Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6

Along with (unsurprisingly) a blonde and dubbel, the first beer from a new nanobrewery in Herentals in the Kempen region in Belgium, officially started in December 2015 with a capacity of apparently 200 l, but planning to expand to twice that volume. Medium thick, moussy, quite dense and very stable, egg-white head over an initially cristal clear, warm ’old gold’ coloured beer with orangey hue and vivid fizz, turning cloudy with deposit (even literally a ’cloud’ of yeast ends up in the glass in the very end). Aroma of banana-flavored bubblegum (isoamylacetate and quite a lot of it), overripe gooseberry, stewed apple, lavender soap, tulips, honey, candied orange, white bread dough, moist cookies and biscuit, grass and even quite some dry hay when warming up, sweet cherry tomato, cooked carrot, Poire William, some very vague burnt rubber which quickly fades - in all, very standard but evolving with temperature and free from obvious off-flavors. Fruity onset, lots of banana ester but also hints of kiwi, sourish redcurrant and unripe pineapple, some traces of white candi sugar sweetness too, spritzy and minerally carbonation (a tad overcarbonated even for this style), ’full’ and somewhat coarse mouthfeel resulting from that; some phenolic spiciness enters along with the fruity esters but both remain fairly ’restrained’ (as in: could have been a lot worse) over a lightly sweetish and eventually very lightly toasted pale malt backbone, working their way towards a drying finish of ongoing malt sweetishness paired with earthy, spicy, leafy but still (too) gentle hop bitterishness providing retronasal floral aromas as well as drought in the back of the mouth, a trace of earthy yeastiness and even yeast bitterness, and a glow of warming, ’jenever’-like alcohol which clearly should have been better hidden for a tripel of 7.8% ABV (which is even slightly below the average for the style), becoming a little bit wry and fatiguing in the very end. Overall though, this is a fairly ’clean’, technically well-made tripel; there are no big flaws here, no gushing, no DMS, no uncontrolled yeastiness, no H2S or whatever. That being said though, this is still very basic: any decent tripel should at least be of this quality level. Clearly this beer does not distinguish itself in the already overcrowded Belgian tripel market, and besides that, it could do with more hops to balance the banana ester and white candi sugar sweetness - even if the aim is to make a classic Belgian tripel without the contemporary ’hop forward’ connotations; I was also bothered by the fact that the alcohol is really badly hidden for a beer that does not even reach 8% - but this is nitpicking, I guess. I can understand that the guy who started this tiny brewery feels comfortable trying out the stereotypical Belgian ale basics first, but I think many of the more ’advanced’ beer aficionados even in this country are slowly growing tired of dubbels and tripels and something else (anything else!) would probably have been a more exciting option. Still, he has produced a correct beer as far as I’m concerned, so I can only hope his ambitions reach (a lot) further than this.