750 mL, corked and capped, the usual Fantôme presentation.

Big gusher, with a ton of very light, wispy foam cascading from the bottle. Needs a very quick inversion toward a glass to save the good stuff.

Mmm … pour is frankly, ugly. It has a butterscotch haze and resembles the thing I most hate in my (beer) life right now, a NEIPA. Ugly, ugly, ugly appearance, that looks like a glass of orange juice. I can’t tell you how much I hate the appearance of this. Looks like the wort, or perhaps more accurately, the yeast starter.

Nose has some citrus hops, and balanced sweetness. A touch of spice, infinitely more promising than the appearance. But then …

The beer is an odd one. I think it’s broken. Perhaps its most redeeming feature is the tingling mouthfeel that persists, and reminds me a little of a carbonated soda. It’s quite refreshing in that respect, but then we get to the tastes. Along with the carbonation comes a significant amount of orange, fruity sweetness. In the back end is where we get a more familiar Fantôme signature of some spice and light herbal elements. There are several reports of this being intended as a Double IPA, and I can kind of see some elements of that in there, but frankly it’s a mess, and ends up being a bizarre beer, even by Dany’s standards. Yeasty, light herbal, Double NEIPA appearance, this is an insane mess if I’m honest. If I had home-brewed it, I don’t think I would have bothered bottling it.

It’s hard to tell what the original point was, and that cannot be a good thing. It ends up as essentially alcoholic orange juice which to be honest, isn’t quite as bad as it sounds … but equally, this is not good. I’m beginning to think that I’m actually drinking the aforementioned yeast starter. Yikes!

I dunno, this seems like a drunken experiment gone horribly wrong. There’s little to commend this in any way, other than the carbonation, and … well, that’s about it. You usually know that you’re getting slightly odd things with Fantôme – and that’s why Dany’s beers have remainder some of my favorites –  but at the same time most of his beers are in a certain lane. This isn’t, and I really don’t think it shows anything good about either brewery. Sorry, a solid miss and a solid mess.