To my knowledge, the first of these rock band beers made for a Belgian rock band, namely Channel Zero, popular in the nineties and enjoying a modest revival recently - hence this beer, I assume, as well as lead singer Franky De Smet-Van Damme's likely having drawn inspiration from beers for AC/DC, Motörhead and so on. Of course, being Belgian, his beer needed to be Belgian as well, so of all the good breweries in this country, he ended up at Strubbe... Plastic foil-covered steinie bottle from Drankenhal Van Callenberge in Stekene. Medium thick, quite creamy and stable, dense, pale greyish white, intermittently membrane-lacing, slowly dissipating head over a misty, deep ruddy-burgundy bronze beer with copper red hue. Aroma of cooked cloth and cooked apples, the heavily sugared and medicinally intended elderberry syrup my grandmother used to make (very strongly so), artificial forest fruit jam, Pepsi cola, raisinbread dough, candied fig, iron, bubblegum, warm rubber, treacle, something leathery, 'cuberdons', cough syrup candy (Antwerp 'borstbollen'), tooth paste, nutmeg in the distance. Very sweet onset, forest fruit jam in an industrial way, almost cola-like actually, not very pleasant and sticking to the teeth; dull sourish edge, notes of cooked apple and strong bubblegum (isoamylacetate), medium carbonation. Quite full but sticky mouthfeel, bit syrupy due to the residual sugariness, strongly sugared dark berry 'coulis' or jam effect weighing heavily on a slick, resinously caramelly and thinly bready malt base. Light metallic notes add further annoyance - as well as this rubbery, bit wry bitterishness in the end, clashing with the cough syrup candy- and forest fruit extract-like 'dark and spicy' sweetness that was very thickly put on top of whatever basic beer they used. Some wry, 'jenever'-like alcohol and a dull spicy effect as well; sugariness, as in some sweet Belgian 'kriek' beer, sticks to the teeth. All the flavours clash in the end, leaving behind a ruin of a beer, incapable of resurrecting this classic nineties band's old glory. Bubblegummy, rubbery, way too sweet and a bit metallic: most things that could have gone wrong, did effectively go wrong here. Like a tripel fuelled with a thick layer of sweet elderberry and other dark berry syrup - seems as if it was either this, or the umpteenth 'heavy kriek' along the lines of Strubbe's own Keyte Kriek Magic, which is probably about the same thing but with cherry syrup replacing the forest fruit syrup. Help, what is going wrong with Franky?