🖥️💉😏🔪🩸🛥️

A tripel you say. Copper brown, clear. Sweet and light, malty, plenty of banana, watery finish. Yeah not a tripel, and not great.

One of the first products by a new company specializing in low alcohol beers - jumping on top of the hype, because low alcohol beers are a commercially very successful trend in Belgium (and other countries) these days. This one, apparently made with three grains (barley, wheat and oats) but also artificial aromas, spices and sucralose (an artificial sweetener low in calories), is supposed to mimick the flavour of the tripel genre, paradoxically so, as one of tripel's main features is of course a high alcohol content - and distinguishes it from an ordinary blonde... Thick and very frothy, very tightly cobweb-lacing, egg-white, pillowy head on an initially clear, deep and warm 'metallic' orange blonde beer with swirls of fierce sparkling throughout, turning misty with sediment. Sweet aroma of honey waffles, plaster, candied peach, soap, banana candy, sugar loaf, old apple cake, candyfloss, baking soda, pumice, whiffs of meringue, natural rubber, dry baker's yeast, cloves, children's medicine, effervescent tablets. Sweet onset with a slight sourish edge, filled with that sucralose I assume, but low in actual fruitiness, even if peach, sweet apple and dried banana aspects are more or less noticeable; medium carb, small-bubbled, soft and quite creamy mouthfeel (the oats, probably), but very soapy as well. Admittedly it does feel 'thicker' than expected from a beer at a mere 0.4% ABV, with a soft, fluffy middle; cereally, soapy-wheaty and a bit caramelly core, with light clove-like spiciness in the end but, more than anything, a dominating plaster- and rubber-like, 'chemical' wryness, reminiscent of aspartame but I guess this is the sucralose again. Some hop bitterness, too, but I cannot get past this unpleasant, almost medicinal wryness - plaster with low-calory sweetener is my last impression upon swallowing. I can understand why brewers make so many attempts at 'colouring' and diversifying the low ABV range in beer these days, there is still a growing market for them, and admittedly some of them are slowly getting better at it. But I'll have even a traditional 'tafelbier' over this one any time, thanks. Not my cup of tea at all, even in spite of the interesting idea; as for its 'tripel' ambitions, this tastes as much like a tripel as e.g. Halve Maan's Sportzot does, a similar product with a comparable flavour profile.