7.3

Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 6.5

Another creative concoction by this odd young microbrewery in West-Flanders, a kind of brown ale (in the most general sense of the word so not the traditional English ale style) brewed with - hold on - pale and dark barley malt, black oats (a relative of regular oats often used in horse feeds but very rarely - if ever - in beer), wheat, roasted barley, four hop varieties including Nelson Sauvin, kveik yeast and Brettanomyces... Not your regular Belgian dubbel, that much is clear, and frankly I cannot find any other category to fit it in - so I had to take peace with 'traditional ale' here in spite of the fact that there is nothing actually traditional about it... The admins can correct me on this but I frankly have no idea which of the set categories on this site would fit this beer better. Anyway: very slow gusher, pouring a medium sized, greyish off-white, tiny-bubbled, tightly 'Brugse kant'-like lacing, slowly breaking but generally stable head and initially clear, dark mahogany brown robe with bronze glow, turning hazy and more greyish-brown further on. Aroma of coffee grounds, dark wholegrain bread, roasted chicory, old 'herbes de Provençe', dried elderberries, something sweaty, a whiff of unripe peach, salsify, dry forest floor, wild lingonberries, old pipe tobacco, brown bread crust, old ground walnuts, black tea, wet leather, dried blueberries. Spritzy onset, quite minerally in its effervescence (not surprising seeing the slow and limited degree of gushing) but not bothering the fruity esters too much, relatively dry (even if the brewer describes this beer as sweet) with a deep sourish undertone, evoking dried prunes, dried blueberries, a touch of medlar and some green pear, but certainly not the more exuberant, almost 'Belgian' fruitiness I tend to expect from kveik-fermented ales. With all those different grains, it comes as no surprise that the middle is predominantly malty and grainy: a lot of dark brown bread crust, roasted cereals and toasted walnut, topped with a chicory-like roasty bitterness which fills the finish. Wheat seems to be somehow less prominent than the black oats (adding this 'dark' kind of graininess somewhere) and the roasted barley - in fact it is hardly recognisable at all. Given that this is also a raw beer, the fact that it was not cooked does show a bit, such beers tend to actually have a 'raw' kind of taste I do not particularly appreciate, but here this - always - subtle aspect remains hidden under the other flavour components. Herbal and very earthy hops then add to the roasted bitterness, with some leafy and tea-like notes, while the Brett provides a leathery accent (but not too much 'funk') and more earthiness which, combined with the roasted barley, eventually becomes a tad ashy. The sour aspect that underlies it all, remains active till the finish, and as in many artisanal stouts and porters it probably comes from the roasted barley more than from fermentation. In all, a 'dirty' and earthy ending, with some berry-like fruitiness lingering atop that roasted chicory-like bitterness, dryish and a bit sour - complex indeed, but I do not really get the full effects of the kveik so it could have displayed its fruitiness perhaps a bit more exuberantly; the Brett, on the other hand, is more dominant, in a leathery, dry kind of way. Not bad, quite drinkable and interesting even, but somehow the net effect strongly reminds me of a very 'artisanal' Walloon brune more than anything truly nordic. Perhaps less odd and outgoing than it was intended to be...