Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 8
Pour from a 75cl bottle @ Poperinge Bier Festival 2024. Pours a misty amber, pure white head. Pleasant aroma of oak and prominent bourbon. Flavour profile presents a nice, integrated bourbon influence, with a cutting acetic wild edge. Some light juicy moments. Bright and fresh feel. Decent.
Bierridder (4318) ticked WUK Oaked Batch 6 from De Brouwmoaten 1 year ago
Bierridder (4318) ticked WUK Oltegoare IPA from De Brouwmoaten 1 year ago
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 9
Bright blond colour with thin head. Aroma is vinous and woody. Delicate fruity, sharp notes that are close to grapes in profile. There's a vanilla sweetness from the barrel that adds a lingering sweetness in the finish.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
20/VIII/22 - 33cl bottle @ Gents Bierfestival, BB: n/a (2022-1079)
Clear blond beer, small creamy white head, stable, a bit adhesive. Aroma: cognac? Sweet and fruity, lots of apples, maybe Calvados or brandy? Not really sure what barrels were used here. MF: ok carbon, medium body. Taste: pretty bitter, very yeasty, fruity, sourish, more yeast, weird, rather unpleasant. Aftertaste: sourish, bitter, pretty unpleasant, weird acidic character, unpleasant, don’t like it. Apparently it's been aged in a whisky barrel. I'm pretty sure it somehow got infected while barrel ageing, the result is by no surprise rather unimpressive. Or maybe it's impressive it's only this bad, after having an infection in the barrel.
Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
The second version already of oak aged Wuk Blond+, this time using Scottish Speyside whisky casks whereas the first version, which completely escaped me, was aged on bourbon barrels. Rating from one of only 700 bottles made. Very aggressive gusher, running out of the bottle neck immediately after opening – I unfortunately could not prevent that a significant volume was lost to the sink. Egg-white, thick but irregular, cobweb-lacing ‘gusher head’ on a deep peach blonde, misty beer. Aroma of overripe peaches, smoked pineapple, moist peat, marmalade, clear vanilla-scenting wet oak wood, ripe banana, moldy oranges, moldy old tree trunks, old oxidized coconut flakes, glue, apple juice. Sweet onset, lots of residual sugars and strong esters, pineapple, peach, banana, cooked apple, fizzy carb, rounded and ‘fluffy’ mouthfeel; soft bready malt ‘soil’, a bit soggy rusk-like with ongoing honey-like residual sweetness on top, leading to an increasingly earthy, musty finish with the smoky effect of the whisky coming to the foreground, alongside aspects of moldy old wood, tree leaves and dried fruit, followed by strong whisky-like alcohol becoming a tad wry and tiring in the end. Every small brewer – and several big ones – in Belgium seems to think now that barrel ageing is always a good thing for just any beer just because it is hip (and taken from the global craft beer movement) but it is often forgotten that putting a beer in a whisky – or whatever other – barrel does not always make it better. Here a mediocre tripel was laid in a Speyside whisky barrel and came out a crude, unrefined, blunt, sweet and boozy gusher. Needs a lot of work – finetuning the basic beer would be a good start, for instance.