugared chewing gum somehow. Dried fruit in the onset, vague apricot and green pear notes but generally clean (the ‘English way’, so to speak), vague dried orange peel, soft carb with full, slick and somewhat vinous mouthfeel; hard-caramelly, bread-crusty and peanutty malts with indeed this ‘smoky’, peaty note, remaining well in balance with a herbal, tea-ish hop bitter element and this ongoing accent, however, subtle, of dried citrus peel. Some warming gin-like alcohol appears but peanutty malts, this odd smoky element (almost like burnt rubber in the end) and the herbal aspect remain dominant. Atypical barleywine of sorts, unusually dry for that ‘genre’ (if it is one to begin with – see Cornell and others on the subject) with an equally unusual peaty-smoky element from the whisky malt, which, if used this way, also gives a cabbage-like impression I have encountered in a couple of similar beers before. I think a bit more sweetness and stronger peatiness, in whichever way, could further improve this one, but who knows, maybe so does cellaring it for a year or two… Took me a while to get used to – it has been a while since I had a ‘real’ whisky beer in the original meaning of the term – but this is admittedly an interesting and original one. Would love to revisit with more age on it.