Belgian Tripel
Granville Island Brewery

 

Poured from the bottle into a tulip globe glass.

Pale amber, to murky yellow body color with a nice looking opacity to it. Fine carbonation, touching a solid simple white head of three fingers that's creamy in appearance. Settles to a good top, nice crown and touches of streaky lacing.

Estery to phenolic touches on the nose quite a bit. Some slight clove more so than fruit, with a bit of marmalade to citrus aroma as well. Hints a little cookie to biscuit like a bit in the aroma as well, but with little Belgian sweetness going on.

Palate is quite solid but runs a little hot. Hot clove with touches of good dryness and wine like fruit flavors in the mid palate. An almost pinot grigio like flavor, but with quite a good touch of heat and booze. A slight hint of banana strangely as well, and a boozy wine like body, but makes it seem a bit wet also.

Comes out like a tripel, but runs a bit too hot, with not much sense of Belgian quality. Drinkable, but also seems quite more potent than it needs to be.

 

650ml bottle, the most recent entry in Granville Island's 'small batch' series - I wonder how much this one really differs from their retired Jolly Abbot?

This beer pours a hazy, medium golden amber colour, with four fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and somewhat bubbly off-white head, which leaves some decent thickly webbed lace around the glass as it lazily sinks out of sight.

It smells of semi-sweet, grainy and bready pale malt, a sort of edgy coriander and black pepper spiciness, estery Belgian yeast, and some tame earthy, weedy, and musky floral green hop bitters. The taste is gritty and grainy cereal malt, buttered white bread, muddled domestic citrus rind, more old-school yeastiness, clove/coriander spice, and a further weedy, musty, and sauced-up floral noble hoppiness.

The carbonation is average in its palate-coddling frothiness, the body a solid middleweight, and sort of smooth, but for some interfering spice and alcohol astringencies. It finishes on the near sweet side, with the malt, spice, and yeast clumsily escorting us out the back door of the party.

Overall - this comes across as about par for the course for this brewing concern, with just enough off-flavours to render it unworthy of ranking among the better examples out there in the market. Yeah, that bit of diacetyl doesn't do this one any favours - it's akin to the fable of the princess and the pea, in that it's slowly driving me crazy as things progress.