Pannepot 2008

Broody and brown, like blood-red soil on a wet day, four-year aged Pannepot is dragged out of the beer cupboard and into a glass like Jack Dee to an in-laws barbecue…

It simply doesn’t want to open (the journey back from Belgium wasn’t kind: a contemporary shot it’s load in the suitcase, drenching the stash of bottles and it’s still sticky and downtrodden) but eventually, after much gushing and fizzing, it acquiesces.

Perhaps it’s just the toll of it’s arrival here, but it looks weather beaten like it’s namesakes – a pannepot is a Flemish  fishing boat associated with the town of De Panne, near the French border, and the beer is a tribute to the fisherman that have enjoyed Flemish dark ales over many stormy years.

It’s tan head could easily be it’s fisherman’s beard, home to assorted aromas and flavours caught along the voyage: burnt raisins, sour figs and dry prunes, vanilla, anise, tobacco, brown sugar. Do caramelised chocolate bananas exist?

Pannepot is a smoking thurible of a beer; deep, complex, throat burning, incensed with mellow spices.

A treasure worth smuggling home, no matter how bumpy the seas.

De Struise Pannepot 2008

FletchtheMonkey

Mark is better known as @fletchthemonkey and started writing about beer in 2009. When not content with spending all day on the internet working in digital for an multichannel retailer, Mark waxes lyrical at digitalmediamonkey.co.uk and types up match reports for Leeds Guide magazine.

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