6.4/10
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Appearance 6
Aroma 7
Flavor 7
Texture 4
Overall 6.5
Collab between a Dutch and a Flemish home brewer commercialized through Boelens. Bottle from Wijnegemse Drankenhal. Opens with lots of pressure - I only managed to avoid serious gushing by opening the crown cap a little bit and then let it rest for five minutes, but foam still crept out of the bottle after that. Thickly ’membranous’ lacing, off-white, foamy and rocky but at the same time irregularly formed head, retaining extremely well and still completely closed after half an hour, over an initially lightly hazy, pure golden blonde beer with ’old gold’ hue and fierce sparkling, turning into a misty, deeper, slightly ochre-tinged gold with sediment, with coagulated proteins sitting firmly on the bottom of the glass. Very stereotypical ’Belgian blonde’ aroma of green apple peel, freshly grated ginger, sourdough, unripe gooseberry, freshly cut nettles, old white pepper, banana (or even a slight hint of bubblegum), lots of clove-like phenols, powder sugar, soapy coriander, cooked turnip, bitter honey, unripe melon, potato starch, soggy white bread, sweet clover, fresh camomile flowers, ripe pear, raw pineapple, straw. Very spritzy onset with fierce carbonation numbing the tongue completely and distracting from a fruity, crisp flavour mixing subdued banana- and pineapple-like sweetness with green apple- and unripe gooseberry-like sourness (with the first prevailing); soapy and still sharply carbonated middle phase with ongoing fruit esters and increasing spicy phenols over a lightly bready and somewhat grainy backbone, the phenols becoming a bit too much in the end, with almost solvent-like features; finishes dry thanks to a (relatively!) generous dose of grassy, spicy and lightly earthy hop bitterness with notable floral qualities retronasally (field flowers - camomile and sweet clover returning). Somewhat sticky, unmistakable coriander seed ’soapiness’ plays along and, to my taste, gets a bit dominant and boring in the end. Some of the phenolic and fruity yeastiness also remains, including the sweet ripe banana isoamylacetate, as well as residual white candi sugar sweetness lending a honeyish-like quality to the lingering malt sweetness. The peppery and floral hop bitterness luckily gets the last word, with a slightly resinous, earthy effect, but never gets rids of that lingering sweetness and coriander ’soapiness’. Well balanced actually, too bad it’s a near-gusher, but in terms of pure flavor, this is quite alright, with enough ’noble’ hop bitterness to counter the estery and malty sweetness. Conceptually though, this remains a very cliché Belgian blonde, perhaps a bit more hoppy and crisp than average, but incapable of extending the limits of even its own style. Technically more or less acceptable, decent flavor-wise, but at the same time overcarbonated and stereotypically ’overcoriandered’, too phenolic and not adding anything even remotely new to the broad family of Belgian ales: this is far from the worst example of an old ’Belgian blonde’ I had so far - and I had way too many already - but I honestly think it simply is no use anymore to come up with something as mundane as this in the current craft beer climate. On a general, ’philosophical’ note: beers like this, even if they would be better executed, make me a bit sad if I look at them from a contemporary craft beer perspective: it’s about time Belgium gets rid of its chauvinism and lets go of its simplistic blonde, dubbel and tripel fetish, otherwise we will be even more overwhelmed by the uncurbed enthusiasm of other European craft beer countries. The alleged Dutch influence here clearly has not too much connection with what has been happening in the Netherlands in recent years, for example. But Belgium still has a near-monopoly on spontaneous fermentation, of course...
Tried
from Bottle
on 02 Sep 2016
at 19:58