This enthusiastic young brewery in my home region of the Waasland, the north eastern corner of the Eastern Flanders province, is a peculiar case: what they basically try to do, is renovate and revive a local brewery that closed its doors in the sixties, but at the same time apply the original Kerel brand name to new, non-traditional craft beers. They claimed from the start that they managed to literally resurrect yeast DNA from the original beer and use it in their beers - but this one, their eighth official creation so far, is the first where this original yeast strain, woken up from the dead with the help of science, is actually used; the beer as a whole is intended to recreate the original Kerel beer probably only the senior citizens of the village of Tielrode may remember. Bottle straight from the brewery, with a new style of label. Irregular, pale greyish white, sparsely lacing head, thinnish but settling as a stable moussy ring and some 'shreds' in the middle, over an initially lightly hazy, warm orange blonde beer with vague vermillion hue - qualifying as pure amber indeed, turning into a deeper, more misty, almost metallic amber with sediment, the sediment produced by this 'zombie' yeast so enthusiastically described on the label. Aroma of freshly baked bread, peanuts, dried apple peel, a lot of obnoxious DMS (cooked cabbage) that just won't go away, raw carrots, spoiled vegetable soup, ripe apricot, banana mush, cooked turnips, faint hints of damp earth, ketchup, old cookies, sweetclover. Fruity, lightly estery onset, hinting at peach, apple and banana but fairly restrained and cleanish, low in sweetness with a sourish touch, softly carbonated, slick and thinnish body, vague metallic accents at the sides. Slim peanutty and bit caramelly malt body with softer bready and very subtly toasty aspects to it, bread crust-like in a thin and subtle way, with a slightly resiny effect in the end. Only light and shy floral and earthy hoppy notes in the finish, not providing much bitterness at all - the result of which is that the finish lacks in 'body' and fades away a bit watery, with that thin nutty and - more pleasant - cookie crumble-like malt sweetishness lingering; the hops do show up very late, depositing a mildly spicy bitterishness on the root of the tongue. The DMS is strong and disturbing here - I am allergic to it - but otherwise, this does remind me of the type of old school, English (Bass!) inspired pale ales that were immensely popular in Belgium in the sixties. I assume the original Kerel was such a beer, one of the countless regional 'Belgian pale ales' (or amber ales, if you will), not far removed from e.g. Palm Spéciale, of which this Kerel Original is very reminiscent. The problem is that we do not live in the sixties anymore - beer has undergone an incredibly vast amount of changes and evolutions precisely from the seventies onwards - and apart from old folks still drinking Palm and the like out of habit, I am a bit in doubt whether this experiment will find any audience at all. This beer is a far reaching throwback in time - it's been a long time since I had anything like this, it reminds me of the previous century, when I was utterly oblivious to beer and drank Palm and other, similar Belgian pale ales by the gallon. Anachronistic is the best way to describe this, as if you'd put an ancient Roman artefact in a modern arts museum - interesting as a standalone experiment perhaps, but I'm sure the people that drank the original Kerel regularly, have long been gone now, bless them. In this day and age, if you put forward "yeast" as the defining feature of your new beer, craft beer people expect something quite opposite to this - the yeast doesn't even add a lot of character here, which is perfectly in line with the rather 'clean' and low-profile yeast strains used for English - and indeed Belgian - pale ales back in the time when this was a local success. I need a time machine back to the 21st century after this but could have appreciated it for what it is, if it weren't for that DMS, which I am highly sensitive to. So far the least successfull of all the Kerel beers for me, including the test brews I had before they officially started - but I still support what they do, and if the rumours are correct, their next release will be quite the opposite of this beer's bland simplicity... Enough said!

Pours nearly clear, darker blonde, big frotthy white head. Medium Stability. Smell is mild grassy, hops, rather green. Medium intense. Taste is rather full, bit medicinal bitter, tad of aromatic features. Bit grassy. OK ;

Overcarbonated... but no gusher. Taste is ok.

Imported from my RateBeer account as VBDCK Kerel India Pale Ale (by VBDCK Brewery):
Aroma: 6/10, Appearance: 3/5, Taste: 6/10, Palate: 3/5, Overall: 11/20, MyTotalScore: 2.9/5

22/X/17 - 33cl bottle @ Alengrin's Tasting (Goedele's place) - BB: 3/IV/19, brew: 1721 (2017-1803) Thanks to Alengrin for sharing the bottle!

Clear orange beer, small creamy yellowish head, little stable, bit adhesive. Aroma: sweet caramel, butter scotch, grains, bit yeasty. Where's my tropical fruits? MF: soft carbon, medium body. Taste: very bitter, some citrus, very grassy, resinous, bit buttery, way too bitter. Aftertaste: quite some bitter grapefruit, really bitter, almost chemical and definitely unpleasant, some caramel, bit of diacetyl. Quite the disappointment, their grapefruit ipa is much better...

VBDCK kicked off with a set of six beers deliberately - but unfortunately not very successfully - rejecting old Belgian clichés (or, to quote the brewer's lovely wife: we have no business brewing tripels, everybody does that), in a region not known for its beery experiments at all - my home Waasland region, in the northeastern corner of Eastern Flanders. This is the seventh beer they commercialize, released less than two weeks ago, an attempt at modern 'international' IPA. Bottle straight from the brewery. Fairly thick, tightly 'papery' lacing, egg-white, moussy head slowly thinning in the middle but otherwise very well-retaining, over an initially cristal clear, warm autumny amber-hued orange blonde beer. Aroma is more promising than anything else I tasted from this brewery, with a still rather careful, but in any case convincing and modern, even somewhat dank IPA character: toasted onions, frying oil, yellow grapefruit and the white underside of its peel, pine nuts, cedar wood, sweet pancakes as it warms up, toasted bread, green olives, moist barbecue spices, hints of old garlic, pink pepper, rainwater, bitter honey. Fruity, crisp onset, well-carbonated but not overly so for this style, bit minerally, alongside dried apricot, bitter orange peel and redcurrant impressions, subdued in sweetness with a sourish undercurrent to it, green olive-like touch; supple, even somewhat oily mouthfeel. Very nutty maltiness, toasted peanuts with a slightly softening caramelly side to it, quickly ascending to a full-fledged hop bitterness, resiny and wormwood-like, very long and drying, with a notably spicy aspect to it; meanwhile retronasal aromas of dried grapefruit peel, toasted sweet onions and even some pine resin appear. Ends bitterly dry and spicy, utterly quenching, with pronounced minerally aspects to it (spring water) but hardly any bothersome Belgian yeast side effects. This exceeds my expectations, which were admittedly low after that Grapefruit IPA, to a large extent: this is clean, to the point, aromatic (even in a somewhat 'dank' way) and uncompromisingly bitter, like an old school West Coast IPA - or indeed many of these new Dutch IPAs, which this beer reminds me of, much more so than of the countless estery and phenolic 'Belgian IPA' attempts made by both small and larger breweries in its home country nowadays. Both in terms of 'truth to style' and flavour as such, this is by far the best VBDCK offering so far - if they manage to continue on this path, I predict a bright future for them in the face of the global craft beer movement translated to Belgian proportions. I could not expect much more from a local, Flemish IPA than this. Big cheers to that - finally this project is starting to convince me of its potential. I remember tasting a DIPA from them when they were still in their preproduction phase and that one did suffer a lot from undesirable 'Belgian' yeasty side effects - but if that recipe is cleaned up, a more 'beefy' follow-up to this modestly alcoholic (almost 'session') IPA could be very promising.