Bottle @ dad’s. Clear golden color, average sized white head. Smell and taste malts, light bitter grains, decently bitter. Average body and carbonation. Decent lager.

French witbier with moussy, creamily lacing, egg-white head with medium retention and hazy pale straw blonde colour with notable greenish hue; the equal haze is perturbed by strings of vivid fizz here and there. Aroma of industrial - not sharp - lemon juice or even lemon-scented air freshener, soap, starfruit, bread dough, lime cake, fresh sorrel, faint banana, unripe gooseberries, clear coriander, Conférence pear, sourish grains. Fruity, crisp onset, somewhat ’clean’ but still with vivid impressions of starfruit, unripe pear and some gooseberry, softly sourish with a sweetish touch, quite spritzy carbonation well fit for the style but calming down quickly, soft and rounded, smooth but somewhat thinnish mouthfeel. The sourishness, combining a dim, basic soapy sourishness of wheat with a sharper, more pronounced lime-like acidity, makes for a very refreshing mouthfeel, with a lot of retronasal soft lime juice or sweetened, almost hand soap-like lemon aroma; the soapiness is further accentuated by the coriander, as is to be expected from the style. Goes down as soapy as it began, with this soft ’industrial’ lemony touch dominating the finish and, frankly, becoming a bit tiresome in the end. Not bad per se, lacks a bit in malty breadiness perhaps, but it has an outspoken lime-like quality which, though feeling a bit ’fake’, lends it a fresh character which is easy to appreciate. Simple and straightforward for sure, but different from the old Hoegaarden standard. However: it says a lot that the brewer himself recommends throwing a slice of lemon in it - something a Belgian witbier brewer would never do - and that this style, which has become a bit outdated in its country of origin, still remains fairly popular in France. It is cristal clear to me that France still has a long way to go in order to produce really interesting beers; there is a lot of hobby brewing going on throughout the country but they seem to be stuck in Belgian clichés rather than trying to experiment and find something new. Of course, copying 20th century Belgian ale standards is exactly how the beer revolution in e.g. Italy or the Netherlands started - but that was in the eighties and nineties... Let us hope that French brewers are willing to draw from the rich wine culture of their country and find ways to incorporate that know-how into their beers, like the Italians have done - then France may one day become a truly interesting beer country.

Sampled at THT August. Bottle thanks to Maakun. Clear red with light pinkish head. Sweet strawberry syrup, malts. Over medium sweet. Near medium body, soft feel soft carbonation. --- Beer merged from original tick of Wendelinus Rossa on 18 Dec 2017 at 16:11 - Score: 5. Original review text: 2.7

Bottle shared at August THT. Clear peach red with a very thin white head. Notes of boiled corn, artificial sweetner, fructose. --- Beer merged from original tick of Wendelinus Rossa on 26 Aug 2016 at 19:31 - Score: 5