Du Brabant / Sulauze T’ame!

Bottle @Xmas Tasting 30.07.2017. Pours golden hazy, thin white head. Nose is cheese slightly burnt rubber notes and a touch of fruit. Taste goes all over burnt rubber and soap.

bottle at home ... hazy amber ... big white head ... sodr dry cheesy fruit nose ... herbal cheesy fruit ... light bitter fruit .. long cheesy fruit

Bottle at Craigs. Pours golden orange, nose is sherbert, orange peel, yeasty, taste is musty toffee, harsh, rubbery.

Bottle from Cotteridge Wines; hazy amber pour with a big frothy white head, aroma has sweet marmalade and hints of spice, taste has sweet malts, ripe tangerine, spice, very sweet, some yeasty action, very bitter grapefruit.

Robe blonde orangée, premier verre clair, second tout à fait opaque. Mousse blanche très abondante, légère et très aérée, formation de cratères sous la surface de la mousse, dentelle. Nez très houblonné sur les agrumes (citron puissant) et résineux (weed). Bouche peu carbonatée, huileuse. Arôme résineux très puissant, amertume importante, agrume en retrait de cette amertume. Corpulence moyenne, texture assez épaisse. Finale amère longue, très astringente. IPA puissamment amère, sèche, mais texture collante. Texture et gros déséquilibre dans l’utilisation du houblon qui n’en font pas une IPA très buvable. Absolument pas juicy comme annoncé sur l’étiquette (ni au sens d’une NEIPA, ni aromatiquement, ni au niveau de la texture).

Bottle. Pours a hazy golden color with a small white head. Has a fruity malty spicy yeasty hoppy citrus aroma. Fruity malty spicy yeasty hoppy flavor. Has a fruity malty spicy yeasty hoppy finish.

Cloudy blond with thin soapy head. Aroma and flavour have plenty of citrusy hops. Lots of citric, pithy bitterness. Grapefruit.

Bottle. Cotteridge. Very hazy, dark orange colour. Thick, bubbly, lasting, lacing, white head. Lovely looking beer. Nose has overripe, just starting to ferment, oranges and melon. Very yeasty and bready. Some squeezed grapefruit. A little peculiar, even by Brabant’s standard. Taste has some fusty sweetness. Then it turns big, stone fruit, phenolic, and bitter. Full body. A bit oily and warm. Long, yeasty, big bitterness to finish. Odd. But in a fairly good way.

19th April 2017
Very hazy amber beer, good pale cream colour head. Palate is dry and has decent minerally carbonation. Thin malts, mildly sweet. Spicy dry pithy bitterness, very dry. Bitter aniseed and lemon. Some hop spice and what tastes like bitter yeast. Dry finish. Spicy bitter linger. Dry, yeasty and bitter, much too much like hard work.

UPDATED: MAR 28, 2017 "Juicy IPA" made in collaboration with a - to me - unknown young micro brewery in the Marseille region in southern France, from a 75 cl bottle bought at Etre Gourmet. Thick, fairly dense and moussy, very stable, off-white head leaving behind an irregular rim of thick ’membranous’ lacing, misty peach blonde robe with vaguely ochre-ish hue and short strings of fizz piercing through the mist here and there. ’Green’ and ’raw’ aroma of freshly cut common fennel, yellow grapefruit peel, brown soap, Grannysmith apple peel, raw green bell pepper, unripe pear, fresh lemon zest, green garden weeds (dandelions) or even reed, unripe apricot, clove-like phenols especially after adding the sediment, green tomato, wormwood or even tonic water, bitter honey, bread crust, wood glue, jute, grass juice, chalk dust, spoiled onions, raw butter beans, young ’jenever’. Crisp onset, very restrained sweetish touch of green banana and unripe stonefruit, stronger green tomato and dito bell pepper sourishness with an umami core buried inside, minerally carbonation, stinging a bit but not disturbingly so, yet still coarsening the mouthfeel, which could have been a tad more supple. Grainy and thinly bready malt core sustains green, freshly cut vegetable aspects but nothing of the initial sweetishness - ’sweet’ is clearly reduced to an absolute minimum here, but the umami touches do carry on. Even before the finish arrives, an uncompromizing, even rather harsh, ’green’ hop bitterness overwhelms the palate, with raw vegetable-like side notes remaining; the resinous, oily hops dominate the finish, drying it almost entirely and therefore leaving little behind of the promised ’juiciness’, effectuating a peppery, wormwood-, heavily dandelion juice- and tonic water-like, very wry bitterness and retronasal effects of yellow grapefruit peel (the Amarillo I reckon) and old bitter kitchen herbs (Columbus?) which clings to the throat along with too many spicy phenols and traces of gin-like alcohol warmth. As usual with this brewery’s new approach, this is rather crude, raw and a bit ’unbalanced’; no diacetyl is left in this bottle, unlike the BBF ratings below; so it was probably not a bad idea to keep this bottle in the cellar for a while and I assume it must be in its prime right now, but to be honest, the prospect of a "juicy IPA" made me dream of the first successful New England style IPA in Belgium - an illusion already wrecked by that Troebel thing from Dormaal last week - and this brew clearly has nothing to do with that. This is a Belgian IPA aiming at ’classic’ American West Coast allure, resinous, thoroughly hop bitter and, frankly, lacking a bit in malt body to sustain this amount of bitterness, while at the same time retaining Belgian ’phenolicness’. I also miss some of the delicate aromatic qualities of Amarillo (which ought to smell like fresh oranges at its best) and Columbus, and even Mosaic, a brilliant invention suited to accentuate other hops’ features, seems unable to achieve this effect; this beer seems to be more about crude, unpolished hop bitterness than about the art of cleverly applying New World hops to any style of IPA. Not too well balanced in being just a bit too hop bitter for its own good - I will probably be able to taste this harsh hop resin flavour till tomorrow morning - and at the same time neglecting the fragrant bouquet these ’new’ hops can establish; if only it would have achieved the latter, I’d be raving about this. I do, however, appreciate the boldness of it: this approach turned out well for me in that Plato’s Chariot (and to a lesser extent Plato’s Cave) from the same brewery but here it just doesn’t seem entirely right. Brabant, in all, remains a genius brewery when it comes to saison variations - as it has always been even before he entered his own revival - but the countless attempts at foreign beer styles seem a bit... well, unfinished, mostly. Maybe Frédéric is trying too many things at the same time, I’d recommend him to take it easy and study particular non-Belgian beer styles more thoroughly, as there is great potential in his ideas (Plato’s Chariot and Belgian Psycho can testify this).