Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 5.5

Now here is one I love to rant about: a young entrepreneur, running a successful digital design company in Ghent which has zero to do with beer, having smelled money in the current beer hype and setting up a hip website to promote a beer he allegedly created along “the best recipe we could imagine” – complete with a somewhat dramatic photo of him diligently operating the stirring stick, a slogan (“are you a Tony”), webshop and so on. Obviously the brewery that actually created this beer called Tony is mentioned nowhere on the site, but all the circumstantial evidence I could find, points at BeerSelect, though at this moment I admittedly do not have one hundred percent certainty yet (I will further investigate this and correct it when necessary). Note that this Tony beer is sold under a whole string of different names: my bottle stated “Horny Tony” on the front label, but apparently there is also a “Drinking Tony”, “Lost Tony”, “Stony Tony”, “Found Tony” and so forth – but do not be fooled, these are all labels for one and the same beer. Very thick and foamy, eggshell-white, pillowy, cobweb-lacing, stable head on an initially crystal clear ‘old gold’ coloured beer with lively, fine sparkling, turning misty and a bit ochre-tinged with sediment. Aroma of banana peel, soggy old bread, quite a lot of DMS (overcooked broccoli), coriander seed, old cotton cloth, dry earth, raw turnip, damp straw, apple peel and a whiff of petrichor. Cleanishly fruity onset, banana ester mingled with some pear and green apple, sweetish with lively carbonation, minerally, over a glueish, smooth body, cereally and white-bready with some light phenolic effects that eventually become a bit plastic-like towards the end. Meanwhile a dash of coriander seed and some floral and grassy hop bitterness pass by gently, until a soft glow of warming, wodka-ish alcohol shows up, though in a mild and generally well-concealed way. Seemingly intended as an ‘edelbier’ (see Duvel, Delirium Tremens and so on), and a very trivial one if you ask me, adding absolutely nothing to the Belgian beer culture but instead rehashing late 20th-century clichés – and not even flawlessly so, as the DMS in the nose kept bothering me (even if I had worse cases of it). What irritates me the most about this beer, is of course the fact that it is as opportunistic as it gets: passion for beer, knowledge of current beer trends or traditions and love for the craft beer community are completely absent here, instead this one is designed to generate money and nothing else. Point off for that, and hopefully this whole beer hype “à la belge” with its continuous stream of meaningless and repetitive tripels, blondes and strong blondes will calm down a bit in the coming months and years. In any case I am definitely not a Tony.