B+ Pamplemousse

The newest Bertinchamps, a grapefruit and ginger beer apparently, bottle from Wijnegemse Drankenhal. Tightly lacing, moussy, snow white head with good edge retention and leaving a thin, disparate veil in the middle, on top of a cristal clear, deep and warm peach blonde beer with a honeyish orange-yellow tinge, becoming (only very lightly) hazy with sediment thrown into the glass. Aroma mostly breathes a lot of sugared grapefruit, almost reminiscent of Fanta Grapefruit or something along those lines, ascorbic acid (as in lemonade again), gari (candied ginger) but subtly so, refined sugars, lemon zest, pear juice, some faint banana, honey, vague accents of cooked vegetables and industrial cider. Very sugary sweet onset, a ton of orange and grapefruit lemonade including the sticky white sugar effect and artificially souring ascorbic acid, fizzy carbonation, slick and smooth mouthfeel. Grainy middle with softer ’sweet cereally’ edge, buried under this ongoing lemonade onslaught, carrying onwards to a cloyingly sweet finish with slick graininess underneath, bubblegum-like stickiness insufficiently washed away by a very subtle touch of herbal hops not providing bitterness worth mentioning; after the sediment has been added, a very light bready yeast touch appears as well. Bitterness almost entirely comes from a grapefruit juice-like effect, totally different from the usual hop bitterness but not feeling completely artificial. Sugary sweetness and ascorbic acidity remain after this. The ginger factor remains very limited, to a subtle ginger ale-like effect somewhere at the back, but not (at all) explicitly spicing things up the way I was hoping. This is a bizarre concoction: I was expecting a beer that celebrates the grapefruity character of New World hoppiness adding ginger to spice things up, but what I got, is this sickly sweet, lemonade- or indeed Radler-like soda pop. I hate both lemonade and Radlers - or cloying sweetness in general - so I am not amused by this bad joke, to say the least. I honestly believed Bertinchamps had the potential to become an interesting craft brewery once, but with this kind of ridiculous experiments, they simply refuse to enter the international craft beer movement. A big step backwards compared with their other beers which - though completely cliché in terms of style - often have something odd and quirky to them. At least this thing is a bit more ’beery’ and less artificial than most industrial Radlers, but it remains a caricature at best and I cannot think of any other redeeming feature. Why Bertinchamps, why?

At Modeste BFF 2016. Pours rather clear blonde. OK white head. Smell is very thin ans fruity, almost like a soda. Taste is rather sweet, intense(!) fruityness. Candy, soap. Too much fruitjuice . Sweet. Syrupy aftertaste