Around Europe on the dry

As I mentioned yesterday, Carlsberg hosted the EBCU for one day of their most recent meeting. The Carlsberg Conference Centre is richly appointed, and just beside the coffee machine there was a fridge offering a plethora of non-alcoholic beers from the company's European portfolio. Well, it would be rude not to.

Birell Belgian Wit, from Poland, is delightfully peachy, sweet and a little sticky, with overtones of lemon. There's that worty quality I associate with non-alcoholic beers generally, though the fruit content is high enough that it gets away with it. Not sure I can imagine drinking lots of it, however.

There's also a Birell Lager, which honestly tasted more like a wit than the wit. Or maybe a radler. Either way, lemon features big. It doesn't have much else to say, just a mild metallic tang in the finish. The texture is thick and un-lager-like, though that does give it a gorgeous stiff head of foam on top. While not unpleasant it's just too sweet. Pretty typical of this style.

Carlsberg's own Nordic Hvede is a wheat beer. This is lighter textured but no more beer-like. The aroma is all rich baked apple while the flavour is mixed fruit bubblegum. After the initial candy punch it finishes dry and quite watery. Most of the others I'd nod through but this is actively unpleasant.

My fellow tasters made faces when it came to the Greek offer, Fix 'Aneu. It's a pale yellow colour. It smells horribly funky; agricultural, like slurry or silage. The flavour isn't as bad, but still terrible. Over-boiled vegetables is the main thing, and a sharp metal tang, leading to carbolic soap. It is, in short, absolutely disgusting.

San Miguel 0,0 at least looks better: quite a rich golden colour. Sweet and worty candyfloss is the aroma, and it's sweet to taste, finishing with a bitter tinny tang. The worst of both worlds, really.

Switzerland brings us Feldscholossen Alkoholfrei Blanche/Weizenfrisch. It's fairly inoffensive. The worst of it is a soapy tang, but that sits atop a bright and juicy pineapple and stonefruit element. The texture is nicely fluffy. I still wouldn't count it as good though: it never manages to shake the feeling of laundry detergent.

Naturally there's a Feldschlossen Alkoholfrei Lager. It starts with a sharp and sickly aroma, leading to a medium-sweet flavour carrying a sense of toffee popcorn, but finishing quickly. There's a light dusting of banana and familiar tangs of tin and soap. Pretty poor fare, but at least it's not loud and brash.

I'd forgotten that Carlsberg owns Baltika. Baltika 0 is another wheat-based one, very pale and only slightly hazy. There's a delicious lemon candy aroma and that adds a different sort of sweetness to it. The base is a standard worty alcohol-free weiss but it's quite successfully masked by the flavouring, perhaps more grapefruit than lemon here. Yes it's a little artificial tasting but it's quite nice, like a posh lemonade. Adding syrup is one way of hiding non-alcoholic beer's flaws. My Russian isn't up to much, but I can't see any mention of added flavouring on the can, mind.

The Lithuanian option was a stout, called Go Juodas. It looked convincing in the glass: deep brown with a thick creamy head. There's a strong chocolate aroma and, unsurprisingly, it's hugely chocolatey to taste. It's sweet like a chocolate breakfast cereal though surprisingly light textured and properly stout-smooth. I really enjoyed this. The flavour profile hides the innate sugariness common to non-alcoholic beers. I'm not at all sure I would even have pegged this as alcohol-free.

And I almost missed Tourtel Twist because I didn't think it was a beer. It certainly doesn't taste like a beer, being powerfully sweet, thin of body, with a tacked-on lime and mint taste, like a basic alcopop. I'd complain it's a drink for people who don't like the taste of drink except for the fact it's not drink. It's a sugary fizzy thirst-quencher and doesn't really belong with the others who are at least trying to seem like beer. It's probably not legal to sell pre-packaged 0% ABV margaritas to kiddies, but if it were they'd taste like this.

And that, in a mere six posts, was my Copenhagen. A proper smorgasbord of a beer city it is.