33 cl can @ hotel room, Riga. BBE 09.04.2023 Aroma has roffee candy and wet paper. Flavour has toffee candy, some aweet malt. Finishes with grass and cardboard. Drinkable NA beer.

Oooof

The newest in the Leffe series of industrial abbey beers: a pale lager, launched in 2020 on the French market - and indeed nowhere to be seen in Belgium, where the brand originated. Quite an odd addition to the range - this once shouts 'redundancy' even before I open the bottle, which in this case strongly differs from the standard 33 cl Vichy bottles used for the other Leffes, containing only 25 cl and looking almost like a 'baby bottle', so to speak... Weird. Thick and foamy but quickly thinning, snow white, uneven-bubbled and slowly opening, cobweb-lacing head on a crystal clear pure and deep golden beer with warm 'old gold' glow and some fine strings of sparkling in the middle. Aroma of boiled corn water and sweet corn, iron pipes (and the addition of actual iron confirmed by the 'hand test'), banana candy, low quality industrial apple juice, plaster, wet polyester cloth, cloves (4-vinyl-guaiacol, as in other Leffes but many other Belgian ales as well) and a vague background whiff of cooked broccoli (DMS, not too unusual in industrial lagers). Minerally prickling carb and a sweet corn-like graininess open the palate, but without any complexity or refinement as expected; a slight touch of sweet banana bubblegum accompanies a plastery, thin, slender corn-like cerealliness, sweetish and 'empty', with clear metallic edges. Retronasally - apart from the cooked corn aspect - I mostly get pasteurisation and a vague whiff of DMS (again, broccoli cooked for way too long); a slight bitterness appears in an otherwise indifferenly plastery and cereally, watery finish, with a vague grassy aspect to it but also something chemical, as in the worst and most macro-brewed pale lagers this world has to offer. This is little more than a lighter (indeed "légère") and less sugared, more 'clean' version of Leffe Blonde, in itself doubtlessly also a lager; it seems as if out of sheer laziness, AB InBev decided to strip Leffe Blonde of all its 'extras' and reduce it to what it essentially is, namely a bland industrial pale lager. The Leffe stamp is indeed recognizable, in the nose but also in a late white-sugary sweet aspect popping up all the way at the back - but obviously this is never a good thing, especially not in a pale lager, where it only causes confusion. Conceptually weird little beer, very thin and industrial, but most of all: very much something nobody ever asked for.