My September trip to the Netherlands yielded a handful of beers which I didn't get round to drinking while travelling and which therefore came home with me. Let's see what's in the suitcase.Kees is a brewery I trust with dark beers, and I thought they would be fine on black IPA. This is Midnight Cascade, one I picked up in a supermarket in Leiden. It's definitely a little on the pale side, being brown, not black. The aroma is quite a muted mix of dark roast and flowery hops, neither especially pronounced. At 5.6% ABV there should be more going on, but the flavour continues in this very understated vein. What's there is good: it's not dull or characterless; there's an attractive Turkish delight bouquet of rosewater, lavender and peppercorns, accompanied by a light topping of milk chocolate. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem arises from an irritating lack of bitterness. Good black IPA would throw in a piquant bitterness, of fresh red or green cabbage, or even classic American pine. This has none of that, its lightly sweet complexity simply fading off the palate, leaving only watery fizz behind. I'm not averse to a floral-tasting porter, but this isn't even one of those, lacking any proper richness. There is an excellent flavour profile in the make-up of this beer, but it needs to be bigger, louder, and given a challenging bitterness to make it really shine.
It was the beginning of Halloween season at multipurpose retail chain HEMA as I was leaving Amsterdam. Their range of Lowlander beers included Pumpkin Weizen, a bottle of which I picked up for funsies. Spiced orange, cinnamon, ginger and cardamom are all listed on the ingredients of this 5%-er, after the pumpkin, of course. It doesn't look much like a weissbier, lacking the head. It smells orangey but not spiced, with a citric hop element too, more akin to a pale ale. We're definitely in weissbier territory with the flavour, however: there's a smooth and slick banana quality to the foretaste which couldn't be anything else. But the other stuff? There's not so much of that. Two years ago I criticised a different HEMA-acquired beer from a different brewery for being far too spiced, to the detriment of everything else. This is disappointingly bland. I know that pumpkins add little to no actual taste by themselves, but the selection of add-ons should have been enough to give this some novelty value. I hunted around the flavour and found nothing but the fresh orange zest and the summer biergarten weissbier vibes. It's a perfectly enjoyable beer, but by reneging on the promise of silliness, it left me feeling tricked, not treated.
Finally, from the shelves of Bierkoning in Amsterdam I procured Stout of the Box, an imperial milk stout by Rauw Brouwers from north Amsterdam. I was expecting this to be sweet, what with it being 10.5% ABV and brewed with caramel as well as, presumably, lactose, but it's bitter. The predominant flavour is a herbal quality, all oregano and rosemary, plus some cola, tobacco, and a rub of sticky liquorice. It's a lot more complex than I was expecting it to be, and definitely not a one-dimensional booze-and-sugar bomb. There's actually something a little old fashioned about its tarry, vegetal quality, in a very enjoyable way. The aniseed lingers long on the palate, giving it an almost medicinal quality. It certainly made me feel better. I'll be looking out for more from Rauw next time I'm in the 'Dam.I know this small set is in no way representative of Dutch brewing, but they do make interesting beer, even if it's not always brilliant.
