Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 5 | Flavor - 5 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
33cl bottle. A clear amber beer, white ring. Aroma of mild reddish malt, some fruits. Taste of dry caramelized malt, red malt, resins, spices.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 5 | Flavor - 5 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
33cl bottle. A clear golden beer with a big white head. Aroma of pale malt, some grains, herbal and spicy hops. Taste of herbal malt, spicy hops, grains, some belgian yeast.
Alengrin (11675) reviewed La Culminante 694 from Brasserie les Mûriers 5 years ago
Appearance - 2 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 5.5
Typical Walloon 'ambrée' as interpreted by this new microbrewery. Very violent gusher, spouting out of the bottle neck during opening - and even being prepared for a bit of gushing, this was more than I expected, and I could not avoid losing about 1/4 of the bottle content to the sink. Huge, inches thick, eggshell-white, irregular and slowly collapsing but generally very stable, thickly plaster-like lacing head; 'milky', soupy cloudiness in the glass, a completely opaque 'dirty' orangey beige, not quite amber - and in combination with the huge head, looking like a cold Irish coffee or something alike. Aroma initially dominated by sharply piercing carbon dioxide, quickly making way for impressions of ripe peach, banana mush, medlar, candied orange and orange peel, carrot cake, caramel, soggy rusk, dried thyme, brown honey, baker's yeast, starch, wet clay. Fruity onset, estery, sweetish with a sourish edge from evidently very fizzy carbonation, impressions of ripe pear, peach, banana and pineapple; bit creamy mouthfeel, but coarsened by the overcarbonation, at least in the beginning, because the gas is not too well 'bound' and dissipates quickly. Raw-doughy, soggy old cake-like middle with ongoing fruity esters and strong spicy phenols, but fortunately not descending into a medicinal or chemical character; quite some unfermented, honeyish sugar travels along, to a very yeasty finish that adds not only a floral, bit lingering hop bitter note and coriander and orange peel spiciness, but also a very starchy, dirty powderiness from the yeast - and even some warming alcohol, which should not be evident at less than 8% ABV. Clearly the lowest score for appearance - something very obviously went wrong here, too much sugar in bottle-conditioning, perhaps? Purely flavour-wise, in spite of being messy as a result, still quite doable, could have been a fine bittersweet and malty-spicy 'ambrée' if it hadn't been technically flawed. Too bad.
Alengrin (11675) reviewed La Culminante Dorée from Brasserie les Mûriers 5 years ago
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 5.5
The blonde in this new brand of beers, brewed by the Brasserie Les Mûriers in Waimes in the German speaking part of Belgium, apparently active already since 2017, but I hadn't heard of it until now. Very slow gusher - you have enough time to go to the bathroom before it comes out of the bottle, so to speak, so no real problem for me. Thick and frothy, irregular, tightly paper-lacing, eggshell-white, very mousy and stable head on a straw blonde, misty beer with apricot hue and narrow strings of disparate sparkling; some dead yeast dots near the bottom. Aroma of dry cookies or these soft and chewy lemon cookies, clear iron shavings (as confirmed by the so-called 'hand test'), ripe banana but in a dry and 'fried' kind of way, fried apples, coriander seed, white bread, fainter hints of candied orange, overripe yellow plum, soap, camomile flowers, honey, pear, grass. Fruity onset, sweet banana and pineapple esters but not too 'bubblegummy', peach and fried sugared apple aspects, minerally elements, very fizzy carbonation; rounded, soft bready maltiness, cereally, with honeyish sweet aspect but also a clearly resounding metallic 'zing' - no doubt the old iron-containing head stabilizer has been applied here. Spicy aspects in the finish, obvious (old and dusty but still very soapy) coriander seed, a hint of dried lemon peel and clove-like phenols, mingling with an earthy, floral hop bitter tail; this sweet cookie-like hint lingers at the back, but so does that metallic side effect, which downgrades the beer's overall quality (and therefore my rating) to an important degree. Without this clear and artificial iron effect, this would have been an elegantly cookie-sweet and lemon peel-spicy smelling blonde. I wonder if the effect is the same if enjoyed fresh from tap, maybe I'll visit this region one day to find out.