6.2/10
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Appearance 6
Aroma 6
Flavor 7
Texture 6
Overall 6
Varenbroek beer apparently honoring Hildegard von Bingen, a crucial figure in medieval culture not just for mentioning hops as an essential ingredient in beer, but also for music, poetry, medieval philosophy (for what that is worth) and even botany - but maybe more importantly, an influential woman in an age otherwise dominated by men when it comes to historical figures. Expectations are high especially seen the hoppy aspect of this figure... Lot of pressure on the bottle but no gusher. Very thick and frothy, irregularly shaped, very stable, egg-white head leaving thick layers of ’paper’ lacing and residing over an immediately hazy straw blonde beer with ochre hue, with the haze ’disturbed’ by vivid sparkling. Aroma of green banana (isoamylacetate but not exaggeratedly so), dried pineapple, some dried lime peel too, dry grass, hay even, field flowers, moldy apricot, old dry ginger powder, red apple peel, baker’s yeast, white bread, chamomille, cooked sweet potato, dried leaves, powder sugar, Conférence pear, abbey cheese, bitter honey, soap, bitter orange and a hint of rancid butter. Crisp, very spritzy onset, lots of minerally and souring carbonation numbing the tongue and distracting from the actual fruitiness, which yields impressions of green kiwi, unripe peach and green banana, very faintly sweetish and more dominantly sourish but in all quite neutral; grainy middle phase, a tad bready perhaps, with light mouthfeel ’coarsened’ a bit by the overcarbonation, while the sourish fruit aspects continue; finishes earthy and grassy, hop bitterish for sure, but still juicy and grainy more than anything else; retronasally I get floral and grass aromas of Euro hops and the earthy bitterness does last for a while, as the fruitiness fades away into oblivion. Clearly overcarbonated and not ’fully’ malty enough (in other words: too neutral and insufficiently malt sweet) to justify this dosis of herbal, earthy, floral hoppiness. I get the idea of creating a light, hoppy, crisp beer (think session IPA but in a very traditionally European ’noble hops’ kind of way), but if you force this idea upon a thin, grainy blonde of 4.5% ABV, things quite simply get out of joint. That is exactly what happened here: Varenbroek tried to pump more hops in this beer than it can carry, resulting in an unbalanced beer which is actually quite hard to pour down even if it is below ’session’ level to Belgian standards. Could improve a lot with a bit more ’weight’ and caramelly sweetishness in the malt department. For now: interestingly hoppy in the nose (floral and mildly spicy, though disturbed by Belgian esters especially in the omnipresent banana form) but unbalanced in the mouth. Technically okay, but conceptually a bit flawed, let’s say.
Tried
from Bottle
on 29 Apr 2016
at 18:39