I approached this with a lot of trepidation, expecting little hoping for the best.

Firstly this is lot 2 c N 16 Best Before End of 2020. Of course, that’s not necessarily an issue for Fantôme per se, since the whole thing is likely to be all over the place anyway, but nevertheless with it being over three years on, it certainly plants a seed. More importantly, I see lots of reviews – admittedly mostly from 3 years ago – that describe a phenolic, band-aid mess. But with Dany you just never know – he even doesn’t know so why should I? As a spoiler alert, this was much, much better than my fears suggested.

Clear orange (avoiding yeast sediment) pour with a nice head for a beer of this age. Aggressive pour was necessary, but I expected that.

Nose has some citrus notes, with maybe a touch of the phenol mentioned before. Either way this is definitely not “medicinal” as the #1 feature. In the context of some of those reviews, I’m happy.

Some orange pith in the initial tastes and a little more of the band-aid, but again, in no way is this overpowering or unpleasant. A little acid too, but this is quite fruity – generically fruity. It finishes quite dry. There’s no noticeable funk here at this age, but the dry, orange based fruit is high and pleasing, and undoubtably the feature here.

In the end strong feelings of dried orange and some light touches of phenol. It sounds (judging by the other reviews) as if the 3+ years on the BB date has helped this beer a lot.