Bottle from Geers. Beautiful red/brown colour, lots of creamy foam. Nose of caramel, chocolate, ripe plums. Light roasty, sweet, notes of spices (anise). Rather bitter finish, bit unbalanced. Not the greatest example for this style but certainly not bad.

The zealous trappist monks in Spencer have been venturing in some more American craft-inspired beers in the past few years, but with this new quadrupel, they firmly return to classic Belgian trappist beer territory; I’m guessing a tripel could very well be next. It shows a very thick and frothy, regularly shaped, tightly lacing, pale yellowish beige, well-retaining head sitting atop a deep, lightly hazy, dark burgundy coloured beer with wine red tinge. Classic and confident quad aroma of dried prunes, old raisins, dried banana slices, toffee, hard candi sugar, candied fig, brown rum, sugared tea, old brown bread, dry cassonade, pear brandy, fried red apples, cloves, vague accents of nutmeg, old cinnamon powder, treacle, damp tree leaves, liquorice candy, moist earth, even some very faint ’freshly fermented farmland’ somewhere. Sweet, rounded onset with well-positioned dried fruit flavours (fig, banana, plums), candi sugar sweetness as is to be expected from the style - but not at all overdone and not cloying, balanced by an underlying, very soft sourish background (dried berries); medium carbonated, fizzing away gently on the tongue’s surface, paired with a full, smooth, lean mouthfeel. The restrained but effective candi sugar sweetness elegantly accompanies a nutty, caramelly and toffeeish malty middle, while the dried fruit notes linger on; a soft toasty accent joins in the end, bringing some ’side bitterishness’ before a dash of herbal, mildly spicy hops add more expressive bitterness to the finish, though it is the nutty maltiness and, to a lesser extent, the candi sugar sweetness that remain dominant. Unsurprisingly, all this is followed by a notable, somewhat crude and wry, ’jenever’-like alcohol effect, accentuating the end bitterness and leaving behind some astringency. Just a bit much so for my personal taste, actually; in comparison with the legendary beers that basically ’made’ this style, think Chimay Bleu, La Trappe Quadrupel and certainly Rochefort 10 or Westvleteren 12, the alcohol could probably have been masked a bit better. In all, an honorable attempt at this style, a bit on the robust side, but very well executed, with so much respect for the traditional standards that if tasted blind, I’d probably associate this with a classic Belgian brewery - nothing in this beer reveals any link to modern American beer culture at all, and that was probably the intention. Well done, I can think of a great number of traditional Belgian beer consumers that will love this - and I’m pretty confident that, contrary to some of their other beers that had no traditionally rooted market in this country, this one will soon pop up here on a more regular basis, like the original blonde one (and probably at one third of the price I paid for it today). And like the Belgian and Dutch classics in this style, this probably has an interesting aging potential too, so I’m keeping one in my cellar for a year or so, to see how it evolves. Very classic in concept and execution, clean-ish and well-balanced without too much cloying candi sugariness as one often sees in less successful examples, robust, rich and warming: this is an exemplary quadrupel without a shadow of a doubt.