Préaris Export Van Damme
Vliegende Paard Brouwers in Oedelem, West Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪
Lager - Premium Regular|
Score
6.65
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Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 6.5
'Export' (in the old Belgian sense of the word - i.e. standard pale lager or 'pils' in brown 33 cl bottles) by Vliegende Paard, hopped with Groene Belle, an old and forgotten, but recently rediscovered local variety from the Aalst region, the hops of which were once as important as those from the Poperinge region. Snow white, frothy, thick, rather creamy, stable head on a clear, pure golden blonde beer with fierce, almost champagne-like sparkling, pushing upwards lots of loose, pale protein flakes of about a millimetre in diameter, which becomes worse further on, when the beer shifts to a hazy straw blonde and the protein flakes get bigger and darker... Clearly past its prime, but let's have a go at this anyway. Aroma of white bread dough with even a slight fresh sourdough hint to it, dried camomile flowers, wet grass, flour, crushed barley as in dry chicken food, faint background impressions of lemon zest or even hand soap, apple peel, rainwater. Crisp onset, rather neutral as can be expected from a lager but still with faint traces of yeasty fruitiness (unripe banana, apple peel) adding a bit of 'life', vivid carbonation with somewhat souring and prickly, even lightly numbing, minerally effect, rounded and slick body; white-bready maltiness with a sourish edge again vaguely reminiscent of sourdough but also sorrel leaf, leading to a floral finish, with camomile- and sweetclover-like, 'rural' hoppiness retronasally yet only soft bitterness, so that this undercurrent of sourishness and increasing yeasty breadiness remain more dominant - paired with a luckily brief whiff of overt phenols. I should have drunk this much sooner (the bottle has been laying around here for months) but based on sheer experience, I can still imagine what this might have looked and tasted like when it was still young, and even if Préaris' top fermentation shines through, I do believe that this was made with a very neutral lager yeast and thus qualifies as a standard pale lager - which indeed becomes 'export' in Belgium when it ends up in 33 cl bottles; with a regional 'craft' (artisanal) lager like this, I cannot help but think about the past, many decades ago, when many more of these 'local' pale lagers were around in Belgium, with only a handful of those still being alive (but hardly kicking) today. Not bad for what it intends to be - I'll try to ignore the unpleasant sight of all those protein bits and flakes...
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6.5
Imported from my RateBeer account as Préaris Export Van Damme (by Vliegende Paard Brouwers):
Aroma: 7/10, Appearance: 3/5, Taste: 6/10, Palate: 3/5, Overall: 13/20, MyTotalScore: 3.2/5
21/VIII/19 - 33cl bottle from the brewery, shared @ home, BB: X/2020 - (2019-1314)
Clear pale blond to yellow beer, small creamy white head, unstable, non adhesive, leaving no lacing in the glass. Aroma: very malty, grains, sweet, some marzipan, reminds me of a Czech Republic lager, not bad at all! MF: ok carbon, medium body. Taste: malty, sweet, grains, bit fruity, citrus touch, very soft bitterness. Aftertaste: malty, grains, bit sweet, soft bitterness, some banana, decent one!