Sympatyczne bez uniesien zbozowe

(Draught at Kulminator, Antwerpen, 18 May 2017) Dark ruby colour with frothy, beige head. Malty, fruity nose with notes of caramel, red fruit, oak wood and hints of Grand Marnier. Malty, slightly fruity taste with caramel, red fruit, oak wood, citrus and a certain alcohol bite in a sweetish, slightly vinous finish. Full body, quite sweet. Tasty, with a mellow and velvety mouthfeel and a powerful and rich taste. Very nice.

Bottle at home, Nivala. BBE 22/08/18. Colour is slightly cloudy orange wtih small white head. Aromas and flavours: Spices, tea, some smoke, some tar and malts. Flavours are strong but hard to say do I like this combination of tea and smoke.

Imported from my RateBeer account as Préaris Framboise (by Vliegende Paard Brouwers):
Aroma: 7/10, Appearance: 4/5, Taste: 7/10, Palate: 4/5, Overall: 12/20, MyTotalScore: 3.4/5

26/V/17 - 33cl bottle from the brewer @ pre-BBQ tasting, home - BB: 5/I/18 (2017-641)

Clear bright reddish pink beer, big creamy light pink head, pretty stable, adhesive, leaving a nice lacing in the glass. Aroma: very fruity, lots of raspberry candy, sweet and sugary impression, bit yeasty. MF: lively carbon, medium to light body. Taste: little sourish, some raspberry, not much flavour-wise though, it's mainly aromatic raspberries, bit lemony. Aftertaste: metallic, bitter touch, some raspberry. Decent beer.

Imported from my RateBeer account as Préaris Me So Juicy (by Vliegende Paard Brouwers):
Aroma: 8/10, Appearance: 4/5, Taste: 7/10, Palate: 3/5, Overall: 14/20, MyTotalScore: 3.6/5

25/V/17 - 33cl bottle from the brewer @ home - BB: 14/IV/18 (2017-631) Thanks to Andy for keeping me a bottle!

Note: this beer was not sold on Sunday at Zythos Beer Festival, as the brewer thought the beer to be too young after evaluating himself. Respect to make the decision, and many thanks for still selling me a bottle after making me promise not to drink it, until he told me so! ;-)
Very cloudy murky beige beer, big solid creamy yellowish head, pretty stable, adhesive, leaving some lacing in the glass. Aroma: bit fruity, some citrus, some tropical fruits, pineapple. MF: soft carbon, medium body. Taste: pretty bitter start, hoppy, some citrus, bit floral, malty touch, fruity notes. Aftertaste: bit sweet, some almonds, citrus, hoppy touch, bitter finish.

Imported from my RateBeer account as Préaris New Zealand Blond (by Vliegende Paard Brouwers):
Aroma: 6/10, Appearance: 4/5, Taste: 6/10, Palate: 3/5, Overall: 11/20, MyTotalScore: 3/5

24/V/17 - 33cl bottle from the brewery @ home - BB: 31/I/18 (2017-619) Thanks to Andy for the last bottle from his fridge!

Clear blond beer, big solid creamy white head, pretty solid, bit adhesive. Aroma: pretty sweet, fruity, sugary, ripe banana, bit yeasty. MF: very lively carbon, medium to light body. Taste: yeast, sweet and sugary, ripe banana, bit malty. Aftertaste: slightly bitter, sweet, some almonds, marzipan, yeast.

Bottle shared at THT, May 2017. Foam forcing itself out of the bottle. Cloudy yellow color. Huge white head. Aroma’s of fresh hops and some resin. Retronasal there’s hardly anything. Flavor is bready malts, not much flavor anyway. Medium bodied. Short finish. Not there yet.

Vliegende Paard has been ageing Marius, Andy Dewilde’s take on imperial stout, on sherry barrels for months and I have been looking forward to the end result all that time, so I’m glad it finally reached my tasting table today - in a generous 37.5 cl ’geuze’ bottle with crown cap (a cork would not look bad on this bottle, actually, but anyway). Opens with a hissing sound but no gushing. Medium thick, pale yellowish beige, creamy head, leaving pretty ’veils’ of lacing and quickly showing gaps in the middle, but retaining well, over a very dark beer, blackish in general appearance, but actually a very sombre bronze with hazy mahogany brown edges. Strong, quite complex and ’noble’, inviting bouquet of rum-soaked raisins and candied figs, medium dry sherry, wet leather, quite some phenolic cloves but not over the top here, wet oak wood including that typical ’vague vanilla’ oak tends to breathe, butterscotch, dried prunes, some liquorish and indeed ’dropwater’, black cherries, cassis, shoe polish, fainter hints of dry earth, whisky, pipe tobacco, damp tree leaves, Moroccan krachel, ginger powder, walnut liqueur. Fruity, sweetish onset but not exagerratedly estery, banana but in a refined, candied kind of way, pear, raisins, some blackcurrant sourishness underneath, but almost completely lacking in the (lightly) ’meaty’ umami character I found in (the first batch of) the basic beer; supple, ’full’ body with quite lively carbonation, feeling more like a hefty quad than an imperial stout, falling short in ’oiliness’ for that, like the basic beer. Stings of carbonation remain scarce and very subtle, while dried fruit sweetness and a thin berry-ish sourish factor travel on top of a big, mouth-filling malt middle with bready and caramelly character, developing bittering toastedness towards the end. Actual roasted bitterness comes in very late all the way in the finish, where it blends with a peppery, earthy hop bitter touch, drying woody tannins though not overly so, and the expected wave of alcohol, bringing forth an accent of dry sherry as well as a lot of boozy, peppery heat and a slight astringency on the root of the tongue. Toasted malt bittersweetness, dried fruit flavors, some sherry and this strong alcohol warmth combine to form the last impression after swallowing. Quite complex, warming sipper, very well-made indeed, with the sherry barrel adding oaky and - evidently - drying sherryish aspects to an otherwise very decent beer; I only had Marius very young from tap at a Bruges Bierfestival edition so far, first batch, and apart from a somewhat thin mouthfeel, I must say I was pleasantly surprised by it. I would therefore have to re-rate it in order to get a complete view on it, but in any case I thought it somewhat excelled the level of the many recent Belgian attempts at this prestigious beer style; in this form, I think this is best viewed as something like ’Belgian style imperial stout’ - in other words, a compromise of actual ’impy’ on the one hand and the old familiar trappist-coloured quadrupel on the other hand. Many beers like that have arisen in the past few years and if seen from this perspective, this is certainly among the finest of them, offering a complex and well-developed palate and bouquet in which the sherry barrel ageing has been applied in a well-balanced manner. Expect a highly profiled, classy and generous Belgian sipper of high technical quality here, rather than a smooth, clean and super-intense American BA stout - and then you will not be disappointed. This beer to me is another argument for recognition of a hybrid ’Belgian imperial stout’ style, which would be yeastier, earthier, a tad paler and less oily and thick than Anglo-Saxon imperial stout; heck, if the Americans already use this concept (think of Weyerbacher’s Tiny or - implicitly - the Spencer monks’ imperial stout, for example), why shouldn’t we Belgians?

New England IPA has been rapidly conquering the craft beer world in the past few years and examples of this new beer (sub-?)style are popping up in Western Europe too now; to my knowledge, this is only the second one in Belgium, after Hof ten Dormaal’s - flawed - attempt, and belonging to the continuously progressing series of limited releases brewed by Andy Dewilde in his own, small installation, with simple black and white labels. The bottle had leaked a bit during transport without loss or even loosening of the crown cap - so I prepared myself for fierce gushing and opened it over the sink as slowly and carefully as possible; still lots and lots of hissing and carbon dioxide pressure indeed, if I had opened this in one swift movement, there is no doubt I would have seen a very violent case of gushing so be warned. Typical ’gusher’ head I reckon: towering high and very foamy initially, but fairly loose and papery in structure and thus collapsing in a short amount of time, leaving behind a complex pattern of tight cobweb lacing around the glass, eventually setting into an irregular layer of egg-white mousse which in the end retained very well; immediately completely cloudy appearance, very misty peach blonde with an ochre tinge - haziness being a natural but well-known side effect of this type of IPAs, this is not worrying whatsoever, though it does seem to become all to ’murky ochre’ in the end even for a NEIPA, looking a lot more like a flawed Belgian blonde. The aroma, however, is already a reason for some concern: delicate ’tropical’ hoppiness is noticeable, but already at a first sniff, it is clear that it stands no chance against an assault of (for this style) inappropriate phenols and esters. Strong band aid and even liquorish-, clove-, cough syrup- and even sweetened medicine phenols, alongside even an unmistakable whiff of bubblegummy banana ester, brutally oppress much more delicate (though very clearly not all NEIPA-related) hints of marmelade and succade, fermenting orange juice, ripe cantaloupe flesh, soggy white bread, overripe sweet pear, apple peel, minerals, rainwater, honey, flowers, old yellowing cucumber flesh, soap, something vaguely minty and ’stroopwafel’. Unsurprisingly, this beer does not behave like a NEIPA in the mouth either: estery onset with hints of banana, orange and peach as well as slightly souring gooseberry, all numbed by - at least in the beginning - an unsurprisingly sharp degree of overcarbonisation, impairing drinkability and in no way related to the creamy, soft mouthfeel one expects from this style; instead, the mouthfeel in general feels rather unpleasantly soapy, the combination of which with the strong overcarbonation reminds much more of an average Belgian blonde rather than anything truly IPA-like. A soft bready malt sweetish backbone carries these esters along to an expectedly very phenolic - spicy but also, again, medicinal - finish with the bubblegummy and soapy effects still lingering; breadiness and earthiness expectedly increase when adding more of the yeast sediment while deep below, the hops establish an earthy, bit peppery, soft bitterness of medium duration, at the same time desperately and vainly trying to push their delicate citrusy and sweet fruit notes through the unbreakable wall of phenols. The label sadly does not mention any hop varieties (a missed opportunity in this type of beers, in my opinion) but what it does mention, is the addition of sugar, which I have not yet seen in any (American) NEIPA recipe - though I am not a brewer of course, so who am I to judge. I can, however, judge whether this is a successful attempt at this new, overly hyped style or not, and in my view it very clearly is not. It may come a bit closer to it in theory than Dormaal’s Troebel in Paradise, but if anything, this one is even more flawed from a purely technical viewpoint; like Troebel, it loses itself in completely irrelevant Belgian side effects, the phenolic part of which is in this case especially strong, to the point that I would consider it a flaw even if we were talking about a Belgian blonde or tripel here. Drinkable beer, in all, don’t get me wrong, but if you tackle a style as hyped and acclaimed as NEIPA is these days, you expose yourself to more strict scrutiny I guess, creating high expectations from the geeks and afficionados. The audience this beer is trying to reach, will most likely be largely disappointed, as those expectations are clearly not met here. I hope Andy intends to immerse himself much more deeply into this style and I’ll be following the first steps of NEIPA in Belgium with suspicion and interest - but to me, this style is still non-existent in Belgium so far. Sorry Andy!