Karmeliet Tripel is a deliciously sweet tripel with great finesse and complexity. Wheat, barley and oats are all used in their raw and malted form to create both a light crispness and creamy sweetness. Gentle bitterness and the bananas and vanilla character of the house yeast meld perfectly with the grains to create an exceptionally well rounded tripel.

Grottenbier is the result of a collaboration between a brewery and a tourist attraction. The beer is brewed at Opwijk in Brabant, to the northwest of Brussels, by de Smedt, best known for their blended Op-Ale, but matured in the marlstone caves at Kanne, in the (Belgian) province of Limburg on the easternmost border of the country, very near Maastricht: thus the name, "Grotto beer". It no doubt does a roaring trade at the caves themselves but is also available from Beer Circus in Brussels. It's a bottle-conditioned ale of a deep chestnut hue, with a very good foamy head and a restrained yeasty aroma with a slight fruitiness and spiciness: the label admits to the inclusion of spices without saying what they are, but I'm sure I detected coriander here. The palate is initially mainly spicy and quite sweet - caramel and candy sugar are used - with a detectable but rather frail malt background. The spice mix is initially complex and rather like one of those Swiss herb sugar sweets, with coriander, liquorice, faint hints of mint and ginger, but very soon the ginger comes to dominate. The hops are also of the herbal variety and become quite forward as the taste develops, but they're in rather uncomfortable competition with the ginger, which leaves the final impression in a warming finish. Overall the beer is rather misjudged: too gingery and with the wrong sort of hoppiness, these two flavours between them shouting down the tantalising complexity with which the beer starts. Perhaps, like many of these things, it tastes better if you've been there.