Neck the halls

We're back for round two of the 2022 BXLBeerFest in the bright and airy ex-warehouse space of Tour & Taxis in Brussels. What delights from my notebook await?

A late one on the first day was Historical Imperial Porter from French brewery Le Détour. I read enough Pattinson and Cornell to know the name is stretching things rather for what turned out to be a dense black 13% ABV monster, aged in peaty Scottish whisky barrels. It was flat and went big on the autolytic chocolate sauce and Bovril, lacing the beef with a lightly roasty edge. As a near-finisher for the evening it worked very well, being sippable, smooth and warming -- welcome even in August daylight hours. This is the sort of beer I like to depart a festival with and veer homewards still holding. But we're some distance from home yet.

The next day I was straight back at Le Détour's bar first thing, their position by the door paying dividends. This time I opted for their Kriek, a powerhouse example at 7% ABV. This goes very heavy on the cherries, presenting a ripe and unctuous punnet to the nose and a chewy, syrupy texture on the palate. The flavour brings cough sweets first and tart rhubarb after, but none of the mineral sourness I was hoping for. It's not a great kriek, and rather sickly. I don't think they've taken sugary shortcuts in the recipe but whatever they've tried in order to mimic the Belgians hasn't worked out.

A lesson in how to do sour at 7% ABV comes from the beer beside it: Meditation from Wild Creatures in Moravia. This is a blend of three different vintages of spontaneously fermented beer and channels the geuze perfectly: sparky spices meeting puckering sourness and citric bitterness. You get immense complexity without it turning busy or overwrought, and utterly clean throughout, in a way I associate with Boon and pretty much nobody else. This festival's ability to bring brewers of this calibre from across Europe into one room is what I loved about it most. That, and all the amazing sour beer.

OK, we need a comedown from that. Here's German brewer Flügge with one of those unexportable beer-wine hybrids, called Röik. The Irish customs authorities would malfunction if the paperwork for this came across their desk. It's 6.6% ABV and pale yellow in colour. I found it quite watery, the limp-handshake flavour offering fruit salad and the echo of departed green apples. It's very drinkable, and I'm sure has all the delicate subtleties that the maker intended it to impart, but I think this busy hangar full of stand-up drinkers wasn't the context for it. I quaffed and I moved on.

Just one more fancy farmhouse fellow for today: Keeping Together brought The Earth Is What We All Have In Common with them from Chicago. It's a Bière de Garde at 7.1% ABV, with added chestnut, orange and rosemary, which sounds more like something you would do to mead than beer. It's a deep amber colour and has a vinous dried fruit aroma. The flavour expands that into a light red wine or pale sherry, plus a spicy finish. There's little sign of the novelty ingredients and it stays true to my idea of what Bière de Garde ought to be. Though at €5 for 80ml it would bleedin' want to.

Is there an IPA in the house? As with Fidelty in July, I had just one, and again it was chosen for me so I admit no responsibility for drinking something called Nut Busters. It's from the generally-reliable Romanian brewery Hop Hooligans and is in the milkshake sub-genre at 6.7% ABV. It's murky yellow and the unsubtle inclusion of coconut makes it smell like sickly suncream. The flavour opens on ice cream in a big way: cheap raspberry ripple in a rectangular block, clashing with a strongly bitter hop citrus. You know how everyone hates the effect of orange juice meeting milk? This is that as a beer. I have an open mind when it comes to beer diversity but I despair for anyone who thinks this tastes good, especially the brewers.

Time to slip into somethings altogether more comfortable, and have you noticed how far barley wine has fallen out of fashion? Imperial stout is holding its own but I now find myself ordering barley wines whenever I see them because it's so seldom. Reserva is from Wallonese brewery Atrium and is bourbon-barrel-aged, clocking in at 10.5% ABV. It smells thickly and sickly of vanilla, tasting of caramel and whisky to the point of losing sight of the base beer. This is definitely a sipper. Raisin and toffee is what passes for nuance here. That's your lot, and if big and sticky barley wine is your bag, here's one of the increasingly rare opportunities to get it. I wasn't terribly impressed, but it's fine: everything it promises, it delivers.

That leaves us with two imperial stouts before wrapping up today. Staying in Wallonia we go to Misery for the bourbon and cognac barrel edition of La Faux: a powerhouse at 12.5% ABV. This didn't hold together for me, bringing typical flavours but not blending them right. On a page, notes of chocolate, coffee and herbs should herald good times, but here the chocolate is cheap and ersatz, the coffee instant and the herbs overly bitter and vegetal. The result is a clanging and clashing mix of not-right, which although slick and warming is impossible to enjoy.

Conversely, French brewer Les Intenables got it right with Night Crush, this one only 10.5% ABV and incorporating cocoa and hazelnut. The key is its bright and sunny flavour profile, brimming with rosewater and marzipan, turning to luxurious chocolate brownie in the finish. Though very much a serious beer, not a pastry confection, there's a gorgeous lightness of touch in what it does. A rare example of a big and dark beer being charming.

There's just time for one more turn about the hall before we call it a weekend.