Antwerpen
Dageraad Brewing

On tap at the brewery. Pours a relatively transparent yellow with fluffy white head. This is a fantastic triple. The nose is orange, malts, honey, grass, and caramel. The taste follows the nose. Nice citrus flavors, along with slight spice, yeast, bread, caramel, earthy notes, and honey. One of my favorite triples.

 

 

750ml bottle - a Tripel, brewed as a celebration of the city from which this outfit draws their inspiration. Cool, a couple of days ago I was chatting (and drinking beer) with a nice random couple visiting from Antwerp, in downtown Edmonton. Apophenia FTW!

This beer pours a hazy, medium golden yellow colour, with a veritably teeming tower of puffy, finely foamy, and fizzy bone-white head, which leaves a bit of splotchy and sudsy lace around the glass as it very lazily recedes.

It smells of gritty and grainy pale malt, a lesser edgy wheatiness, some coriander and white pepper spice, a banal Belgian yeastiness, simple syrup, and some plain leafy, weedy, and certainly perfumed floral green hop bitters. The taste is bready and doughy pale malt, some wheaten cereal notes, still understated Low Countries yeast, muted earthy spices, sugar solution, a mixed banana/pear/citrus fleshy fruitiness, and more weak musty, leafy, and still soused-up floral 'verdant' hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite overwrought in its swirling and probing frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and not particularly smooth, as the yeast and spice act out a bit of boorish hooliganism here. It finishes well off-dry, the mixed malt, added sugar, and alcohol all keeping this one just a tad skewed.

Overall, this is a somewhat disjointed version of the style, which is kind of surprising coming from this brewery - they typically hit the Belgian ones squarely out of the park. Maybe it was a certain nervousness in trying to flesh out their origin story, but the bubbles and the too evident booziness need to be tweaked here.