Towering amber-cream head over ruby-shot dark brown beer; some lace. Caramel syrup, liquorice, plywood. Sweet, I jap /I, liquorice, sweet chocolate, Nesquick, dry wood. Quite well-bodied, slick, chewy to oily; well-carbonated, some alcoholwarming. Come on! This is something belonging to the very beginning of beerrevival. Today we can do better, no? Txs to Stef!

21st May 2022
Almost clear very dark brown beer, small tan head. Nose is striking and pleasant red wine. Smooth airy palate, semi dry, good fine carbonation. Smooth malts, a touch of creamy sweetness. Not a huge amount of dark malt character here. There is plenty of red wine character, mature red berries and a touch of wood. Some mild alcohol derivatives don't detract too much. A curious beer, like the red wine character but where is the stout element? Drinkable all the same!

Sampled @ Zythos Beer Festival 2022. A clear orange brown beer with a beige head. Aroma of red fruits and caramel. Taste of strong dark roasted malt, red fruits, caramel, berries.

On tap at the 14th Brugs Bier Festival, Brugge, Belgium. A very dark brown coloured pour with a healthy beige head on top. Roasty, malty, chocolate, caramel. Fine but too much happening here.

Bottle as a Christmas present - thanks, Elke! Hazy dark brown, stable, tan head. Aroma of toffee, burnt caramel, prune, raisin, dried orange peel, date jam, syrup. Taste has very sweet prune, raisin & date over caramelly malts, bit syrupy and spicy-phenolic. Herbal hoppy finish, hint of sweet-spicy liquorice, more dried fruits and syrup as well as warming liqueur-like alcohol. Medium body, syrupy texture, average carbonation. Not as elegant as the Stoutilicious BA, but well-made, more of a classic 'Belgian Dark' indeed - surpassing the industrial examples.

Bottle as a Christmas present - thanks, Elke! Hazy black, small, foamy, beige head. Complex aroma of blue plum, blue grape, fig, red fruit jam, toast, fondant, liqueur-filled praline, red wine, cold coffee. Taste has sweetish plum, prune and fig mixing with sourish brambleberry, blackcurrant and grapes, kept together by a dark-chocolatey malt body with toasty notes and wood. Tart, toasty finish, lingering red fruit & berries, soft coffee roast, vague dark chocolate again and woody tannins. Warming red wine-like alcohol in the very end. Medium body, oily texture, average carbonation. Complex and enjoyable, a promising issue by this brewery.

Spiced strong dark beer in the De Bock range, developed in Beveren, which my home village is part of; founder Pieter De Bock (who has worked for Affligem and Anders and now for Musketeers) already named his first beer (Rémi) after his grandfather, so now the honour goes to the grandfather of his business partner Jordi Bruynseels, whose grandfather was named Desideer Bruynseels. Developed for the Chinese market, this new De Bock beer also appears in specialized beer shops in Belgium; I got mine from Fontana, now taken over by Dullaert, in Sint-Niklaas. Towering high, foamy, thickly plaster-like lacing, dense, pale beige, rocky, stable head on a misty deep chestnut brown beer with ruddy cinnamon-coloured edges. Aroma initially a bit muffled by the huge head but slowly releasing impressions of freshly baked brown bread, old gingerbread, dried prunes, coriander seed, coffee grounds, ruby port, caramel to even burnt sugar, dried thyme, clove, medlar, nutmeg, 'oude graanjenever', old raisins, sawdust, straw. Sweet onset but not in a cloying way, dried prunes and raisins returning, hint of pear perhaps, medium carbonation, full but supple body; some candi sugar travels on but thinly so, over a rounded, caramelly and notably brown-bready maltiness with walnutty edges, leading to a warming, spicy finish, where the malts even turn lightly roasty (coffee), matching well with a soft herbal hoppiness, spiciness of both phenolic (clove, nutmeg) and 'real' (coriander) nature and, tying it all together, a soothing glow of armagnac-like alcohol - which nevertheless refrains from becoming too obvious. This brewery has only pleasantly surprised me so far - its founder is clearly a very accomplished brewer from a technical point of view, his experience as the Anders head brewer clearly shows: even if these beers reiterate old Belgian formulas, apart from that wine-barrel aged stout which was downright amazing, all of them are technically remarkably well executed. This one feels like a spicy Belgian style Christmas ale, a Scotch in disguise in fact, which is all I could have wished for on a gloomy and dreary November night. But I am sure the Chinese will like it too...

New addition to the De Bock range (after Desideer, which I haven't tried yet), from my home region - the town of Beveren, more precisely: a wine barrel aged imperial stout, no less, brewed in their own micro installation in the Klapperstraat. Quite surprised to find this one, at De Picker in Zele... Thick and frothy, tightly paper-lacing, beige, stable, moussy head on a black beer with misty mahogany edges. Strong bouquet of a powerful red Pinot Noir wine, black coffee and coffee filters, brambleberries, cassis, blue plum, old bars of 'fondant' chocolate, wet oak wood, burnt brown bread toast, beef stock, port sauce, hints of salmiak, toffee, brown rum, burnt raisins, pear, clove, English brown sauce, Ersatz chocolate, old vanilla beans, dust. Fruity onset, some blackberry, pear and elderberry sweetness mingled with unripe grape and green apple sourishness but more sweet than sour, vague beef stock-like umami element, lively and minerally carbonation (a bit much for a strong stout actually) thinning an otherwise thick, oily mouthfeel. Layers of old bitter-chocolatey, brown-bready and caramelly malts ensue, still carrying this fruity tartness onwards to a complex finish in which a lot of things unfold at more or less the same time: the Pinot Noir effect of a powerful red wine, ripe blackberries and ripe blue grapes, the drying tannic effect of the wood, the tartness of the wine underneath its sweetness, a herbal hop note adding light bitterness, a 'dusty' and bready yeastiness and phenolic spicy notes (clove) - all tied together by a warming, soothing glow of whisky-like alcohol. The malts, meanwhile, have turned all roasted bitter and a bit ashy even, as is the case in many Belgian attempts at imperial stout; this roasted chicory-like effect lingers on together with the Pinot Noir, which in the end may perhaps be a bit too explicit. Feels like a stout diluted with some strong red wine, all things considered, but compared with the earlier De Bock beers (a stereotypical Belgian IPA and a predictable Belgian blonde, though both well executed), this one ups the ante and came as a total surprise to me. With this kind of experiments the De Bock guys may well be able to attract attention from the craft beer crowds - I noticed that Beervikings is already selling it - and if this is the intention, I can only recommend them to continue on this path, even if a beer like this takes a whole lot of thought and care, in which it does fall a bit short. The balance between beer and red wine could have been tilted more towards the beer and less towards the wine (to the benefit of the beer), for example, and the roasted bitterness could have been more coffee-like and less ash-like; having said that, I must conclude that I never expected De Bock to come up with something this ambitious, so have a point for that.