Tesco Finest Belgian Wheat Beer
Brasserie Du Bocq

 

(Notes of 20/06/2009) Purchased at the Tesco supermarket at just 1.59 quid, a discount price of course; the beer comes in a Belgian-style 750ml brown bottle with a curvy neck, corked and caged like a French Biere de Garde. BB 21/05/2010, served chilled in Rodenbach's slim, tall goblet.

A: the colour is like that of a cloudy perry or even semi-filtered sugar cane juice, coming with a slowly softening carbonation in support of a well-lasting white puffy foam
S: the main aroma is deeply grainy and fruity, underlined by pronounced but light-bodied citric peels, lime, sweet-ish grainy wheat and honey drink. Spiciness comes pretty mild but the coriander-seeds do ring a bell from the background. Overall, slightly too sweet on the balance but not unpleasant.
T: quite spritzy and sharp upfront, the taste is somewhat messy in structure but still features grainy wheats as the dominating elements on the palate, closely followed by traces of unfermented sticky sugar (a bit like sweetened and mashed Chinese green beans); coriander seeds and "bitter orange" (as described on the label) are both timid and next to non-existent, but in the end a difficult-to-describe spicy undertone and faintly chemical "bitter lemon" does linger for a short while.
M&D: the mouthfeel in general is fizzy and but not too "hyper", yet the body is somewhat in the lacking, allowing only the residual sugary elements to grant some kind of weight overall. This is a weird witbier, the messy structure of which is perhaps attributable to too many un-natural ingredients used in this brew (acidity regulator, salts, and antioxidant)...