Expansion of the Gauloise range intended to benefit from the popularity of strong, sweet, red fruit ales in French-speaking Belgium and northern France nowadays. Expectations are low, even more so because I do not have very fond memories of the other Gauloises, being mediocre at best. This one has a thickly cobweb-lacing, pure pale lilac, dense and creamy head and deep, clear, bright fuchsia red colour with vivid fizz. Non-beery aroma of the not-exaggeratedly-sweet strawberry ice cream I remember from when I was a kid (the colour of the head looks exactly the same too), bubblegum, sweet cherry candy, liquorice lace, hints of cake dough, red cough syrup and banana liqueur; only when warming up to room temperature, does a vague impression of caramelly malt sweetishness appear. Very sweet taste, sugary, bubblegum, red candy, cloying, but fortunately there is not too much lemonade-like ascorbic acid this time to make things worse than they are; carbonation is fairly soft, resulting in a very smooth, creamy mouthfeel, full, with still a shadow of bready malts underneath, screaming for help as they are buried alive under candyish fruit sweetness but managing to stick up their heads a bit in the end; finish respects this bready malt sweetishness and even allows a trace of earthy hop bitterishness to peep through, but needless to say, the fruit candy sweetness wins in the end; it does, however, refrain from attacking the throat with sugary stickiness, which is a good thing for this particular style, in my view. A dash of warming, ’anonymous’ alcohol is a welcome feature here, as it provides a kind of drought against the sugar sweetness. The end result, after swallowing, is a beer which smells horribly like sweet candy and nothing like beer at all, starts off like sweet candy, but then (unsuccessfully) tries to become increasingly ’beery’ as the liquid proceeds its way through the mouth, leaving an impression of a strong and caramelly Belgian blonde with a lot of alcohol, but of course the candy sweetness persists till the bitter (or rather: lollipop sweet) end, where, I would like to add with emphasis, an unpleasantly wry ’chemicality’ also shows up - like the kind of medicine of which the horribly bitter ’real’ taste is masked with tons of sugar; I am unpleasantly reminded of the cough syrup I had earlier this week. In short: another overly sweet, sugary red fruit ale. I respect the fact that even this kind of ’deviations’ from the "core of beer" have a certain audience and I should look at this in its specific context, but I will always fail to understand why this enjoys so much popularity.

0.33l bottle. Red body, light pink head. Cloyingly sweet strawberry syrup aroma and taste. I can’t really get anything else, maybe a bit of cherries in the taste with a minimal hop bitterness in the finish. Way too sweet for me.