Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7
330ml can from Garage à Bieres, Herlies. Pours a misty gold, small white head. Mellow fruit with pineapple, grapefruit, mango notes.. distant tang. Good kit.
Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 8
Can from Dranken Vandewoude and drunk at home. Hazy dirty gold colour lasting off white head. I mean its a decent ddh ipa. Decent strength .decent tropical fruit. Some bitterness on the finish. OK dipa. Good fruit influence. Decent.
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 6.5 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 6
Draft @ Zeppelin, Antwerpen. Cloudy orange with an ok white head. Aroma of grapefruits and stone fruits. Taste of grapefruits, caramel, stone fruits and yeast. Rather dry finish. Moderate to strong bitterness. Medium carbonation. Alright.
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7.5
0,33l bottle at Känguruh, Vienna. tastes glue, spices, earthy, tad boozy, tobacco. Overall rather drinkable. 7.4
Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 6
The Musketeers have been operating for two decades as inspired client brewers before opening their own brewery in my home region of the Waasland (the northeastern corner of East Flanders) in 2019, and have kept the tradition of honouring their original beer with a yearly special alive. I have yet to find the 2024 Special Edition but pending that, I am having this 2025 one already, oddly describing itself very generically as a 'strong blonde' without any further specification - an ominous sign, as I have deplored the decline in 'inspiration' of their beers ever since they set up their state of the art brewing site six years ago. Bottle from De Hopduvel. Medium thick, off-white, paper-lacing, generally stable head on an initially clear 'old golden' robe, a pure golden blonde with a touch of ochre in it, paler in any case than I recall from the original Magma upon which this beer is ultimately based; turns misty with sediment. Aroma of soggy white bread, healthy breakfast cookies, cold chamomile tea, hard unripe pear, green banana, chewing gum, rubber somewhere, industrial chicken 'bouillon' cubes, chicken soup in powdered 'minute soup' form, vague whiff of vanilla, old yellow curry powder, dry sand, spoiled chervil, hint of 'oude jenever'. Spritzy onset, high minerality due to sharp carbonation (or "pearly" as the brewery calls it), sweetish with a bubblegummy undertone accompanying notes of hard pear, green banana and very unripe peach, moving into a smooth-edged, quite full yet slick middle, cereally and white-bready but 'simplistic' in all, acquiring a white-peppery, grassy hop bitterish ending, with a chicken stock cube element lingering behind. 'Jenever'-like alcohol warms things up in the end, a tad wryly so, as a smooth cereally flavour and mild grassy hops keep lingering. The contrast with early editions of Troubadour Magma Special Edition could not be more stark; the only thing setting this Aura apart, bearing in mind that its name refers to gold, is that it aspires to be an 'edelbier' competing with the almighty Duvel. It has the exact same ABV, talks about 'pearliness', is clearly paler than most of its predecessors - I mean come on, it is quite obvious, is it not? Well, if my theory is right, then this only proves how desperately this brewery is trying - and partially succeeding - to establish itself in beery mainstream; this is fine as such, I guess, but it keeps saddening me that in doing so, they constantly forsake their own inspired beginnings. I am beginning to wonder if I should keep following their brews, to be entirely frank...
aaake (183) ticked Dirty Talk from Brouwerij The Musketeers 5 months ago
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 8
Tap at Indewildeman, 1st September 2025. Pours golden. Aroma is yeasty and boozy, floral. Taste is yeasty, citrus and floral, nice
Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7
I must admit that I am beginning to lose track of all these Bucketlist beers by Musketeers, located in my home region (Waasland in between Ghent and Antwerp), but this NEDIPA seems to be the seventeenth already, brewed with - apart from barley malt of course - rye, wheat and oats, all malted; oddly, though perhaps less so in a Belgian context, the hop varieties, which is usually considered the essence of anything IPA these days, remain undisclosed. Can (a beautifully shiny and colourful one) from De Hopduvel. Quite thick and firm, egg-white, thickly 'Brugse kant'-like lacing, irregular but robust, stable head on a more misty than 'deeply' hazy, warm golden blonde robe with apricot hue and fine strings of visible sparkling. Citrus-forward aroma of lime blossoms, orange zest, pomelo, dried lemonbalm, chamomile, Graham crackers, drying grass, bread crumbs, lilacs in spring (briefly), not quite ripe pear, herb cheese (faint), dry and dusty gravel. Fruity onset but not overly exuberant - at least for the intended style - with the fruitiness provided by a mixture of restrained esters and aromatic hops, yet not in the sweet-sultry tropical way one all too often sees in hazy IPAs today, more in a citric, bitterish, 'dryish' way, almost closer to the old West Coast IPAs than to NEIPA; hints of unripe peach, pear peel, unripe mandarin, active carbonation with very minerally effect - much more so than is typical for the style - running through the whole beer. Smooth, medium full, cracker- and bread crust-like pale maltiness, dryish and very low in residual sugars, a bit creamy, meeting with bittering hops in the end - citrusy and citrus pith-like primarily, but also floral and a bit spicy. Again, the lusciously sweet and perfumey tropical fruit effects of a typical present-day NEDIPA are lacking; something 'dusty' and petrichor-like blows over this admittedly quite rich, but somewhat onedimensional hop bitterness, the latter leaving a pleasantly peppery sting in the throat. I do not see anything truly NEDIPA-like here, so I could be harsh in my rating and deduct a serious amount of points for missing the point (if you get my drift), but this is not a bad beer per se - in fact it is a very pleasant, Belgian style IPA with a vague 'global' influence to it, and part of it (only part of it, mind you) does take me back to those wonderful very first Troubadour Magma specials these brewers made, many years ago now. There is something nostalgic going on here, in that sense - have a point for that.
Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 6.5 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7
33cl bottle from Cantina della Birra, Riccione, Italy. Pours orange gold, fairly hazy, with fine white foam. Aroma is spiced, cinnamon, fruity. Body is average, with good carbonation. Taste moderately bitter, with some fruity sweetness. Final is average.