Next to the blonde, there is another new and equally pointless expansion of the old Pauwel Kwak brand on the market now: this 'rouge' version, which in 21st-century Belgium tends to refer to strong, artificially red fruit-flavoured and heavily sugared ales - one of my least favourite (sub)styles, so I am probably starting off on the wrong foot here... To call this a cherry beer would be stretching it too much: the ingredients list mentions only 0.3% cherry extract (obviously not real cherries but I think that goes without saying), and the colour mostly comes from 'black carrot' and blackcurrant syrups; lemon juice (no doubt of industrial signature) has also been added. Looks like we are in for a treat here... Very thick and rocky, heavily plaster-like lacing, pale 'dirty' pink-beige, fluffy and utterly stable head on a crystal clear, admittedly pretty ruby red beer, a very deep and intense pure red glow with coppery edges and lots of fine-bubbled sparkling. Aroma of, what else, 'poepegatjes' and red Haribo candy (and a lot of it), old 'dropveters', Fanta Red lemonade, clove, plaster, wet synthetic towels, dry breakfast cereals, white bread, 'kriekenjenever' with even some noticeable alcohol, fainter hints of 'speculoos' or gingerbread and rubber. Sugary sweet onset, lots of red candy again but admittedly a bit less strongly so than in other 'rouges' and less so than feared, countered a bit by a soft sour edge from the lemon juice but still feeling very lemonade-like and artificial; blackcurrant and cherry only in the most 'plastic'-like, fake way possible, as in fruit-flavoured ice cream. Moderate fizz, supple and lean body, thinnish and a bit 'empty' like the blonde one, with white candi syrup probably constituting an important part of the malt bill along with slick corn and only then barley (indeed corn is mentioned before barley on the ingredients list - so it is not even an adjunct but a major part of the 'malt bill' here). Meanwhile the sugariness clings to the teeth and this artificial blackcurrant flavour remains dominant, accompanied by quite a emphatic spicy clove-like effect; ends bubblegummy, sugary and red-candy-like, but the spicy effect and a glow of warming, in this case 'kriekenjenever'-like alcohol bring some desperately needed distraction, even though the alcohol is - as in the blonde - too obvious here. The sweetness lingers, but that lemony streak, in an indeed industrial and Fanta- or Sprite-like way, lasts just as long; yeasty or malty aspects are near unnoticeable and I am still searching for the hops. Boozy, red chewing gum 'beer' like most other rouges, another confirmation for me that this will never be my 'style'; this is just that awful blonde buried under fake fruit extracts and sugar, but I have to admit that the peppery effect in the finish (a combination of the clove element and alcohol) brings some distraction from how terrible this concoction really is - the only reason I am rating it a little bit higher than the blonde, which was even worse than e.g. Leffe Blonde for me. Another shameless marketing fad and another disgrace to the Belgian beer heritage by the world's biggest brewing company, something many average Belgian beer drinkers are strangely still proud about even if the Belgian part has become smaller and smaller after all those mergers and take-overs - but that is another story.

The marketing boys at AB InBev apparently considered it a good idea to throw a couple of new variants on the old Bosteels Kwak beer on the market, possibly to spark renewed interest in this famed beer, which admittedly was a pioneer in the (even internationally) highly influential 'streekbieren'-revival in Belgium of the late seventies and eighties; apart from this blonde variant, assuming the original Kwak is to be seen as an amber beer, there is also a red variant which I have been postponing for weeks now - but hey, we are here for science, so let us crack open these new variants, with the blonde first. I pour it into a wine glass rather than the 'koetsiersglas' Kwak became famous for, and which was a clever marketing move back around 1980 inspired by the old English yard glasses (but do not believe the story about this Pauwel Kwak having invented it please - I would have to write a rant about that some day). Thick, moussy, intricately cobweb-lacing, egg-white, relatively regular head on a crystal clear, warm, pure and 'metallic' old-golden beer with sparse strings of sparkling; remains clear till the last drop so very obviously filtered. Aroma of banana-flavoured candy and banana milkshake (isoamylacetate to its worst, bubblegummy degree), granulated sugar, industrial honey, soggy breakfast cereals, prepacked pancakes from a supermarket, industrial apple juice, the 'cooked' smell of pasteurization, rice pudding, blonde candi sugar syrup, whiff of grass, old clove, iron, plastic. Sweet and simplistic onset as expected, lots of banana, some sweet apple and pineapple but in the most artificial and industrial, 'flat' way possible, lively carbonated; lots of white candi sugar syrup (doubtlessly a huge part of the malt bill for economic reasons) with cloying effect. Slender, glueish body, lingering residual sugariness sticking to the teeth in a more than honeyish way, over an essentially thin and cereally, very lightly caramelly core; 4-vinyl-guaiacol comes in towards the end, clove-like but also a tad smoky (as in: burning plastic), as is the case in some of the Leffe beers from the same producer. Clearly 'cooked' and pasteurized, with a cloyingly sugary finish, lots of 'glueishness' and very little hop bitterness apart from a brief grassy note; making things worse, the alcohol, which should be unnoticeable at this strength, adds a warming, 'jenever'-ish glow all the way at the back. Bosteels was swallowed by AB InBev some years ago and I passionately hate its new owners, for many reasons, one of them being the consistently abominable quality of their beers: it does not take an expert to see and taste that a beer like this is made as cheaply as possible (though not sold to consumers as cheaply as possible, of course) and every beer afficionado truly loving beer as an ancient, versatile and amazing product, should detest this way of working. This blonde Kwak fits perfectly in that approach and frankly tastes like a stronger version of Leffe Blonde: a lager (!) made with huge amounts of malt adjuncts, cooked to death and artificially carbonated. The concept of this beer itself was already unclear to me (why making new Kwak variants in the first place?) but whoever thought of this bland, overly sweet, childishly simplistic, redundant recipe deserves to be drowned in a barrel of non-alcoholic blonde Leffe. This kind of industrial rubbish makes me angry - this blonde Kwak is even much worse than I was expecting (based on reviews I read) and I do not expect the red one to be better, on the contrary. Shame on you, AB InBev, once again.