16 August 2024. At The Musketeers brewpub. Cheers to Silke, Elke, Gregory & Anke!

A: hazy yellow, small, off-white head.
A: dried orange peel, fruit cake, apricot, mango, wine gums, vanilla.
T: sweet mango, pear, cake, bitter orange peel, yeast.
F: soft floral hops, fruit candy, sour orange, rather harshly bitter & yeasty.
P: medium body, slick-sticky texture, soft carbonation.
Crudely made and unenjoyable; this style is supposed to be fun, right?

Small if persistent white head over fully hazy yellow-golden beer with a green sheen. Bit dusty nose, grains, treebark, dried moss. Bit diary, ink with gall/quinine like bitterness. There is some maltsweetness with sweet aniseed underneath, but the bitter crushes everything. Quite slick, good carbonation, light to medium bodied, bit creamy. Again one not in the best Magma tradition.

Donkergeel bier met schuim. Smaak is fruitig zoet en licht bitter hoppig met een romig mondgevoel en iets van abrikoos, wat banaan en perzik.

Pours unclear, light to even fluo yellow. Scent is chewy, green banana. Bubblegum, lactose heavy ice cream. Taste is full-on ice cream, bubblegum, mildly bitter. Not as sweet as feared, still is quite decent.

The newest Bucket List beer by Musketeers to date (who knows how long they intend to continue this series), a canned milkshake IPA with added lactose - which is obligatory in this style - and 'fruit', but it is not disclosed anywhere what fruit and in what form, which makes me very suspicious. Irregularly edged, egg-white, large- and uneven-bubbled, coarse, plastery lacing head on a cloudy yellow-apricot blonde robe. Aroma of banana- and strawberry-flavoured Fruitella candy (if that still exists), baby fruit porridge, milk sugar, brioche, gingerbread, dried lemon thyme, old lemon cake, pineapple, side notes of damp earth, urine, clay and old potato mash. Sweet onset, banana mush, cooked pineapple and ripe pear, with a vaguely sourish undertone - with somewhat citric effect; minerally carbonation, a bit sharper than I am used to from a milkshake IPA, after which the lactose flavour comes out in full force, resting heavily on a brioche-bready, porridge- and cooked cereal-like 'pale' malty middle, with - as feared - a touch of artificial sweet fruitiness, almost lemonade-like, joining in and gaining momentum further on. In the finish, an odd leafy hop bitter aspect sets in, clashing completely with the silky, sweet and desserty stage that was set earlier; the lactose and fruitiness, by now reminiscent of baby's fruit porridge, continue at equal force, and the whole thing crashes into imbalance. I do not know why this brewery persists so stubbornly in creating hip postmodern craft beer styles within this Bucket List project, but this is not what I expect from a milkshake IPA, even if the basic elements are surely there. Downtune the hop bitterness and omit the fruit for starters, and this would already be a step in the right direction. A milkshake IPA, decadent as it may be, is not the easiest 'new' beer style to master and in my humble opinion should not be treated this superficially (yes, I admit that part of me has developed a certain weakness for it in recent years, even though I rarely consume one these days)...

1/I/24 - 33cl can from Geers (Oostakker), shared @ the Abeels’ place, BB: 8/XI/25 15:00, L8911231108 (2024-4)

Little cloudy yellow blond beer, big creamy bit irregular off-white head, creamy, pretty stable, adhesive, leaving a nice lacing in the glass. Aroma: fake vanilla, Tic Tac mints, pancakes, buttery, diacetyl. MF: ok carbon, medium body. Taste: quite some citrus, fake vanilla, pretty bitter, resinous hops, grapefruit, a bit piny. Aftertaste: more fake vanilla, citrus notes, bitter, bit sourish, decent but not great. The beer is probably a lot better without the vanillin flavourings.