330 ml bottle. Pours a very dark brown with moderate fizzy head. Aromas of chocolate, wood, and roasted malts. Flavors follow same with additional rum notes. Tons of carbonation makes things interesting, bringing out more chocolate and roasted notes while hiding a bit of the alcohol

4/V/25 - 33cl bottle from De Hopduvel (Gent), shared @ home, BB: 22/II/29, BR 105/106 (2025-452)

Clear dark brown to black beer, big irregular aery beige yellowish head, unstable, non adhesive. Aroma: lots of chocolate, caramel, some vanilla, woody, a little oxidized, sugary impression, port, sherry, syrupy, blueberry jam. MF: soft carbon, medium body. Taste: pretty sweet and sugary first, lots of port and sherry notes, very oxidized, dried fruits, soft acidity as well, some dried cranberries, raisins, caramel. Aftertaste: very oxidized, sugary, lots of sherry and port, so sweet, a little acidic, a bit earthy, more sugary, dried fruits, soft bitterness, some tannins, more alcohol, dry finish. Meh, too sweet if you ask me.

Sampled at Pikkulintu Ruttopuisto, Helsinki.
Poured light mahogany in color with a white head, lasting.
Tart and sour with light metallic notes. Woody, dry, berryish. Very tart for sure.

(Keg at Pikkulintu Ruttopuisto, 20250417) The beer poured reddish brown and hazy. Its head was medium sized and white. Aroma had candi sugar, sourness, wood and berries. Palate was medium bodied and dry with medium carbonation. Flavours were sourness, wood, candi sugar, malts, berries and bitterness. Aftertaste had sourness tartness and bitterness. A very tart oud bruin. Not bad but bit weird.

Every brewery in Belgium, large to tiny and hypercommercial to hyper-artisanal, needs to have a nablab these days - it seems that every few years or so, a new hype comes along for less alcoholic beers (thank God we got rid of that Radler hype, now that I come to think of it) but this one seems here to stay. This is Verzet's contribution, a (practically) non-alcoholic hazy IPA of sorts. Medium sized, cobweb-lacing, egg-white, somewhat creamy and stable head on a hazed ochre-blonde beer with pale orangey glow. Aroma of freshly cut grass, soggy white bread, unripe green melon, moist white pepper, carambola, something distantly minty, flashes of pineapple, green mango, basil, honey. Crisp onset, restrained in sweetness with hop-fruity notes of starfruit and unripe mango but subduedly so, vague apricot somewhere, minerally undertone partially coming from lively carbonation - but with evidently rather thin (I would almost say watery) mouthfeel. Slender white-bready and bread crumb-like pale maltiness in the middle, under this somehow restrainedly tropical hop aroma, but quickly shifting to full-fledged, leafy, peppery, wormwoody hop bitterness filling the finish and lasting for a long time, in a notably spicy way - much stronger than the second 2024 Brigade beer, their other non-alcoholic IPA. In comparison with that one, intended for their Brigade members only, this one lacks the lush hop aromas one can nowadays expect from a nablab IPA - aromas which could have made this one so much more interesting. They are present, sure, but in a rather faint and distant way, so to my personal liking, they deserve much more exposure. Other than that, this is a fine alternative to the often dreary alcohol-free blondes that were around before the hype started - but the stakes are high these days, and the same thing can be said of a lot of contemporary Belgian (and foreign) nablabs. Clean, refreshing and pleasant enough, but after that very different and much more convincing Brigade version, this is a bit of a letdown for me. That said, I am not the biggest fan of this weird hype anyway - and this one certainly is among the better, more characterful examples of it, no doubt about that.