Boelens Klokbier (Tripel Klok)
ABV: 8.5%
Origin: Belsele, Oost-Vlaanderen, Flanders
Website: www.brouwerijboelens.be
First published: 12 February 2001
Another review from the archive written for the pioneering Oxford Bottled Beer Database (OBBD). I’ve left it uncorrected — so please read it in that historical spirit.
I got the significance of the name badly wrong, forgetting that klok in Dutch can also mean ‘bell’. There’s a story that the inhabitants of Belsele once gave a visiting tinker all their gold and silver on the promise that he could mend their church bell, at which point he simply upped and left with the loot, never to be seen again. The locals were thereafter known as klokkenlappers or ‘bell menders’.
The original Boelens brewery closed in 1915 but was revived in 1993 as a microbrewery by Kris Boelens, a descendant of the original owning family. Klokbier is still around but it’s now labelled Triplel Klok and has a dubbel stablemate.
A beer from a small brewery in Belsele, East Flanders, halfway between Gent and Antwerpen, known for its Bieken honey beer. I haven’t worked out the significance of the name, which means simply ‘Clock-beer’, but the attractive hand-drawn label depicts a small village church, and the bottle-conditioned beer is distantly monastic in style.
It’s sweet and honeyish, though in this case honey isn’t listed on the ingredients, though it is flavoured with herbs. The beer pours peachy and cloudy, with an impressively generous sediment, and gives off an intensely fragrant, honeyed, herbal aroma with perhaps a hint of woodruff. On the palate it is lively and orangey, with a lip-coating candied sweetness, tangy drying notes and perhaps a hint of cinnamon.
Hops develop on the tongue and continue to dry out the throat on the swallow, leaving a mainly dry finish with persistent candied notes and a late touch of marzipan. Enjoyably fragrant and stimulating, if just a little too sweet.
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