6.5/10
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Appearance 6
Aroma 7
Flavor 7
Texture 6
Overall 6
Belgian blonde by Broeder Jacob, intended as a tribute to the ’kotmadam’ statue in Leuven, which in itself is a tribute to the humble Leuven landladies that privately hosted students there from all over the country for generations - and still do. Steini bottle from Wijnegemse Drankenhal. Thick and frothy, generous, egg-white, densely moussy, continuously ’membranous’ lacing, very stable head (remaining closed for most of the time) over a lightly hazy, pure golden blonde beer with somewhat ’old gold’ hue, instantly showing a diffuse ’mist’ of disparate yeast bits, congregating to a uniform haze with sediment, lending the beer a deeper old gold colour. Extremely stereotypical but correct ’Belgian blonde’ aroma of bubblegum, freshly cut grass, soggy breakfast cereals, banana cake, melting powder sugar, green apple, pale honey, pear, pineapple, young Gouda cheese, bath soap, coriander seed, dough, cloves, camomile flowers, very vague hint of soggy chicken food. Crisp, fruity, estery onset, lots and lots of the inevitable banana / bubblegum ester paired with some green apple acetaldehyde and vaguer hints of unripe pineapple, pear and a soft, limited gooseberry-ish background sourishness; very fizzy carbo, overcarbonated even for this style, with numbing physical effect and very minerally ’stings’ distracting from the basic flavour, making a smooth, supple mouthfeel needlessly rough. Pale malt sweetish middle with sharpish grainy edges but the sweetness being accentuated by this über-Belgian residual white candi syrup sweetishness, over which the fruity esters happily move along and, as usual, meet with clove-like, though not exaggerated and in this case quite welcoming phenols towards the finish. Once there, a floral and subtly grassy hop bitterness comes in, but rather faintly so and certainly incapable of washing away the bubblegum and residual white sugar sweetness; meanwhile a coriander seed soapiness has firmly established itself and adds intended spiciness, but most of all exaggerated soapiness to the finish. I hope this beer replaces the gallons of standard industrial lager the average Leuven student washes down every week, that is clearly the intention of this beer and they would be wise to choose this instead of the well-known mega brands, but I am no student anymore and seen within the broader context of Belgian ales, this is about as boring and stereotypical as it gets: technically completely correct for sure (I did not expect anything less from a physically Anders-made beer), but conceptually the umpteenth reiteration of a theme that has been done to do death for decades now. Feels like another rerun of ’FC De Kampioenen’ - but that is another Flemish sitcom than ’De Kotmadam’ and I guess you have to be Flemish to get this. Whatever: completely redundant, unless it manages to replace the intellectually incomprehensible yet ongoing stream of much worse ’pilsjes’ in the Leuven student world. So young students, be warned: stop funding the capitalist macro breweries and drink this instead of Stella or Jupiler! And I sincerely mean that.
Tried
from Bottle
on 07 Jul 2017
at 19:13