5.8

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 5.5 | Flavor - 5.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 5.5

Tripel aged on oak chips, vaguely "brewed in Ghent" according to the label but it is no secret that the exact location is BeerSelect in Sint-Denijs-Westrem, submunicipality of Ghent. One of those 'ultracommercial' beers developed by an entrepreneur (a plumbing company in Kalken apparently) who has sensed that money is to be made with local beers nowadays, attaching a story to it about women generally not liking beer and therefore feeling the need to brigde the - non-existent - gap and creating a beer for both men (with their "raw primal instinct", quote their website!) and women (with their "softness", ditto). It is odd to see a way of thinking like this still being used in 2024 as a starting point for commercialising a beer and I know a lot of beer-drinking women who will justly be offended by this - so we are starting off on the wrong foot here, I think... Implied misogyny aside - even if the entrepreneur in question deliberately tries to achieve the opposite, claiming that he used a half-male, half-female tasting panel to test this beer - it is also annoying that the label on the beer itself does not openly mention the brewery. Anyway: egg-white, intricately cobweb-lacing, medium thick, quite dense and moussey, slightly breaking but generally very stable head on an initially crystal clear pale and pure yellow-golden beer with a disparate 'suspension' of yeast floating in the middle, turning misty and deeper 'old gold' with sediment. Rather uninviting aroma of green banana, apple peel, raw potato, wet straw, ferrous spring water, wet kitchen towels, unripe apricot, very faint smoky touch of wood chips but almost nothing of the oaky vanillin it is supposed to exude, petrichor, jute rope, old dry cereals from a dusty bag. Sweetish onset but clean and sleek, unripe apricot and green banana again, low in esters, with dim sourish undertone persisting throughout the whole thing; sharpish carb with minerally effect accentuating that sour element. Very slick cereally and slightly rusk-like maltiness with a vague metallic touch around the edges, sweetish with soft bitterish toasty note, bittering in the end from the drying effect of the oak chips (again completely dull and lacking retronasal vanilla) and herbal, floral hops, above which a hint of clove hovers. Slight 'jenever'-like alcohol in the finish but fortunately at least this aspect remains firmly in place without disturbing the rest - not that there is so much to disturb, because this is simply the umpteenth run-of-the-mill tripel for the masses churned out by the BeerSelect factory. There is nothing more (or less) 'male' or 'female' about this beer than any other tripel of the same characterless, sleek, impersonally commercial vein, and the fact alone that this commissioner highlights gender differences so emphatically makes my male "raw primal instinct", paired with countless tastings of similarly bland tripels, simply say no. Boring, redundant, annoyingly sourish and metallic beer that adds literally nothing to the East-Flemish beer landscape.