Ahh…another week, another Chimay beer taste.
This week I delved back heaven sent beers that are from the Chimay Trappist Monastery and popped the top of the Chimay Tripel, also known as Chimay White, because of the label colour. It is essentially the middle beer in the very excellent Chimay range that varies in alcoholic content, and price, from Red to White onto their top beer the Blue label. Like the other Chimay beers it is reported to age quite well and can be cellared to improve or develop more character. It is a crisper beer than the other Chimay beers thanks to a more developed hopped flavour; it pours a hazy golden brown colour with a dense, high-rise off-white head. The aromas are powerful, with raisins and demerara sugar against floral notes, cloves and pepper, and a core of hops.
The White is definitely fruitier than the Chimay Red, but lighter in taste. It’s more than just an average beer, but I can’t rate it as high as the Red, it falls a little short. Its taste is dense, thick and full-bodied, with an immediately sharp and bitter with vegetable-funk/floral type flavour and one of the longest lingering funky aftertastes I’ve seen for a while.
However, despite its shortcomings it is still a high quality beer. I realise that sounds strange, saying it’s a quality beer, but yet that it falls short of the mark and not rating it well. So, in trying to make my point a little clearer, and bearing in mind that several of these 8% alcohol beers had been consumed at the time, my neighbour and I came up with the idea of comparing the Chimay White with Bon Scott.
Here was a man that wasn’t perfect. Like all of us, Bon had some shortcomings. But the difference between him and the rest of us is that even at with all those flaws he still managed to ooze excellence, if you cut him he would bleed excellence all the while belting out “Let there be Rock” or “Long Way to the Top”.
Chimay White, as with Bon Scott and AC/DC, may not be to everyone’s taste, but you need to have your head read if you even suggest that what both offer was, or is, just average.
Bottom line?
It’s a quality beer, but I expected more as their Red label is so good. I’m thinking that if Rugby is the game they play in heaven, and the Chimay beers are brewed by God’s earthly representatives, then God after trying the White label probably would have said: ”strewth mate, they’ve dropped the ball here”.
3.5 out of 5.
