7.3

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

The first beer by what seems to be a new nanobrewery in Lede (close to Aalst), set up by a guy with apparently decades of experience in home brewing. Depending on the success of this first, it will be decided which recipes are to come after it. The name could be translated as “blark”: it is an intentional contamination of ‘blonde’ and ‘dark’ but in Dutch, because the beer is apparently neither of the two; I thought this was rather weird when I first read this, given that there is an EBC standard to measure this by, and that there is a whole spectre of colours in between typical (straw) blonde and typical dark (blonde), including amber- and copper-coloured ales, which are also neither blonde nor dark… If ‘blonde’ and ‘dark’ are the only possibilities this brewery sees in terms of colour variation, then I think the Blonker story will come to a very early ending, but anyway. Thick and frothy, egg-white, membrane-lacing, stable head on a hazy deep peach blonde with beige-ish tinge – indeed a kind of ‘dark blonde’, if you will, but still a blonde beer to me… Aroma of dried apricots, unripe peach, cooked turnip, coriander seed, halfripe banana, dry straw, old potatoes, cheese rind, dried thyme. Fruity onset, sweetish with again that halfripe banana and unripe peach, vaguely sourish undertone, minerally carbonation; full, rounded body, white-bready and cereally pale maltiness (nothing ‘dark malty’ to be found here, mind you) with phenolic spicy notes (clove, thyme) and a pinch of coriander sprinkled on the tail, where a floral, hayish hop bitter note brings balance, even lasting quite long and ending a bit earthy. The alcohol remains altogether well hidden. Technically not bad for the umpteenth tripel, ticking all the boxes and free of serious off-flavours: it shows that this Jan De Clercq (coincidentally carrying the same name as the brewer of De Zwarte Bron in Sint-Pauwels) has decades of homebrewing experience, but opting for another standard tripel is a very safe choice in Belgium, to say the least… As for that name: forget the dark part, this is as ‘blonde’ as any typical tripel.