330 ml. bottle sampled thanks to tderoeck. Small GUSHER. Sparkling hazy citrus, little white head. Nose is chemical, sweet plaster, industrial vanilla, big perfume, fizzy, chemical. Taste is fizzy chemical, nasty overly sweet, perfume, spices, industrial, yeast. Overly fizzy. Yay another soulless industrial-like unpleasant excessive BE blond from Boelens. Unfortunately it seems like there is still a market for beers like this (a pretty big one I am guessing).

Bottle from the Bierboom in Bruges, cheers Rudy! Apparently an occasional beer commissioned by a Dutch beer company called Rodanum and executed by Boelens near Sint-Niklaas - ironic that I have to find a beer from my own region in Bruges, now that I come to think of it. Irregular, cobweb-lacing, eventually (completely) dissipating egg-white head; basic colour is a deep ’old gold’, golden with a peachy hue, with a thick suspension of yeast bits throughout, disturbed by quite lively fizz rising up from the bottom; starts of with a light haze but becomes pear juice-like cloudy in the end. Sweet and yeasty aroma has a distinct and strong ripe pineapple quality, apart from canned peach, honey, ’jenever’, gooseberry, cooked banana but fairly subtle, a lot of roses, cooked celeriac, turnip even, chamomille tea, stewed pear, jute, white pepper, baker’s yeast. Very estery fruity onset, lots of overripe pineapple, some apricot, banana, ripe pear and strong gooseberry, more sweet than sour, strongish carbo numbing the tongue a bit but not overly so; caramelly and slightly grainy malt backbone with residual white candi sugar sweetness lingering on the teeth, so in all: too sweet to begin with. Finish continues this malt sweetness in addition to basic earthy and lightly grassy hop bitterness, well intended but effectively incapable of countering the malt and residual sugar sweetness, some retronasal solvents (not very pleasant actually) and, of course, a glow of strong, gin-like alcohol in the end, becoming somewhat wry on the root of the tongue and in that sense tiring. Why these people commissioned yet another tripel out of all the dozens of available beer styles remains beyond my understanding as usual in this kind of cases, but I am still capable of appreciating a tripel if it is made with care; this one comes across as amateurish, trying to connect with the sweetest side of the Belgian tripel range (and yes, I’m also pointing at you, La Trappe Tripel!). Not sufficiently fermented, too many weird off-flavors, alcohol on the brink of becoming too intrusive: not a great success I’m afraid, just at a time when my confidence in Boelens, my local brewery, had begun to increase. I should have known better I guess: the shop owner actually discouraged me from buying this - something I have not often encountered from shop owners regardless of which products they sell - and in retrospect, I guess he was right. Too bad: the label says ’subtly hopped’, if only they (I do not personally know who commissioned this) had been more generous and way less subtle with the hops!