Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 6.5

One of the first two beers from this new 'bierfirma' 1B2T in Schaarbeek near Brussels, a white IPA. Opens with smoke coming from the bottle, but no gushing. Very thick and foamy, eggshell-white, paper-lacing, slowly thinning head, cloudy 'yolk yellow' blonde robe with apricot hue. Aroma of old dusty 'herbes de Provençe', old hay, dried out bread crust, jute bags, clear DMS (overcooked cauliflower), potato juice, cooked apple, banana peel, bitter honey, wet straw. Crisp, dryish onset, pineapple, unripe apricot and green banana fruity notes, very sharp and stinging carbonation, minerally; bready and bit soapy malt body with ongoing fruity aspects on top, leading to a drying, hayish and floral, quite 'noble' European hop character with only light citrusy notes. Spicy phenolic effects and bready yeasty accents interfear while the DMS returns retronasally and the expected hop bitterness remains altogether low, in any case much too low for anything labelled as IPA. Much more 'white' than IPA: this is a witbier with an above average hop dosage and lacking in the classic witbier spicing, but the fact that the hops clearly and significantly underachieve, makes this fall 'between two chairs', as the French would say. Needs a lot of work - see Source's Epervier IPA for comparison, also in Brussels: this 1B2T project can sincerely learn quite a lot from what Mathieu Huygens has begun, I think.