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beer reviews Belgium bottled beer

Magical Mystery Pour #12: Troubadour Magma Triple-Spiked

Troubadour Magma in the glass, with bottle.

Magical Mystery Pour logo.This 9.8% ABV Belgian take on IPA is the fourth of five beers suggested to us by The Beer Nut (@thebeernut).

We bought it from Beer Gonzo along with its sibling which we wrote about yesterday. It cost £3.25 for 330ml which seems pretty reasonable for a ‘special edition’ fancy-pants beer with the added faff of Brettanomyces.

This one did gush ever so slightly which prompted a careless pour which, in turn, led to it surging up out of the glass and all over the table. What we managed to catch was misty orange topped with a cream-yellow foam. It gave off an intense room-filling aroma of citrus.

Our first reactions on tasting were gibbering, fear and confusion.

‘That’s quite something,’ we agreed, vaguely, once we’d calmed down.

Tasting notes, fountain pen on paper.

It was extremely fruity in every dimension — hops, of course, but also sweetness and acidity in balance so that, more than any other beer we can recall tasting, including some containing actual fruit, it really did resemble breakfast juice. (Grapefruit, orange, lemon.)

There was a burn in the throat and up the nose — a reminder that this is a boozy beer — and a funky fustiness that seemed quite restrained in the context of all those other fireworks. As we’ve admitted we’re still stuck on Orval = Brettanomyces and sure enough that specific beer did quite definitely come to mind. Could you get close to this beer by mixing Orval, a US IPA and Tripel Karmeliet in equal parts? Maybe.

Close up on the foam of the beer.

Job done, we checked out TBN’s own tasting notes for our own sanity:

I was expecting disappointment and dismay but it is amazing. If anything, the brett enhances the hop juiciness and despite the very definite farmyard funk it still tastes gorgeously fresh. The funk is not a gimmick, it’s not there for its own sake and really does provide a tart balance to the tropical fruit sweetness in the base beer, clearing out some of the heavy sugary malt. Tangy, refreshing and counter-intuitively clean, this is an absolute triumph. I couldn’t imagine ordering anything else for the second round.

This is a big, modern, electroshock of a beer — perhaps a bit much for us, if we’re honest, but we can see why it might appeal to thrill-seekers, jolt junkies and jaded palates.

We’ve only got one more of TBN’s beers to go. If there’s someone you think we ought to invite to choose some beers for us in the next round drop us an email: contact@boakandbailey.com.