6.9

Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 6.5 | Flavor - 6.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7.5

"Savage tripel" developed by a self-proclaimed student-entrepreneur from Bonheiden (in the south of the Antwerp province), commercially produced at Boelens. Very thick and rocky, thickly plaster-like lacing, egg-white, bath-moussey, firm and stable head on an initially near clear, pale yellow-golden robe with a column of steady sparkling rising up from the middle; misty and a bit deeper apricot-tinged with sediment. Aroma of crumbled Betterfood cookies, white bread, ripe banana, pear, some canned pineapple and peach jam, honey, grass, dry hay, young beech leaves in spring, daisies, mugwort leaf, cooked parsnip, limestone dust, waffles, petrichor, wodka. Fruity onset, sweet with a lot of ripe banana, ripe pear and ripe peach, next to notes of red apple and pineapple as well as a very dim sourish undertone, enhanced by lively, very minerally (limestone, gypsum) carbonation; smooth, bit fluffy, agreeable mouthfeel. Residual, honeyish sugars sweetly - but not too cloyingly - linger over a slick white-bready malt core, lending it a somewhat dry cookie-, Betterfood- and even brioche-like character; this honeyish sweetness pairs well with delicate floral hopping, providing a mild finishing bitterness. Phenols are largely kept at bay, while sweet yellow fruit, residual sugar and pale malt sweetishness linger, slightly bittered by the abovementioned floral hops, into a warming finish where a wodka-like alcohol glow flares up, creating an unnecessary, somewhat obnoxious heat down the throat. The alcohol should be better hidden in a tripel of this strength and it is clear that this student-entrepreneur and Boelens have opted for a sweet tripel to please the masses, so in that sense there is nothing savage about this: instead of raw Mesozoic power, I get yet another boring, straightforward, sweet mass-market tripel, adding absolutely nothing to the already vast lake of similar beers in this country. That said, in this particular market segment it is admittedly well made and very easily drinkable, so at least the creator's entrepreneurship has a reasonable chance of commercial success with this beer. And if not, surely he will choose something completely different than beer to satisfy his commercial appetite, because that is what natural-born entrepreneurs do. You know what is missing in this beer, apart from complexity and originality? Love and passion, not for the sake of having an own entreprise itself, but for beer. I think that by now, we have had enough of these opportunistic guys skimming the market with bland, distracting, mass-marketed and uninspired run-of-the-mill blondes and tripels just because they can make a buck out of it - have we not?