6/10
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Appearance 2
Aroma 8
Flavor 7
Texture 4
Overall 6
After François Grand Cru, the "Belgian Beer Experts" (not hindered by any form of modesty), now present us with this second tripel - these experts apparently do not excel at originality to say the least. This one is their claim to fame, it seems, intended to conquer the Chinese market with a reference to the number 8 (which seems to symbolically refer to prosperity in China) and the colour yellow (the most prestigious of all colours in Chinese culture); contracted out to an importer in Hong Kong and entering in cooperation again with the familiar face of television journalist Patrick Van Gompel, this is clearly a beer with ambitions. Comes from a fancy black longneck bottle with golden letters on its label, but when removing the cap, also carrying this golden '888' logo on a black background, beer streamed out of the longneck's neck - gushing is never a good start for me, but does not necessarily affect the flavour of the beer so let's investigate what this is about. Typical 'gusher head': towering high at first, but collapsing rapidly and eventually reduced to a thinnish but stable, open, egg-white ring and a few flat 'islands' in the middle. Lightly hazy, warm peach-hued 'old gold' robe with vivid strings of sparkling. Aroma of very strong isoamylacetate (banana-flavoured chewing gum), ripe pineapple, candied orange peel, honey liqueur, coriander seed, overripe cantaloupe, young 'jenever', granulated sugar, industrial cider, sweetsop and candyfloss, hints of freshly cut grass, pear, white bread, vague stewing white cabbage. Sweet onset as expected, lots of honeyish residual sugars carrying on throughout the palate along with strong banana ester, ripe pineapple and ripe pear notes with the banana ester being predominant; spritzy carbonation, slick and lean body. White bready maltiness almost bending under the weight of the residual, honeyish white candi syrup sweetness but maintaining its cereally character yet showing a thin metallic edge as well; it evolves into a medium bitterish finish in which a whiff of soapy coriander pops up, immediately followed by a grassy, simple, bit floral hop note providing some late bitterness and eventually finished off by a glow of heating, 'appeljenever'- or gin-like alcohol, which turns a bit peppery in the end. The banana ester and residual sugary sweetness keep dominating the entire picture. Like its predecessor, this is another sweet, simply structured and 'easygoing' tripel clearly intended to appeal to a large audience, and we all know the Chinese audience is a large one to say the least. Commercially this might work, but any beer geek will immediately see through the whole commercial mumbo-jumbo surrounding this essentially very conservative beer, which suffers from too much simplicity in its malt department, too much insufficiently hidden alcohol and too much sweetness; this is all about image and making money, even if these guys are apparently self-proclaimed beer experts. They very clearly are totally oblivious to the international tendencies that are making beer great again - no pun intended - and seemed to have no more inspiration than to turn to the worn-out sweet Belgian tripel formula, not for the first time, but for the second. Points off for that, for claiming to be hoppy while in this 21st-century context it clearly is not, for its badly hidden alcohol, and for the gushing.
Tried
from Bottle
on 09 May 2018
at 23:45