5060391920399 - @BCB (heule); Hop: Golding, Cascade
18/XI/25 - 33cl bottle @ HoReCa Expo (Gent), BB: 6/II/26, LB06060224B 08:30 (2025-1307) Thanks to all for sharing today’s beers!

Clear gold blond beer, creamy dense white head, stable, a bit adhesive. Aroma: sweet impression, honey, orange marmalade, sugary impression. MF: ok carbon, medium body. Taste: good bitterness, very yeasty, alcohol, malty, gentle bitterness, sweet and sugary, some honey. Aftertaste: more sweetness, honey, a bit sugary, malty, grains, bitter finish, ok but not great.

18/XI/25 - 33cl can @ HoReCa Expo (Gent), BB: 25/II/27, LB6250225C 09:37 (2025-1306) Thanks to all for sharing today’s beers!

Clear yellow blond beer, creamy white head, stable, a bit adhesive. Aroma: very malty, grains, sweet impression, wort, a bit metallic. MF: ok carbon, medium body. Taste: sweet start, wort, sugary, wort, very metallic, soft bitterness, meh. Aftertaste: wort, gains, metallic, meh.

A clear golden beer with a white head. Aroma of mild sweet grainy malt, honey, belgian yeast. Taste of sweet strong pale malt, honey, belgian yeast.

A clear golden beer with a white head. Aroma of mild herbal and spicy pale malt, some citrusy hops. Taste of herbal and citrusy hops, pale malt, herbs, dry bitter finish.

Pours near-clear blonde, fairly small white head. Scent is fresh, zesty hoppyness, mild maltyness. Bit of spices but all in a nice balance and not very NA-forward. Promissing ! Taste is sharp, clean and fairly bitter. Mild NA profile towards the back, but the beer tries very well to hide it, only revealing it's essence in the aftertaste. Mild spices, peppers aren't very recognizable. Nice and drinkable at the start though. Medium low body, high carbo. Decent, would have been even better with a less sticky finish.

33cl bottle picked up in Belgium on my last trip (early May): BB 5th November 2024, drank at home on 1st May 2024. Bio and Belgian says the neck label and that sums up what this pretty good Pils is all about. Golden body, white crown, soft yet crisp and hoppy with a decent malt base, weak aroma like most beers of this style but I enjoyed what esters it did give out.

Pilsener by this Ostend-based client brewer, luckily not containing any malt adjuncts and hopped with New World hops - so in concept at least, IPL may be a beckoning from a distance. Longneck bottle from the Carrefour supermarket in the Groene Vallei in Ghent. Creamy and dense, snow white, frothy, thick and stable head, near clear pale straw blonde robe with greenish tinge and quite lively sparkling, pushing up tiny bits of protein here and there; shifting to a hazy yellow blonde further on. Aroma of white bread or even sourdough, dried lemonbalm, old lemon peel (the Cascade?), freshly cut grass and garden weeds, margarine, old potatoes, damp straw, wet flour, courgette, touch of dusty old paper. Crisp onset, a bit fruitier than normal for the genre due to the residual yeast, with vague notes of halfripe banana and pear, but not really sweet; more malt fruitiness after that, with prickly carbonation (softer than industrial pale lager, though) and smooth, bit glueish mouthfeel, feeling quite 'full' for this kind of beer. White-bready pale malt sweetishness, a bit 'moelleux', under remains of that estery fruitiness and retronasally carrying a lemonbalm-, zucchini- and pepino-tinged hop aroma, while the bitterness from the hops grows - yet restrains itself quite early on, to let the esters and malt sweetness pass through unscathed. There is a vague background citrusiness in here somewhere and the New World hops do add a certain freshness as well as a 'postmodern' feel, but there is also a residual sweetness that lingers, a bit much so for what is intended as a Pilsener. I wonder if this is not top-fermented after all, because it sure tastes yeasty and rounded enough for that... In any case a pleasant enough beer, easygoing and very different from what the average consumer expects when he sees 'Pils' on a Belgian label.

Organic witbier by this Ostend-based client brewer, having achieved a level of commercial success not every new microbrewer can enjoy - my bottle, for example, comes from a Carrefour supermarket in the city of Ghent. Some slow gushing, in the form of foam creeping out of the bottle neck, but nothing dramatic (contrary to their tripel I had earlier in the evening). Foamy, inches thick, off-white, very moussey and pillowy, somewhat crackling, cobweb-lacing, dense and firm head on a cloudy yellow blonde robe with khaki tinge - looking like an 'oldskool' Belgian wit indeed. Aroma of green banana, raw spinach, strong coriander seed, white soap, lemon peel, cucumber, cold chervil soup, withering lettuce, unripe green melon, old cotton cloth, hints of cooked turnip, sweat, pumice, gypsum, raw leek, moist white pepper, freshly cut grass, spruce tips (Chinook!), cumin cheese. Spritzy onset, lots of stingy (over)carbonation with strong minerally effects, also highlighting something clearly metallic (iron pipes) early on; fruity notes of green banana and unripe pear but restrained in sweetness and esteriness especially for this style. Minerally overcarbonation and that metallic effect continue under a smooth, slick, raw-wheaty base with grainy pale maltiness at its edges, a tad soapy and sourish as can be expected, gathering spicy notes from the added coriander seed (powder) and lemon zest, with certain refreshing effects. Hops are a bit more outspoken and 'developed' here than is typical for a Belgian wit, with background traces of grapefruity Cascade and piney Chinook still noticeable if you know where to look - but very subtly so, so that, as in many 'updated' Belgian blondes and tripels with New World hops I had, they feel a bit 'lost' here - a missed opportunity to upgrade this beer to an 'americanised' wheat ale, I think. They do add more bitterness, though, overruling the coriander a bit - but the lemon zest, fortunately, remains fresh and powerful enough to linger in the aftertaste, with very zesty, 'fresh' effect, indeed evoking the classic witbier experience in a somewhat distinct way. Very wheaty, not as 'coriandery' as many more oldskool 'blanchekes', more hoppy than average and still elegant, light and refreshing: this Pure White reiterates Pierre Celis' old Hoegaarden formula while at the same time daring to differ a bit with postmodern means, not an easy balancing exercise to perform. Not really my beer - I am but a cool lover of witbier - but admittedly more interesting than that half-hearted IPA and gushing tripel I had from these guys.