Caractère

37.5 cl bottle. Pours cloudy orange, small white head. Aroma is fruity and herbal. Toasted and herbal. Nutmeg, biscuity. Herbal. Dry smd herbal finish.

Bottle shared. Hazy amber colour, creamy white foam. Nose of vanilla, oak, sweet peach, fruitiness. Medium carbonation. Taste is sweet, hints of whisky, fruity. Not bad but the price tag is crazy: €12 for 50cl for such a mediocre beer is too much.

F: big, white, not long lasting. C: orange gold, hazy. A: malty, bit woody chips, hint of whisky, bit vanilla, toffee. T: malty, light caramel, bit alcohol, woody chips touch, quite sugary, bit vanilla, very sweet with subtle woody tones, warming alcohol, nice bottle in woody looking gift box, this is not bad beer but miss some more complexity, still enjoyed, medium to full body, medium carbonation, the price 12,99€ is really crazy, at least I can use the gift box for transport other beers, 0,5l bottle from Delhaize Chazal @ Schaerbeek in Brussels.

Small, cream-coloured head, short-lived over clear caramel to amber coloured beer, lively carbonated. Sugar, caramel, herbs; aromatic, bit of incense, pinecones. Again caramel & incense, pale toffees, and a bit of CO² -induced sourishness; Cardboard and again some herb - sage, maybe. Subtle oxydation. Feels pretty well-carbonated, alleviating some stickiness. Medium bodied; Caractère might be just a step too far, but this is without any doubt the best Leffe ever - even the first one I’d drink again readily. 7/4/7/3/14

After that barrel-aged Duvel, another long-announced and (by many but not so much myself) much-anticipated wood-aged variant on a classic Belgian theme. I seem to have the dubious honour to be the first one to rate this new product from AB InBev, our new overlords here at Ratebeer so to speak, a fact I am still very, very uncomfortable with especially considering the tremendous loss of credibility serious users are now suffering - thanks again Joe, but let’s not go into that discussion again, this issue has been done to death in the forums and way beyond this site itself and we’ll see what happens in the future. That said, it is admittedly hard to remain unbiased here (and I mean that in a negative way), but I’ll give it an honest try. Comes from one of the apparently 50,000 bottles made of this, each containing 50 cl and looking a bit like a bottle of a sweet sparkling wine or something, of a type also used by e.g. Meantime, with neck and front label in low relief, cork and muselet and a hangtag elaborately explaining how the inquisitive and innovative ’master brewers’ of the brand are painstakingly searching for new flavours to please us, eventually creating this near-perfect beer - the text goes on, but after this much bullshit, excusez le mot, I could not bring myself to reading much further. Egg-white, initially medium-sized, loosely structured head fizzing away like the head on a coke and hardly leaving any lacing at all, in the end almost disappearing completely; cristal clear orange-tinged ’old gold’ robe, warm, with some loose bubbles rising up here and there. Aroma seems to be not that far removed from that weird Leffe Rituel 9°, which probably served as the basic beer here, but with things added making it even more weird; I get impressions of moist cigarette tobacco, cane sugar, old polyester doormat, vague generic blended whisky, toffee apples, cooked carrot, plastic flowers, freshly struck old-fashioned matches (pasteurization!) and burning frankincense, popcorn, straw, some vanilla-ish wood but in a ’mute’ kind of way, burnt ’witloof’, industrial caramel and dito honey. Expectedly sweet onset, in a ’dull’ kind of way, canned peach and dried banana, with an equally dull sourish touch to it; the sweetness dominates, with lots of residual white sugariness stretching all over the palate till deep into the finish. Carbonation is a bit fizzy at first but ’dies’ quickly, leaving a slick, bit glueish mouthfeel, made a tad sticky by the sweetness, which is accentuated by the unmistakable, ’rubbery’ and sweetish chicken food-effect of corn - again I have the feeling I’m having a strong pale Euro lager, which is probably close to the truth. Corny and cereally in the middle with a lot of added caramel flavours - industrial caramel of course, as in most of the Leffes - developing into a certain kind of weird, almost ’raw’ cigarette tobacco-like smokiness, which is present in that Rituel 9° as well, but is brought much more to the foreground here by the oak chips ’soaked in Scottish whisky’. The end is indeed vaguely whisky-like, with a lot of warming booze (though not exaggeratedly wry in this case) and that weird smoky flavour that keeps lingering, mingled into the residual, sticky sweetness. The wood chips admittedly add a touch of drying tannic-ness as well as a supplementary layer of flavour to the basic beer. Finishes dry more due to alcohol and a bit of wood than due to any hoppiness - which remains almost entirely ’structural’ here. The sweetness and that weird, almost ’out of place’ smokiness linger along with a firm dosis of heating, (cheap) whisky-like alcohol. Well... I have no idea to which extent it was a coincidence that this and that Duvel B.A. hit the market at about just the same time, it seems both were involved in a kind of race to storm the average Belgian beer consumer with wood-aged variants of their popular brands, but this beats the Duvel version certainly in terms of weirdness: this has all the - already - weird characteristics of Leffe Ritual 9°, further enhanced by those whisky-soaked wood chips. I have nothing against using wood chips to add tannic properties to a beer, but you cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear - this is still bland, sticky, heavily pasteurized, crudely boozy and very likely bottom-fermented Leffe we’re talking about, probably Leffe Rituel 9°. That said, this thing, though ugly in its ’industriality’, is at the same time so weird that I might find it among the more interesting Leffes I had to date, hence the 3+ score - and no, this rating has in no way been influenced by AB InBev in any kind of way... The tragic irony, perhaps, is that this disgusting company, the embodiment of all things most beer afficionados - and thus users of this site - loathe, is probably even technically uncapable of producing a really ’genuine’ wood-aged masterpiece. Take that if you read this review now that you own a minority of this place, you capitalist pigs!