50cl can from an Albert Heijn in Ghent. Pours hazy yellow/orange with a small, dissipating, foamy, white head. The aroma contains banana, bubblegum (with banana taste), honey, sugar, some clove and wheat, iron and cooked vegetable. It tastes heavy to medium sweet and very light 'wheaty' bitter, but the finish is again sweet with notes of sugar and syrup. Light body, watery/sticky texture, soft carbonation. Fails the minimal expectations for a German Hefeweizen and adds an industrial, overly sweet touch to it.

From a 50 cl can bought at an Albert Heijn supermarket. Weissbier from Bavaria under the pseudo-German Lander Bräu brand - a blast from the past, when Central European style beers in the Low Countries (so including Belgium) were sometimes given German sounding names in order to lend them a certain quality status. This one in any case couldn’t care less about the Reinheitsgebot, as it uses not only maltose, but also acacia honey as a flavoring - first time I see this in a Hefeweizen, but at least they are honest about the maltose. Medium thick, frothy, lightly lacing, egg-white head, not as rocky and ’flowery’ as it should be for a Hefeweizen head and only sparsely fed by uprising bubbles, moving upwards through a hazy, warm peach blonde robe with almost olive greenish tinge. Aroma of banana mush as is to be expected from the style, but in a simple and rather overstated, bubblegummy, almost banana candy-like way, hints of honey (I assume residue from the acacia flavoring and a lot of it), apple sauce, clear ’can’ iron, melting vanilla sugar, soap, stewed white cabbage, strong clove-like, almost lightly medicinal phenols, dough, wet cardboard, hint of grass. Sweet bubblegummy onset, lots of isoamylacetate (banana ester), hints of overripe peach and sweet pear, softish carbo (could have been a bit livelier for this style, actually), soft and fluffy, soapy mouthfeel, sourish and soapy ’wheatiness’ as the main backbone, the barley factor remaining thin and cereally and not achieving the breadiness that makes a classic Bavarian Weissbier more pleasant. The added acacia honey flavor brings an unpleasant sweetness to the whole, in an artificial, industrially feeling and eventually almost ridiculously lemonade-like way, sticking to the back of the mouth and only accentuating the already overstated banana ester sweetness; metallic side notes appear towards the end as well and hops remain limited to a very ’muffled’, faraway dash of floral bitterishness deep in the tail; what I do get after swallowing, though, is a kind of subtle, but disturbing chemical, plasticky wryness all the way back in the throat, fighting for dominance against that soapy factor. Weissbier has been popular in the Netherlands for many years (as opposed to Belgium, where this niche is of course filled by the indigenous witbier), but somehow the larger Dutch breweries always manage to miss the point and make a caricature out of it; the ancient Bavarian Hefeweizen, if well made, is a beautiful, elegant and refined beverage, with just the right amounts of German yeastiness (genetically closely related to Belgian ale yeast strains), a good balance of wheat and - pure - barley and a ’noble’ hoppy touch for structural balance. This kind of Dutch industrial interpretations were never meant to aspire at that level of craftmanship and this one, by what I tend to regard as the most ’crudely’ industrial brewery of the entire Netherlands, is even worse than its competitors (like Brand Weizen or Grolsch Puur Weizen) by being more ’chemical’ and ’plasticky’ and incomprehensibly adding soapy acacia honey sweetness which brings it completely out of balance - inasmuch as there was structural balance to begin with. Worse than expected for me, maybe because at the time of purchasing, I had forgotten that Lander Bräu is actually a Dutch brand and was hoping for at least a Reinheitsgebot-compliant German one. This may well be the worst Hefeweizen I ever had.

Can. Hazy yellow color with white head. Aroma is dusty, esters, some fresh yeast. Taste is dusty, wheat, esters. Medium carbonation. Not good.

Hell hefiger, sehr künstlicher Antrunk. Vanille, von wo auch immer, süßlich, trocken. Getreide ist erahnbar. 7/7/5/5//5