Extra strong version of that awful Cruzcampo (Spanish industrial lager), hopefully this will be at least a little bit better... Thick and frothy, lacing, very dense and stable, off-white head over a cristal clear, deep ’old gold’ coloured beer with orange hue, low in fizz, with a few tiny dots of yeast remainders here and there. Uninviting, simple and very industrial aroma of old bread crust, old iron, cooked potato, plastic, white pepper, old ’jenever’, dusty old cloth, brown paper bags, industrial caramel, dry pigeon food, crushed corn. Clean, sweetish onset, caramelly sweetness but feeling artificial (as if industrial caramel was added, as is often done in macro beers), paired with a kind of dim, soaked grain-like sourishness so nothing cloying; carbo is on the soft side for the style. No fruity esters - this is very clearly a lager. Middle phase - clearly lacking body - consists of sourish and sweetish grains with a thin layer of that industrial caramel sweetness draped over them, and very notably metallic, unsurprising given the strong ’old iron’ presence in the nose. This metallic aspect lingers into the finish, along with the caramelly sweetishness, the graininess and an added dash of grassy hop bitterishness, but there seems to be a plastic-like, more or less ’chemical’ wryness to it as well, and all the way at the back, I can clearly taste a gin-like alcohol presence, which should have gone by unnoticed in a beer below 7% ABV. Looks a bit fancier than your average Euro strong lager due to the bottle and the deeper, more orangey-hued look, but this is, in all, an artificially designed kind of heller Bock, quite possibly inspired by Italy’s Peroni Gran Riserva, with which it seems to have quite a lot in common (including the name). Yet, while Peroni delivers a still more or less credible and drinkable ’kind of’ Bock, this one fails completely to hide its heavily industrialized background, with a thin metallic body and chemical flavor aspects, making it quite an unpleasant beer for craft beer lovers like myself. I cannot enjoy this, but I can physically still drink it, the only reason why my rating is above 2/5.