Pours cloudy blonde / yellow. Very stable, creamy white head, with big lacing. Smell is overly focussed on coriander. Some orange peel in the back. Taste is full, sharp citrussy. Soapy, mild lemonpeel. Crazy-intense on the coriander. Weak body, AVG carbo. not good at all.

Tap @ Flandes. Hazy pale yellow / white. Nose wheat, coriander soap. Fl soapy, soft wheat, lemonade.

The follow-up to the old Haecht Witbier, which was a cleaner, more bland and uninspired imitation of Hoegaarden - now having become a bit stronger (5.1 vs. 4.8% ABV), differently spiced and put under their "Super 8" brand, which they probably think is their Insurance for the future. Bottle from a Delhaize supermarket. Initially thick, stable, irregularly but tightly lacing, egg-white, moussy head over a misty straw blonde beer with ochre-ish tinge. Nose of a whole lot of - frankly unexpected - artificial sweet citrus, not unlike Fanta Lemon or something along those lines, accompanied by subtler hints of green banana, a lot of soapy coriander seed, potato mash saved since yesterday, green apple, white bread, bath foam or indeed hand soap and a lot of it, bubblegum, cucumber juice, unripe gooseberries and a persistent, obnoxious odour of DMS (stinky sulfuric cooked white cabbage). Harshly carbonated onset, distracting from the actual flavours - which include a whole lot of bubblegummy banana ester and a dash of green apple acetaldehyde, next to vague impressions of unripe pineapple and hard Conférence pear; the sharp carbonation numbs the tongue at first and coarsens an otherwise slick, very soapy mouthfeel, continued in the middle by a whole lot of soapy wheat (apparently both unmalted and malted wheat having been used here), with thinly 'white' and cleanly bready edges. Meanwhile, that Fanta-like, sugary, artificial citrussiness cuts through the whole, creating an admittedly superficial but - to me - very unpleasant lemonade-like effect which in the end seems to be only reinforced by the soapiness of the coriander. Hop bitterness is never an important factor in traditional European wheat ales, but here it remains all but absent. Ends with soapiness, wheaty breadiness, a chalky accent, some coriander and, superficially but still enough to sincerly bother me, that sweet, sugary, Fanta-like citrussy lemonade thing, even to the point where it becomes a bit cloying, along with plastic- and paper-like notes. Only after swallowing does a brief, earthy hop bitter accent appear - too little, too late, I would say. Whoa... this is much worse than I expected, very lemonade-like, artificially flavoured and almost Radler-ish - never thought I would say this, but in sampling this abomination of a witbier, I'm beginning to miss its humble predecessor. This is a very different beer indeed, a drag queen of a witbier, ostentatious, grotesque and tawdry in its Radler-inspired make-up - Pierre Celis is spinning in his grave now, if only this were a boring Hoegaarden clone... I've been observing Belgian beer culture and Belgian breweries for almost twenty years now and industrialized Haacht has always struck me as being completely uninspired, boring and dramatically lacking in personality - this one may be an attempt to counter that image, but they could not have made a worse choice. I was relatively pleasantly surprised by the fact that they could come up with something remotely IPA-like recently, but this one shatters all my hopes that this brewery can ever become a significant player in the field of tasteful and creative brews even at 'average Belgian beer drinker' level. Shame on Haacht for making a caricature out of Pierre Celis' creation, which they originally tried to follow slavishly. Clearly they have no clue even when it comes to Belgian traditions. I never liked this brewery one bit and this one only put me in a rage. Awful and not even recommended for people from abroad who want to explore the old Brabantian witbier style. And why a brewery of this size and with this amount of experience does not even notice the huge amount of DMS in this beer is completely beyond me!