7.1

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7.5

Brand new beer from a very young microbrewery in the Ardennes; 75 cl bottle with a funny label depicting a ‘purple rinsed’ old lady with her lap dog. Apparently a saison of sorts flavoured with black tea. Thick and foamy but quite quickly thinning, egg-white head over a hazy, warm orangey peach blonde beer, more cloudy amberish with sediment. Very perfumey aroma indeed, but more jasmin tea, cloves, lavender soap, bath foam and hibiscus flowers than actual black tea, highly aromatic and ethereal, yet nicely embedded in notes of freshly cut red apple, melting powder sugar, honey cookies, gingerbread, half-dry orange peel. Flavour follows aroma: sweetish pineapple, red apple and peach at the onset with a mild, deeply situated sourishness underneath that will stretch through the entire palate in a discreet way; strong fizzy carbonation, ‘foamy’, but not painfully stinging; sweetbready, doughy malt base (the spelt going a bit lost really) with lingering fruity esters and honeyish residual sugar, a tad sticky even in the end, before phenols start to mingle with this strong, ethereal, perfumey black tea spiciness. An earthy hop note provides soft end bitterness. I normally don’t like spiced Belgian ales nor any beer flavoured with tea, but admittedly this is not badly executed at all; it has a soft, accessibly sweet and fruity Wallonian ‘saison’-ish ale profile with a modern twist added the right way, if you can take this dosage of ‘perfumeyness’. Quite original, were it not for the Fantôme range that predates it and of which this beer strongly reminds me; in fact, if I hadn’t known any better, I would have situated this Bichon Malt-Thé right in the core of Fantôme’s oeuvre…