beer_name: La Trappe Blond (Koningshoeven / Dominus)
text: BB 12/08, served lightly chilled in Hapkin's tulip-shaped bowl glass. A: dark reddish amber hue, not blond at all! Coming with an off-white creamy head that settles to a thin cap, on top of semi-lively tiny fizziness. S: pretty sour-sweet prune-y and burned sugary, at first quite like what happens to an expired English bottled bitter... After the beer settles, the aroma shows syrupy sweet grains, boiled sweet potatoes, sugar-cane juice, buttery fudge, grassy hops, and random fruit-esters on top of (much) milder notes of tangerine-ish citrusness. Overall, the balance gears towards the rich and thickly sugary side, thus not terribly pleasant to me. T: just like the nose, the foretaste gives out a very thick presence of burned-sugary and candy-ish malts, followed by a lightly spicy bite of yeasts, fig jam, estery flavour of Chinese green-bean paste, with fat-prune-ish and milder citric fruitiness lingering in the end. Semi-dry in the finish along with the sweet grainy edge that simply refuses to budge even until the last second of tasting. M&D: very light in carbonation, medium-bodied, slightly weird in flavour and not very drinkable due to the sickly-sugary sweetness that disturbs the balance. My previous notes of the On-Tap version seems to be much better, and the only thing I can think of blaming for this bottle is perhaps the expiry-date issue. I don't mind trying the bottled version again.