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

'Standard' NEIPA by Kees, still one of the leading Dutch craft brewers, hopped with the "bare essentials" Citra and Mosaic - so no frills here, just a basic NEIPA, coming from a can bought in a Jumbo supermarket. Thick and foamy, egg-white, audibly sizzling, pillowy, frothy head dwindling very slowly over a hazed yellow blonde robe with olive greenish tinge. Aroma of pomelo zest, orange pith and grapefruit peel so very much Citra, but also fried leek, lots of fresh lemonbalm, drying white bread, cooked sweet potato, vague guava, chamomile and even homemade 'flower cookies', faint background hints of vanilla (even quite 'genuine', oddly), very light wet dog, dried roses and pond water teeming with green algae - perhaps even the faintest note of fresh raw shellfish. Quite crisp onset for the style due to sharp carbonation with strong minerally effects (which should not be present in this style), notes of green banana, green mango and green guava but nowhere explicitly sweet; hint of raw cucumber and something unripe pear-like alongside a sharp-edged pale maltiness, but not grainy - in fact a certain smoothness, applicable to the intended style, is maintained, yet not in an overly creamy way. The hops increase in strength as it goes, pushing forward retronasal citric aromas of lime zest, grapefruit blossom and pomelo flesh - as well as the lemonbalm plant I grew up with, in a more herbal way. Meanwhile the same hops also impose a certain leafy bitterishness over the finish - but fairly gently so, even if 'spreading out' for a while. Not your typical standard NEIPA if you ask me: much more crisp, more bitter and less creamy, this one behaves more like a "mountain IPA", or something in between East Coast and West Coast - in fact, if marketed differently, it could well pass for one of those contemporary 'new' West Coast IPAs which are distinghuised from the dominant hazy IPA mode just by being a bit more bitter and crisp (whilst usually failing to convey the actual historical West Coast IPA of two or three decades ago). Kind of an 'everyday IPA' indeed, hence its presence in a supermarket, I guess - but far from Kees' greatest achievements even in the IPA field, which admittedly has never been his forte.