Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 6.5 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 6.5

Special variant on Vicaris Tripel, one of Dilewyns’ first ever beers, ‘embellished’ with rum-soaked oak chips and bottled in 75 cl bottles with cork and muselet. Huge, inches thick, foamy, snow white, cobweb-lacing head, hazy peach blonde robe with ochre tinge. Aroma of banana, canned peach, indeed white rum (a bit coconutty), cooked sweet potato, chewing gum, rusty iron, green pear, ‘oude jenever’, coriander seed, some vague vanilla (from the oak chips I guess?), raw cane sugar, honey, raw celeriac, dried orange peel, industrial apricot jam. Sweet onset, fruity esters with banana ester being most prominent, impressions of (canned) peach and sweet red apple too, sharp carbonation stinging through a rounded, softly bready pale malt core. A layer of honeyish residual sugars travels along on this ‘conveyor belt’ of malts and esters, so that the banana still lingers in the end. Meanwhile, a whiff of mild spiciness (coriander, clove) passes by and gets overwhelmed by the rum, adding this typical sweet-tropical coconut-ish aroma retronasally along with warming booziness. Some vanilla from the oak chips pops up, but tannic flavours are hardly there, if at all; floral hops do constitute a lingering finishing bitterishness. The alcohol, however, becomes rather wry and unpleasant in the end – as is all too often the case with these ‘pimped’ tripels trying to cash in on the barrel ageing hype without actually being barrel aged (because infusions are of course a quick and cheap shortcut for that). Crude, sweet and boozy tripel, a bit as expected really. I have seen this brand kick off back in the day, regularly met the man who started it in person back then, and appreciate the long journey Vicaris has since undertaken, with the takeover by the creator’s children and the high-tech state-of-the-art brewery they set up, but they have clearly chosen the path of the greatest common divisor in Belgian taste for commercial reasons and none of their beers have charmed me as much as the very first originals two decades ago. If anything, this one should have undergone some prolonged actual rum barrel ageing like the more U.S.-oriented craft brewers do: who knows what a beauty may have arisen then…