Dupont Avec les Bons Voeux

Brewed by Brasserie Dupont
Style: Saison
Tourpes-Leuze, Belgium

37,5cl bottle, copperblond, superb head, a delicious hoppy aroma, typical Dupont, taste is dry, no hint of sugar at all, taste is the bitterness of hop, long aftertaste. Yummy! The Best Wishes to all :-)

Very musky saison beer. A highpoint in all saison-brews, at least in my book. This has all it needs: dryness, muskyness, sourness and it’s refreshing like nothing else! An awesome beer, deserves the 100 percentile, definately!

Wow, what a great Saison. The miriad of spices and fruits with a very pleasant efforvescence was quite enjoyable. Hard to drink others after this.

4/17/05: Bottle, 2004 vintage
Thick , rocky head which clings to the glass, leaving an XL amount of lace. Golden sunshine body with chunks. Aroma of cheese, fruit, clove and yeast. Flavors of cheese, yeast and slightly spicy. Dry finish.

(bottled, Monk's). Straw color with voluminuous white head and brilliant clarity. Malt & yeasty rustic aroma with amazing musty barnyard undertones. Wonderful complexity with strong malt lead-off and firm bitter & very dry finish. Substantial alcohol and big body. A real winner.

75cl bottle from Beers of Europe. Golden. Looks and smells like a particularly good tripel, with that Dupont funky yeast aroma. Grapefruit, pepper and coriander on the nose also. Very smooth mouthfeel with good dry bitter finish. A cracker.

Exquisite Savoir-Faire! Hazy golden in color with a thick creamy head that last forever. The nose is bready, like sourdough (this is the yeast) and somewhat like pastry or Marzipan. Highly carbonated. Medium to full body, crisp and clean, it goes down amazingly well despite 9,5%. A pure beauty of a beer.

Draft: at Brouwers. Dec 30 ’06

Hazy straw amber with a modest white head and lovely lacing. This beer has a splendid aroma of lemon, barnyard dust, and a hint of vinegarly lambic. The flavor is stunning: lemon and lovely - nay, perfect - bitter hops, more barnyard, a hint of sunflower seed, and warm sweet malts through the middle. The mouthfeel is full and rich without either the heat or the thickness one might attribute to a 9.5% beer; as a result, this one is packed beyond compare with flavor but remains refreshing nonetheless and despite its high alcohol content.

After 600+ ratings, this is the best beer I’ve ever tasted. My new top-rated beer by two points.

Revisit on tap, Feb 18 ’07.

Indeed, after my encounter with the bottled version (described below) I began to wonder if the rating above resulted from one of those fortuitious moments where the beer and the mood and palate and the setting all align in perfect synchrony to raise a very good beer to beyond excellent in the moment.

So the next day, I tried this again on tap, again at Brouwers. The previous 4.7 was no fluke; that beyond-perfect mouthfeel was back, the beer was everything I had experienced the first time, and it was fully deserving of its position alone at the top of my list.

Bottle: 750 ml, 2006 bottling tasted Feb 17 ’07.

From the bottle, this is a somewhat different beer. It’s very good, still, but it doesn’t compare with the mind-blowingly good beer that I tasted on tap. Much of the loss is in the mouthfeel. The bottled version features a coarser head; it is harsher and lacks the smooth creamy fullness of the tap, substituting instead a more oily mouthfeel and more overt 9.5% alcohol. I probably would have rated this about a 4.2 if I was tasting it for the first time. The take-home lesson is that if you haven’t had this one on tap, you haven’t had the full experience of what it can be.