Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
Bottle shared with Antonius Willem. Clear dark orange color, full sized off-white head. Smell and taste malts, some hops. Reminds me a bit of orangepeel as well. Average to medium body, firm almost fizzy carbonation. Not a good double IPA at all, but it’s a drinkable beer.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
Bottle shared with Antonius Willem. A bit hazy golden color, full sized a bit soapy white head that diminishes quickly. Aroma is malts, typical sorachi ace hop aroma. Taste malts, some kind of fruityness, bitterness from "het witte van een sinaasappel". Decent body and carbonation.
Benzai (24515) reviewed Hip Hop USA from Microbrouwerij De Keukenbrouwers 9 years ago
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7
Bottle shared with Antonius Willem. Hazy orange color, average sized white head. Smell and taste malts, somewhat hoppy, some citrus, a distant hint of orangepeel and a soft fruit bitterness. Decent body and carbonation.
Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 7
Bottle shared with Antonius Willem. Hazy pale yellow color, average sized white head. Aroma is lightly malts, wheat, yeast, citrus. Taste lightly malts, citrussy again and indeed like the label says "pompelmoes". Average to medium body, a bit fizzy carbonation. Ok beer.
Benzai (24515) reviewed Monk Johnny from Microbrouwerij De Keukenbrouwers 9 years ago
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
Bottle @ weekly shared by Joes. Brown color with a red glare coming through, average to medium sized quite quickly diminishing off-white to beige head. Not a lot of aroma at first but after a while a sourish dark malt aroma comes through. Taste malts, dark malts, lightly sourish, sourish finish. Is that sourness intended? Well, it’s drinkable but I can see people disliking the sourish flavor and aroma.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 4 | Flavor - 4 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 3
Bottle @benzai. Brown colour with a small to medium sized off-white head. Smells farty, poop. Tastes sour, weird, infected. Thin body, soft carbo.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7.5
Belgian IPA highlighting Sorachi Ace, the beloved Japanese hop variety which was developed somewhere around 1980 for Sapporo. After a bad experience with their porter, I kind of wanted to get this out of my cellar as soon as possible but it appears to be more promising. Very thick, ’papery’ lacing, frothy and even rocky (clearly hops-enhanced), irregular, cream white head over a hazy golden blonde beer with ochre hue, becoming ever more clouded as the bottle progresses. Aroma of lime, lemon zest, soap, some fresh dill as expected from the hops, starfruit, unripe green plum, white bread dough, dried field flowers, dry earth, fainter hints of green banana, old dry cake, apricot, sourdough, freshly cut grass, white pepper but none of the green tea or coriander notes sometimes ascribed to this particular hop variety as well - only the lemon / lime and dill notes keep their heads up amidst restrained, but unmistakable ’Belgian’ yeastiness. Crisp onset, estery alright but not exaggerated, more sourish than sweetish but in any case very fruity with hints of passion fruit, green plum, strong gooseberry and faint green banana, spritzy carbo (a bit overcarbonated even), supple and light but sufficient body ’coarsed’ a bit by overcarbonation, citrus peel fraîcheur playing along as well as the gooseberry ester but not so much the banana; finishes dryish with a notably soapy retronasal quality, floral and a tad lemony as well, while in the mouth it becomes ever more earthy (especially with the deposit added), softly spicy and leafy, with a mild but persistent, somewhat ’superficial’ bitterness. An earthy bitterness does linger on the root of the tongue but this could have come from any hop variety. Typical ’Belgian IPA’ (I am an advocate of this term being recognized here as a separate beer (sub)style): the classic Sorachi Ace qualities are there, especially its lemon zest characteristics, but not its subtleties, because those are drowned in an overly Belgian yeastiness. Either you feel sorry for the hops, or you enjoy the marriage of Belgian yeast traits with the most essential qualities of this hop variety - the choice is yours. As far as I personally am concerned: much more enjoyable than expected and maybe even the best Keukenbrouwers beer I had so far, but still I would like to see Belgian brewers getting rid of these Belgian yeast traits in order to showcase as important a hop variety as they have chosen here - even more so considerig the unique character of Sorachi Ace. If hops are the main thing in IPAs these days, it would have been a better choice to give them all the credit without bothering them with side flavors no one truly cares about. In fact: in this particular case, they do not even seem to play the main role, but rather support the overall character, which is a lot closer to a classic saison than to a true IPA. I guess this is what you get when you drown a modern hop variety in a quenching, relatively light, crisp but estery Belgian context: a beer qualifying perfectly as a farmhouse ale. Had these guys written ’saison’ on the label, I’d given it a higher score, subconsciously... In any case this is an interesting brew and luckily far removed from the debacle that was Hip Hop Porter.
Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 4 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 4.5
Yet another new Hip Hop beer, opening with violent gushing - sigh... Medium thick, pale eggshell-beige, moussy head with good retention, colour is a misty burgundy-hued bronze - if this is a porter, it is the lightest one I have ever seen... Aroma is anything but inviting: lots of FFF (manure) hit the nostrils, along with hints of dusty earth, cooked turnip, some unripe peach, some band aid-like phenols, moldy walnut, field flowers, stewed pear but without brown sugar, caramel, rotting grains and, to make things worse, unmistakable DMS (cooked cabbage) and even some DMTS (burning rubber). Estery onset, fruity with hints of gooseberry, banana and passion fruit, spritzy carbonation (in fact overcarbonated especially for the style it claims to belong to), sweetish and sourish with a mushroom-like umami touch, ’fluffy’ and bready malt body, bit caramelly with a toasted edge but no roasted bitterness whatsoever, very yeasty from the start and increasing as such towards the finish with a very bready effect, some herbal and spicy hop bitterness in the end trying to save the day but the overt yeastiness dominates eventually, along with esters and some spicy phenols, none of which are well in place. I have many problems with this: first of all, this is not a porter, that much is clear; I know that ’true’ porter went extinct in the first half of the 20th century only to return in an often (too?) stout-like way with the craft beer revolution which has lead to much confusion between porter and stout, but there are ample historical accounts to argue that there is nothing even remotely porter-like in this beer even if you take the original English porters into account. If anything, this is a Belgian dubbel or ’brown’ ale at best. And not a good one at that: this beer simply stinks, there is an infection going on and / or something went wrong with fermentation, I cannot imagine this is supposed to smell of cooked vegetables, farmland, manure and other such unpleasant things. In terms of pure taste, this is not truly undrinkable, there is a fluffy sweetness and big Belgian yeastiness to it which you either like or not, but it has too many flaws to qualify even from a mere technical point of view; that in combination with the mislabeling in terms of style, makes this a failure at two levels in my opinion. It seems that everything that could possibly go wrong here, has gone wrong. I have one piece of advice for these Keukenbrouwers: I remember them telling me about their wild plans of developing a vast range of beers at Modeste last year, well, forget about this and concentrate on fine-tuning your first efforts before venturing into dozens of other styles you apparently do not even understand yet. There is a Flemish saying which goes as follows: do not try to run before you can even walk. Enough said.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 4 | Flavor - 4 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 4
330 ml. bottle shared with tderoeck & kraddel. Purs touch darker hazy amber with an off-white head. Seriously what gives for the style? Nose is sweet weird palnts, yeast, leaves, dishwashing liquid, wet dog. Taste is herbal, massively fizzy, nasty spoiled leaves, rotting plants, fizzy wet leaves, wet dog, herbal. I am far from a person who obsesses about styles but this is really not a porter, not even by the widest definition imaginable, it has zero roasted malts for one thing, I could excuse it if it was any good but it isn’t or at least not for me & it is beyond being not to style. Seriously what happened here? Their other beers weren’t amazing or anything but they were okay or the usual yeasty BE affairs but I have no idea what happened here. Have these guys ever tasted or seen a porter and/or stout?
Appearance - 2 | Aroma - 5 | Flavor - 5 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 4
Imported from my RateBeer account as De Keukenbrouwers Hip Hop Porter (by Microbrouwerij De Keukenbrouwers):
Aroma: 5/10, Appearance: 1/5, Taste: 5/10, Palate: 3/5, Overall: 8/20, MyTotalScore: 2.2/5
14/IV/16 - 33cl bottle from Willems (Grobbendonk) @ home - BB: 19/XII/17 (2016-357) Thanks to kraddel for sharing the bottle!
Cloudy beige to light brown beer. Like, really? You call this a porter? How did that happen... you started brewing, someone went like: "hey, we're all out of chocolate malt", "don't worry, I don't think they'll notice. Besides, most Belgians don't like roasted beers anyway". I wonder. Big fizzy irregular beige head, unstable, non adhesive. Aroma: very soapy, floral, dirty, dusty, spicy, some banana. MF: lively carbon, medium body. Taste: banana, very spicy, bit sweet, yeast, sourish touch. Aftertaste: more banana, bitter hops, caramel, yeasty, very soapy. This is an insult to the beer style.