The ’red’ one in this series, relatively new; the notification ’made with added fruit and caramel extracts’ I read somewhere is an ominous sign so I already begin to regret buying this, but let’s put it to the test anyway. Thin but stable and lacing, snow white head and pure orangey amber colour, cristal clear with low sparkling. Quite strong but one-sided and obnoxious aroma of canned peach, sundried tomatoes, lots of biscuit, perhaps some candied cherry, industrially fabricated cookies, bread dough, freshly baked cake, earth, banana, cheap brandy, tons of iron, burning plastic, industrial honey, flowers, cooked beetroot. Taste starts off sweetish and unnaturally sugary, restrainedly fruity (peach, red apple, tomato) with a (too) strong, sourish and minerally carbonation effect numbing the tongue; then a caramelly taste comes along, but in a sweet, industrial kind of way rather than from malts, while the initial sweetness keeps pushing and to make things worse, the backbone is thin, grainy and clearly metallic. Finish is dominated by the sticky industrial caramel and sugar sweetness from the onset, cloying and unpleasant, some herbal hops trying to fight it but not succeeding in doing so, and a hint of warming, rhum-like alcohol coming to the rescue but again to no avail; the toasted malts do make an effort to counter the sweetness, but they too, though stronger than hops or alcohol, have to admit defeit. Off-putting solvents have the last word. I never had much trust in this brand - which I have been familiar with for almost twenty years - and this abomination proves me right: totally redundant, way too sweet and clearly unbalanced. Did not like this one bit. I guess it is trying to benefit from the strong, top-fermented ’kriek’ style which has become popular in Wallonia and northern France in recent years, but I’d even prefer Kasteelbier Rouge, no matter how awful, above this. Bad experience, I sincerely do not understand the high score it achieves here.