7.4

Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7

Sour ale brewed with wild yeasts 'caught' in the brewery and containing a portion of whisky malt (hence the "smoking"), by a rather creative and prolific new brewer in the Waregem region in West-Flanders - one I have been watching for a while before I actually took the step to obtain a series of his beers. Medium thick, egg-white, rather dense and creamy, somewhat pillowy, tightly membrane-lacing, irregularly edged yet stable head on a misty peach blonde beer with amberish tinge and lots of lively sparkling sustaining the head. Aroma of raw rhubarb, green gooseberry, wood sorrel, indeed a light but clear smoky-whisky-like hint (even very vague burnt paper somehow), wild apples, sourdough, sedge, unripe plum, unripe orange, yoghurt, hint of red wine vinegar. Crisp, fruity onset, quite colourful, with lots of gooseberry, green apple, unripe plum and redcurrant effects - generally notably fruity-sour, in other words, even a tad puckering but not overly vinegary and somewhat mitigated by a peach-like sweetish element within; lively carb accentuating this sourness, but in a very fine-bubbled way so satiating without painfully stinging. Smooth mouthfeel, dried by ongoing crisp and fruity, but also sharply lactic acidity, piercing consistently through a slender, bready and cereally malt core; the smoky element of the whisky malt, already much softer than Rauchmalz and certainly when used in a small dosage, gets a bit lost in this overall sour fest, which concludes with a dash of very soft floral hops (only distantly bittering) and more puckering, at this point downright lemony sourness, accompanied by something notably lactic retronasally (buttermilk-ish). In spite of the rather complicated premise, the net result here is a brightly fruity, 'yellow-summery' sour ale - almost like one of Alvinne's basic blonde sours (think Phi and the like) but without wood and less complex. Functions well as such, but the acidity, though of a 'happily' fruity kind, may be a bit too sharp for some, I reckon - let us say that the average American sourhead would love this...