For my money, which I am more than happy to impart upon this venerable Belgian family-run brewery, Kwak has one of the greatest noses in the world.
On raising the quirky 'yard of ale'-style stirrup cup glass to one's nose (which I do not currently possess, hence the chalice in the photo), relentless waves of boiled sweets and glacé cherry break over one's twice-blessed organ of olfaction.
The cherry morphs to tangy, sour-sweet Morello and prune on the palate, with a confusing and pleasingly dry finish, but the tackiness the brew leaves around the corners of the mouth remind us of the sweet barley malt that gives it its denseness and complexity.
At the currently recommended 5-6 degrees Celsius, this beer would have been even easier to quaff, which would both do its interesting qualities a disservice, and perhaps precipitate a swift encounter with the horizontal plane. I prefer this somewhere in the middle of the 8-14 degrees Celsius range, and suspect that leaving the beer to warm too long would exaggerate its barley wine characteristics. That's not necessarily a bad thing if that's how the fancy takes you - Kwak has some chameleon-like qualities in this regard - but I enjoy Kwak and Belgian beers in general for their alterity as much as anything else, and like to let it speak to me in its own voice rather than re-imagining it as a British barley wine.
That said, it would be a great choice to introduce a hardened barley wine lover to whose preferences seldom extended to the continent.
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