Bottle at home, golden beer, small head. Aroma is sweet, malt, wort, medicinal. Taste is the same, sweet, wort, medicinal. nah

7/VIII/24 - 33cl can, shared @ home, BBQ with the neighbours, BB: 18/VII/25, L1 15:54 (2024-704)

Clear light yellow, almost fluorescent beer, small aery irregular white head, unstable, non adhesive, dissipates immediately. Aroma: pretty malty, grains, lemony, a bit grassy. MF: soft carbon, medium to light body. Taste: fruity start, lemony, gentle bitterness, pretty sweet, malty, grains. Aftertaste: more malts, a little metallic, grains, sweet, ok but not very pleasant.

The marketing machine behind this brand of non-alcoholic sports 'beers' has churned out a new one: Thrive Play, containing wheat malt and all the trusted ingredients (even a non-alcohol-producing yeast strain), plus, wait for it, vitamins D3, C, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9/11, B12, A and E - basically all the vitamin preparations they could get their hands on, it seems... Can from the Delhaize supermarket in Lokeren. Snow white, bit coarse and irregular but tight and stable, slowly opening, shred-lacing head over a hazy yellow blonde robe with olive-greenish tinge and lots of disparate sparkling. Aroma of sourdough and white bread dough, plaster, sweaty shirts after a few hours of intense exercise, curry soup powder, old gymnastic mats, canned and dehydrated chicken meat, turmeric powder, worn-out synthetic rubber - indeed a meagre non-alcoholic wheat drink loaded with industrial vitamin preparations, but in a musty kind of way. Somewhat sourish onset with a sweetish edge but both understated and dull, vague hints of pear and banana perhaps but very muffled, minerally notes connecting with this truckload of vitamin preparations on top of a slick, thin, grainy and indeed clearly soapy-wheaty main structure, the soapiness strongly amplified by the added vitamins, also adding aspects of plaster, rubber, chalk and something annoyingly metallic. The hops do try to add some genuine 'beeriness' with a floral bitter aspect in an otherwise watery finish but this bitterness eventually comes primarily from the vitamins and quickly starts to feel wry and 'off'. Disgusting - most dedicated sports people I know are not the greatest culinary gourmets (who knows what kind of 'health concoctions' they ingest without caring about flavour) and I am certainly not part of the intended audience here, but this feels like some forced medicin within a waferthin 'beery' frame. I was hoping for this one to be slightly better than the first (that dreadful 'IPA' now renamed Thrive Peak) because 'added vitamins' sounded a bit less bad than 'added proteins', but this is just as awful, if not worse. Who drinks this?