Belgian Cherry Beer

Haeseveld, a restaurant since the eighties housed in a building dating back to 1909 (originally a florist's residence), taken over in 2019 and since then operated as a brewpub by Huyghe in Melle, may be a pretty place to spend some time on a summery afternoon, but their beers have not impressed me so far - on the contrary, they opted for the very predictable blondes, tripels and pilseners from the start, now supplemented with the equally obligatory sweet cherry beer, or indeed - worse even - a rouge. Medium thick, tiny-bubbled and densely structured, slowly breaking, pale lilac-tinged off-white, generally stable head on a clear ruby red beer with vermillion glow. Aroma of - unsurprisingly - a truckload of red Haribo 'dubbele kersen' candy, the old familiar 'poepegatjes' and 'dropveters', grenadine, white sugar, bubblegum and that is it, apart from, perhaps, some very vague background hints of green banana, wet white paper and dish water. Very sugary onset, one of the sweetest beers I had in a very long time and that even includes other rouges: this is grenadine rather than beer, with this liquid red 'drop' candy flavour monotonously dominating from beginning to end. Carbonation is on the soft side but still prickly, mouthfeel is very slick and more 'filled' from sugar than anything else - the sugars kind of hide the fact that this product has, indeed, a watery body (unsurprisingly at this ABV of course). Pink and heavily sugared, cherry-flavoured bubblegum springs to mind meanwhile, as well as Fanta Red and perhaps a touch of some sweetened pink dairy dessert, but everything remains thin and ridiculously simplistic. Not much more to report here than red candy in watery and extremely sugary form: this is below par even for a rouge, which means comparing it with other ghastly sweet and artificial 'red candy beers', none of which has any serious 'zythological' ambitions of course. This is as idiotically sweet, bland and boring as it gets even within its own dreadful category - I guess Haeseveld goes down yet another notch in my estimation. On a side note, I do wonder if this product is the same as the Belgian Cherry Wheat Beer which Huyghe produces for Marks & Spencer; I guess I will find out soon enough, as I brought a bottle of that one in the M&S supermarket of Aberdeen and took it home to sample. I honestly do not know what got in to me that day.