Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7

One of the first beers by a young client brewer in Ostend, a tripel executed at De Meester. Bottle from PostMyBeer.be. Medium thick, intricately 'Brugse kant'-like lacing, snow white, regular and stable head on a misty peach blonde beer with deep golden glow and tiny-bubbled sparkling, turning into a cloudy orange blonde with sediment added. Strong aroma of ripe peach, banana, apricot jam, some slightly disturbing DMS (overcooked kale - but then I seem to be overly sensitive to this), coriander powder, brioche bread, carrot cake, dried orange peel, cooked turnip, bitter honey, slight hints of papaya, mud or puddle water, sweet potatoes, moist white pepper, dandelion, grain 'jenever'. Fruity onset, peachy and banana-ish esters, apricot and pear notes, sweet but not too cloying; slight sourish undertone, lively but fine-bubbled carbonation, rounded mouthfeel with a slight metallic 'zing' to it. Supple sweet brioche-bready and vaguely biscuity malts under a layer of honeyish residual sweetness, developing mild spiciness in the end with coriander powder flanked by phenolic clove but not too sharply so; floral hop bitterness in the end, lasting for a while and drying a bit of that sweetness away, but these ripe peach and banana elements survive till the last drop, even when a peppery, somewhat 'hot' jenever-ish alcohol effect sets in - a tad too obviously so even at this ABV and on the brink of what I can accept for a tripel. Utterly traditional, predictable, 'commercial' tripel, a genre endlessly repeated by the bulk of Belgian brewers including all these new microbrewers - with a sweet side that will certainly appeal to the average Belgian tripel drinker. Not too shabby, in all, but far from surprising; the tripel style still clings too much to its own worn-out cliché features, even if the possibilities of expanding it into something bigger are numerous if those clichés are twisted, reinterpreted or downright abandoned. The Dolle Brouwers, which I visited last week, is just one of those breweries which proved that it is possible, with their beautiful Dulle Teve and its rare derivatives. I can already predict that this Zwoane brewery's other beer is an equally cliché blonde named 'saison' for pure marketing reasons so I have no intent to go out of my way to find it. In all, as for this tripel: decent enough I guess, but, frankly, boring.