Brouwerij Bliksem Hellevuur

Hellevuur

 

Brouwerij Bliksem in Breda, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands 🇳🇱

Belgian Style - Tripel Regular
Score
7.19
ABV: 10.0% IBU: - Ticks: 3
Our hemelvuur tripel aged on Makers Mark bourbon oak barrels for 8 months. It’s a tasty highway to hell! Hell yeah!
 

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7.8
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 8

33 cl. bottle @ home, bought @ Kulenborgse Bierhandel.
Clear dark golden with a white head. Vanille, oak and thus bourbon aroma. Sweet taste with an initial sweet finish. After a while the bitterness cuts through the sweetness a bit, which is a good thing. Bliksem is quickly becoming a Dutch favorite brewery for me as they combine skillfully brewed beers with interesting barrel approaches and gorgeous metal music inspired labelart. This Hellevuur is, again, a perfect example of this.

Tried from Bottle from Kulenborgse Bierhandel on 02 Jan 2022 at 21:57


7.3
Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7.5

One of Breda's many prominent craft breweries presenting this bourbon barrel aged tripel (Hemelvuur, the 'mother beer' is called) in their ambitious Anthology series; bottle from a local Delhaize supermarket, to my surprise. Thick, frothy, busily cobweb-lacing, yellowish egg-white, regular and stable head on an initially clear, deep and warm 'old golden' beer with rusty tinge and a column of small-bubbled sparkling in the middle, turning misty and deeper 'metallic old gold' with sediment - with that typical vague brownish tinge acquired from the wood. Aroma of whisky-soaked apricots, clear bourbon indeed (perhaps a bit too much of it), honey, freshly cut sweet apples (very prominently), glazed pear, moist 'beschuit' from Holland, some banana, caramelizing sugar, almond or even amaretto, vanilla-scenting oak wood, hints of floor polish or wax, very vague damp earth somewhere, cold tomato soup, dried basil. Sweet, 'full' onset, lots of sweet fruitiness in the vein of cooked pear, fried sweet apple, mushy banana and a hint of ripe peach, lively carbonated with minerally effects but acceptable enough for a tripel; full, rounded mouthfeel. Clear residual, honeyish sweetness covering a smooth malty base, a tad bready and rusk-like, but also with a very vague metallic touch somewhere. The bourbon meanwhile grows and grows, until it unleashes its vanilla-like oakiness retronasally together with a bittersweet, 'hot' alcohol effect back in the mouth; it does accentuate the sweetness as is usually the case in 'B.B.A.' tripels, but at the end of this rather intense tunnel, a soothing, 'dark green', somewhat leafy hop bitter accent beckons, bringing consolation amidst all that sweetness and booziness. Subtle as it may be, the hop bitter note here provides a backing structure I personally need in sweet and boozy tripels aged in sweet and boozy liquor barrels; I am inclined to maintain that if you must age tripels in barrels, wine barrels (or fortified wines) remain a better choice than that initially charming, but soon way too sweet and boozy bourbon. This is my second bourbon barrel aged tripel of the evening and I still think this concept can be executed better, meaning: more sophisticated, more complex, more refined. As in that Thalia in the Triootje series from my home region (Waasland in East Flanders, Belgium), created by old and dear friends of mine, I have to conclude that an imperial stout fits bourbon barrel ageing better, whereas a tripel seems more suitable for wine barrel ageing, at least in my personal experience. Tripels aged on bourbon barrels are just a bit 'much', becoming even more sweet and boozy than they already were and losing 'finesse' in the process. That said, this one is certainly skillfully made and not the worst in this specific segment, but the booziness really downplayed the experience for me - even more than the wax around the bottle top and neck. Feels equally boozy as that Triootje Thalia I had earlier this evening (created to the exact same concept even if the bourbon brand is different), but a bit more crude as well - yet the bitter element here is something I can certainly appreciate... I do not know which of both BBA tripels I liked most, but I think the entire concept to begin with is a bit lost on me. Like Thalia, this Hellevuur too may significantly improve with ageing, though.

Tried on 18 Dec 2021 at 02:33


8

Bourbon zeer goed proefbaar. Dus ook vanille en houttonen. Topcombi met de tripel. Heerlijk. --- Beer merged from original tick of Hellevuur 2021 on 17 Dec 2021 at 19:48 - Score: 8. Original review text: Bourbon zeer goed proefbaar. Dus ook vanille en houttonen. Topcombi met de tripel. Heerlijk.

Tried from Bottle on 17 Dec 2021 at 19:48