One of my 'pet hates' in beer, the infamous Desperados brand, keeps coming up with new variants apparently, this one 'flavoured' with industrial aromas of rum, lime and passionfruit to lend it a 'tropical' flair... Can from a Delhaize supermarket. Thick and foamy, egg-white, bath-moussey, fizzing, irregularly but consistently lacing, pillowy head on a crystal clear, pure golden beer with light 'old gold' tinge and one single string of small-bubbled sparkling rising up through the middle. Aroma of passionfruit lemonade (as in a tropical cocktail) being very dominant, granulated sugar, faint lime extract (as in lime-scented bath soap) and even fainter rum extract, heavily weighing on even less flattering hints of spoiled button mushrooms (!), cleaning agent, wet plastic and dish water. Sugary sweet onset, glucose syrup galore and sticking to the teeth, with that dreadful ascorbic acid underneath, the two combined establishing an even more lemonade-like flavour than I was expecting; quickly the passionfruit extract is imposed on this infernal combo, while the basic structure of the 'beer' remains thin, watery even, with a faint sweetish graininess which is even hard to detect under all that sugar, aromas and lemonade flavour. Some carbonation fizzes on, but not too harshly so - alas, as it might have distracted from the flavours if it had been sharper... Nothing else happens apart from a weirdly astringent note in the finish, no hop bitterness or anything even close to that, but the 0.1% rum extract rearing its ugly head. I thought I did sense a whiff of grassy hoppiness all the way at the back, when this onslaught of bad taste has passed the tongue and only the bare essentials remain, but it could just as well have been that astringent rum element lingering on, ruining even the very last phase. Sugary sweetness sticks to the teeth and, perhaps even worse, that afwul, almost rotten dish water effect returns retronasally. I was obviously not expecting much here but viewed up close, it is even worse than I could have possibly imagined - the base beer is as fake and bland as it gets, but on top of that, you get cloying sweetness, a lemonade character which in my book will never work in beer, palpably industrial additives and even a kind of weird rotting odour in the background which I cannot even link to any of the classic brewing errors. It still does not beat the very worst beer I ever had, but it comes eerily close - Desperados, already at the bottom of my list, manages to drop yet another level in quality - astonishingly so. Maybe if you freeze it solid and offer it as water ice? Nah, even then it would be as disgusting as it is now.

Bottled 330ml. -at Karlovački Dani Piva. Golden coloured, medium sized white head, artificial ginger in the nose. Sweet and artificial ginger taste with light lime and sugary finish.

Fles 33cl in Appelscha gedeeld. Zoet, aardbei, citrustonen, candy, lemon. (30-8-2024).

Even tickie van de jeugd Gescoord.. blijf het maar matig spul vinden dit, frisdrank imo.. pic van the original omdat die op t aanrecht stond 😉