Ardenne Wood My Chipie
Brasserie Minne

Blind-tasted except for the beer's name and brewery/country... Just the single front lable on the bottle featuring a magpie.
L- Pours super-dark brown and cloudy (more sediment left in bottle. 2mm tan head soon clears to a thin ring at the edge.
S- It has that really prominent rustic piquant smell that reminds of two things I do not particularly love; a) beer that has been aged in wine barrels, or b) styles that are sour more than bitter such as the Belgian Geuzes. I suspect this is wine-barrel aged.
T- Oh surely it's wine barrel aged? It tastes more like a dry wine than a beer. I (honestly) briefly involuntarily shudder when swallowing a sip, it's the sour-wine aspect here.
F- I'll be brutally frank, like a cheap, course and rough tasting glass of wine.
O- Is it just me, when imbued as a youth with the rights-of-passage I learned to 'never mix the grape and the grain'. Ie/for example, drinking both wine + beer at a party will make you achingly hung-over. So drinking a beer which outright tastes like a rough wine rather than any kind of beer just draws down my shutters right away. I can finish this, but I'm really struggling to underrstand who the target market is more this style of beer.
Review/scoring all done, now the reveal, I get to read the lables to see what I missed! ---> Oh wow! Seems it's not wine barrels but Genever barrels, the latter being a Continental version of gin! 'Vintage 2019'. Tasting it again I get the Genever, but maybe only because I have also drunk Genever shots many years ago, so know it's gin/schnapps/acquavit hard-liquor type character.
330ml bottle BB: October-2021 Euro7.95 (ouch!). Bought from TremblingMadness, York/UK as part of a large pick-your own consignment to London.
p.s. One of those beers that easily divides, as it is so full-on and different. Hope it works for you!
#1836