Bruegel Amber Ale

Brewed by Brouwerij Van Steenberge
Style: Belgian Ale
Ertvelde, Belgium

Serve in Trappist glass, Tulip, Tumbler

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Poured a clear amber with a medium white head. Aroma of apples, wheat, and some earthy notes. Taste is slightly yeasty and slightly like hay. Slightly bitter. Pretty one-dimensional and thin, but a good flavor. Overall decent, but a little more flavor would be good.

Bottled 33cl. Ordered from www.bierzwerg.de. It pours a clear amber beer with a decent head. Caramel, jarred pickles and cork showing up in the nose. Diacetyl throughout. Slightly acidic. I didn’t really enjoy this beer.

UPDATED: MAR 15, 2010 Long time ago had this one, wrote the following down: Bottle: Smells like cigarette. Taste is luckily better but not too good either. Taste is soft, creamy, spicy, watery, fungi/mouldy. It’s not a great beer, kind a strange one, but since it is a pretty well balanced beer, it’s easy to drink it pretty quick. But than you’re done.

[2649-20091207] Bottle. Flowery new insoles aroma. Clear, dark yellow orange body with a quick foamy white head. Floral grain malt flavour with a long sweet aftertaste. Medium body. Interesting to try.
(w/ jerc)

Pours copper with white head and lots of carbonation. Aroma is almost non-existent but there are portions of yeast and hops. Taste is very carbonated, yeast and very mild hop bitterness. Overall not an impressive beer.

Poured from a bottle into a snifter glass. Beer is amber and clear. Forms a thick white head of medium and small bubbles that leaves a lot of lacing on the glass. Carbonation is moderate to low and made up of large bubbles. Smells good, lots of nice esters and a yeasty aroma that I associate with tripels a lot. Smells really good. A slight sweetness as well. Beer is a little thin and light in the flavor department. There is a bitterness to it at the back but I was expecting a lot more up front in the way of some sweetness or other characters. I’m not sure what to think. Second taste, mild fruit flavors followed by the bitterness. Drinkability is OK, mouthfeel is a little too thin. Overall, its just OK.

In my last year of college I was amidst my falling in love with belgian beers and belgian style beers, I was presented at one point in a Dubuque liquor store with the opportunity of purchasing a six pack of this beer at a price that wasn’t remarkably outrageous or unaffordable for me at the time, but thrift and the unknown must have gotten the better of me and I opted for something less expensive and I had always kind of wondered if I made the right decision. That is to say that I’ve been waiting in a manner or speaking to try this beer for a number of years now. I was actually meaning to go get a bottle of this with a few other things at a store across town last weekend when my wife put the kibosh on the whole deal insisting that we could buy beer closer to home and that she wanted to go get some Chinese food as opposed to watching me poke around a beer store for half an hour. It was with great surprise and joy that I beheld a bottle of this ale in my good friend Dan’s hands when he came over to hang out/brew a batch of homebrew last evening. It’s not that I had great expectations for Bruegel, it was a long curiosity with the beer that piqued my excitement in seeing a bottle of it in my very kitchen. In all honestly my coming to terms with what something of an amber session ale from Van Steenberge probably offered to me sort of made me think that I had made the right decision years ago. This is to say that my expectations of the beer did not match my excitement over finally trying it, with one whiff both were quickly forgotten. The beer poured an unassuming enough orangish gold color with a small head, nothing exciting but it looked nice enough none the less. The aroma of this beer is easily the thing I liked the least about it, like weird burnt plastic, burnt caramel, butterscotch, with some floral notes present and some raw maltiness. This is the sort of thing that you would expect from a not quite failed first homebrew attempt, but far from my already wavering expectations of a beer from Van Steenberge. The flavor is a little better but where it lacks apparent infection and general disgusting characteristics it is alas very boring. The beer is lightly salty which is kind of cool in it’s own right and the caramel is just right, the beer is generally malty and has that dreaded diacetyl butteriness. The palate is thin and the carbonation leaves something to be desired. My score is pretty low, but I honestly feel like I’m being a bit generous here, this didn’t seem too great at all.

330 ml bottle from LCBO (part of gift pack). Pours a clear orange gold with moderate, slightly off-white head. Aroma of banana, caramel and cirtus. Taste is a little blander with fruit, caramel and light citrus. Somewhat watery. Nothing special.

Reviewed 11/19/2009 (bottle): Pours a clear golden yellow color body, huge off-white head, pretty lasting. Fruity aroma, some hay and farm-like notes. Floral and Belgiany too, but those notes need to be inhaled deeper. Some banana. Clean taste, some pilsner like taste, corn or vegetable, but not in a bad way. Refreshing. Light taste, thin palate. Not very complex. A little bite, but not very spicy. Kinda bland. Not as good as a Sierra Nevada or Bass.

(Bottle into tulip) Got this one as part of a 6 pack sampler from Brouwerij Van Steenberge. Poured a clear orange with a large white head that fell rather quickly. On the nose, you would think that this would be a very sweet beer, as the malt was heavy and there was a pleasant aroma that reminded me of raisins or dates. The taste, however, was rather sharp, and not really what I expected. There was a nice bite to it, and a little more of a bitter flavor, not near the sweetness of the nose, but not overpowering either. This was a nice crisp, refreshing offering and paired well with the spice I was having at the time.