De La Senne Taras Boulba

De La Senne • Belgium

Taras Boulba is the perfect session beer — loaded with complex yeast flavors, hopped to perfection, and as drinkable as any beer you’ve ever tried. At 4.5% alcohol, it’s built for drinkability — we suggest buying it by the case.

You’re no doubt wondering where the name comes from and what the hell the foreign text says. It’s all been explained to us by the brewers, but we’re still not entirely clear about it. What we can understand is that a young Flemish man has gone and married a French-speaking Wallonian girl, and his father, Taras Boulba, is very angry. (Smeirlap means ‘fool’ in a bizarre local dialect, which combines Flemish and French, somehow.)

This is all a bastardization of the original story by Gogol, whose protagonist was Ukrainian and Eastern Orthodox. His son marries a Polish girl, a Roman Catholic, during the religious war between the two countries in the 1600s, and the Ukrainian father simply kills his son to eliminate the shame.

The label says this is “just the beginning of the story,” so surely the brewers have something else up their sleeves. We can’t wait.

Can you just trust us on this one? This beer rocks. Hard.

Style: Blonde Ale

ABV: 4.50%

Packaging: 330ml bottles; 6/750ml cork-finished champagne bottles, 30L kegs

Brewer Website: http://www.brasseriedelasenne.be/

Other Beers by De La Senne