Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 6.5 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7

The second beer by this hobbybrewer, limitedly commercialising his beers through De Rechter but developing his recipes in his own equipment at home, a dubbel with an ABV of 6.3% referring to the year 1963 in which apparently the brewer was born. Violent gusher, I could not prevent about 1/4 of the content streaming out of the bottle neck and straight into the drain so be warned. Typical 'gusher head', very coarse and irregular, towering high, rocky with thick plaster-like lacing, pale greyish beige in colour; murky chestnut brown with 'dirty brown-beige' hue - the whole looking indeed like a kitchen brew by some hobbyist, even if the commercial quantities were executed at a professional (yet young) microbrewery. Typical 'dirty dubbel' aroma of fresh brown bread, clove, overripe medlar, dried orange peel, mud, forest floor, moldy hazelnuts, fig, pear, autumn leaves, dandelions, wet clay, foraged chanterelles pan-fried with brown sugar, very old brown honey, dried rosemary, crumbled cookies, touch cinnamon, iron. Sweetish, estery onset, hints of pear, banana, medlar and blue plum with a sourish undertone (blackberries straight from the woods), sharply carbonated with minerally effect; 'fluffy' body with slight metallic edges, brown-bready and cookie-like with a sweet brown-sugary undertone but feeling a tad 'dirty' as well, under growing spiciness of phenolic clove to even rosemary and cinnamon - but luckily nothing too 'clinical'. Very earthy finish, forest floor and dead tree leaves, with a floral hop bitterishness, an ongoing iron-like 'zing' and lingering fruity and spicy yeastiness with pronounced phenols, yet somehow the flavours do come together quite well in the very end and find balance between sweet, sour and bitter. That said, it is clear that something went wrong here, with mild and onsetting infection probably being at play; get rid of these unforgivable technical flaws and you will have a very stereotypical, yet flavour-wise acceptable dubbel, albeit one on the sweeter side of the spectrum. There is quite some finetuning work afoot here, but at least the basis is right, which cannot be said of some other starting-up breweries' output.