5.6/10
—
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.
Tried
from Bottle
on 17 May 2020
at 15:22