Score
6.39
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33cl bottle. A clear golden beer with a white head. Aroma of mild banana, yeast, pale malt. Taste of mid sweet strong pale malt, wheat, some banana, phenols, spices.
Hazy blond colour with lasting head. Aroma and flavour have loads of malts. It's grainy and sweet. Excellent body and mouthfeel. Sweet but not like a banana.
Bottle. Not a gusher (anymore?) unlike previous ratings by others. Pours clear, golden blond. Medium small, relatively fast fading white head (for the style) . Much visible carbonation. Scent is Banana, simple and straight. Bit sharp, not as creamy as one might enjoy in a tripel. Intense phenols as well, providing a dry spice. Taste is sharp, overly intense yeast profile, medium bitter. Honey, banana, milder cloves, medium body, high carbo. Touch metallic. Too phenolic, and beyond that a higher-than-needed ester profile. Not much hoparoma. Boring tripel, fully focussed on marketing rather than a unique, or even better-than-average recipe. Though this is still enourmously overpriced, it's not AS BAD as francois is. Expect this to be about €7 in bars ( where francois could be around 9 and above) if normal magrins are taken. How do they fail to see that today's market demands more than a story, and even all the more if you're beer is priced about double or more than other's in the genre?
Kruidig en droog. Ok
Huge white head; coldhazed orangey-golden beer. Alcohol nose, boozy, pale malts, bit gassy, fresh green leaves. Dryish, malty flavour, bit maltsyrup. Again boozy and sweet. Alcoholheat, very slick, medium bodied. Luxury packaging for brown paper bag outdoor alcoholbums' maltliquor. Awful.
33cl bottle (3,35€) from Prik&Tik Kampenhout. F: huge, white, good retention. C: orange gold, hazy. A: malty, banana, honey, red apple peels, chewing gum, bit spicy, mellow fruity, yeasty. T: malty, mellow fruity, banana, juniper alcohol touch, bit herbal, decent bitterness, bit yeasty, spicy, medium to full body and higher carbonation, drinkable over-priced tripel that’s all, marketing beer
Bottle shared by Marte. Clear yellow golden color, average sized white head. Aroma is floral and perfumy. Flavor is malts, sweetish, again a bit perfumy, floral, floral yeasty. A bit fizzy carbonation, decent to medium body. Ok. 6-4-6-3-13.
330 ml. bottle from ALBO. High boost Belgian blond tripel commissioned for the Chinese market. More marketing than beer. Golden sparkling Duvel looking, fizzing away soapy white head, big. Nose is phenolic, medicinal, chemical, BE esters, high boost, harsh, plastic, medicinal, raw, sweet BE banana,… Fizzy chemical esters, pharmaceutical, chemical, phenolic, esters, booze, BE esters, plastic, industrial, chemical lab,… Not my thing at all this harsh boost BE golden phenolic, chemical, pharmaceutical affair. 1980s styled BE golden in the worst way.
Bottle from Prik&Tik, Stockman, Maldegem. Hazy amber colour, white foam. Sweet nose of citrus banana, malts. Taste is sweet banana, rich malts. Nice, but too expensive.
After François Grand Cru, the "Belgian Beer Experts" (not hindered by any form of modesty), now present us with this second tripel - these experts apparently do not excel at originality to say the least. This one is their claim to fame, it seems, intended to conquer the Chinese market with a reference to the number 8 (which seems to symbolically refer to prosperity in China) and the colour yellow (the most prestigious of all colours in Chinese culture); contracted out to an importer in Hong Kong and entering in cooperation again with the familiar face of television journalist Patrick Van Gompel, this is clearly a beer with ambitions. Comes from a fancy black longneck bottle with golden letters on its label, but when removing the cap, also carrying this golden '888' logo on a black background, beer streamed out of the longneck's neck - gushing is never a good start for me, but does not necessarily affect the flavour of the beer so let's investigate what this is about. Typical 'gusher head': towering high at first, but collapsing rapidly and eventually reduced to a thinnish but stable, open, egg-white ring and a few flat 'islands' in the middle. Lightly hazy, warm peach-hued 'old gold' robe with vivid strings of sparkling. Aroma of very strong isoamylacetate (banana-flavoured chewing gum), ripe pineapple, candied orange peel, honey liqueur, coriander seed, overripe cantaloupe, young 'jenever', granulated sugar, industrial cider, sweetsop and candyfloss, hints of freshly cut grass, pear, white bread, vague stewing white cabbage. Sweet onset as expected, lots of honeyish residual sugars carrying on throughout the palate along with strong banana ester, ripe pineapple and ripe pear notes with the banana ester being predominant; spritzy carbonation, slick and lean body. White bready maltiness almost bending under the weight of the residual, honeyish white candi syrup sweetness but maintaining its cereally character yet showing a thin metallic edge as well; it evolves into a medium bitterish finish in which a whiff of soapy coriander pops up, immediately followed by a grassy, simple, bit floral hop note providing some late bitterness and eventually finished off by a glow of heating, 'appeljenever'- or gin-like alcohol, which turns a bit peppery in the end. The banana ester and residual sugary sweetness keep dominating the entire picture. Like its predecessor, this is another sweet, simply structured and 'easygoing' tripel clearly intended to appeal to a large audience, and we all know the Chinese audience is a large one to say the least. Commercially this might work, but any beer geek will immediately see through the whole commercial mumbo-jumbo surrounding this essentially very conservative beer, which suffers from too much simplicity in its malt department, too much insufficiently hidden alcohol and too much sweetness; this is all about image and making money, even if these guys are apparently self-proclaimed beer experts. They very clearly are totally oblivious to the international tendencies that are making beer great again - no pun intended - and seemed to have no more inspiration than to turn to the worn-out sweet Belgian tripel formula, not for the first time, but for the second. Points off for that, for claiming to be hoppy while in this 21st-century context it clearly is not, for its badly hidden alcohol, and for the gushing.