7.3

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

Stout by a nanobrewery in a village west of Hasselt in Belgian Limburg, which seems to do all brewing, bottling and labelling by themselves - cheers to that. Towering high, foamy, pillowy, firm, greyish pale beige, membrane-lacing head on an initially clear, very dark chocolate brown beer with burgundy edges, as good as black but not quite, misty with sediment. Aroma - at first difficult to perceive due to the huge head - of brown bread crust, dried blackberries, candied cherries, marmite, juice oozing from a medium rare horse steak, fig compote, iron (confirmed by the old 'hand test'), milk chocolate bars, ground hazelnuts, sirop de Liège, dust, black pepper. Sweetish onset, hints of ripe pear, fig and medlar, very sharply carbonated with overly minerally, stinging and numbing effect; very light umami notes here and there (meat) but the 'dark' fruitiness prevails through a supple, caramelly, brown-bready and somewhat hazelnutty maltiness with doughy core. Spicy notes in the end, clove and nutmeg along with a black-peppery, tea-leafy element from the hops, yeasty and fruity too, but with a well-measured roasted, coffee-ish bitterness underneath which survives all those distracting flavours. Again a very 'Belgian' interpretation of a (dry) stout, sharply overcarbonated and overly yeasty (fruity and spicy) for a genre which should be clean and sleek regardless of the intended substyle - but at least the basic flavours here work a lot better than in that Ad Vitam Stout I had before this one. With some cleaning up and reduction of that carbon dioxide, this could well become a very decent Irish style stout - let us say that there is growing potential in this one. Not bad at all for a Limburgian homebrewery (founded 2019) very limitedly going commercial.