Sugar rush

What was I thinking? Was I thinking? Look, they were in my eyeline, in the supermarket, labelled as BEER despite all other appearances. So that I could stop wondering whether they should be included on the blog or not, I bought them both, God forgive me, and here they are.

You will find a review of classic Desperados here, written in 2009. These are extensions of a brand that probably didn't need any. Both are at the same strength as that: 5.9% ABV.

Desperados is (loosely) tequila flavoured, but for Desperados Tropical Daquiri they've taken pains to point out that rum is the spirit invoked. It looks like a standard lager: a clear deep golden. It doesn't smell like a beer at all, however, with sickly sweet syrup of the generically tropical variety, done with passionfruit. To taste, it's not as sickly as I was expecting, something it has in common with the original. There's a clean base that has been syruped up but not completely destroyed. Where the beer side contributes most is the finish, cleaning up the worst of the sugary excesses so that they don't dwell on the palate. The promoted rum character does not materialise at all, which suits me as a disliker of rum-flavoured things that aren't actually rum. I mean, it's not good beer, but it could be much worse. There are "proper" artisanal breweries passing off products as fruited sours that are more sticky and unpleasant than this. Though as a fan of both beer and daquiris, this doesn't really give me any sense of either.

The spirit moves once more, and the next one is Desperados Red Caipirinha, claiming to be flavoured with cachaça, though I'm not expecting to find much of that. It's a dark rosé shade in the glass and, bizarrely, actually smells like beer. The listed additives are cachaça, which isn't a strong flavour by itself, and elderberry juice, which I'm guessing is mostly for the colour. That leaves the grain of the lager base as the main character in the aroma. It does taste syrupy: sweet and generically fruity, more raspberry and cherry than anything fancier. There's absolutely no sign of the spirit and it really doesn't resemble a cocktail of any kind. This is an alcopop in all things but smell. The previous one, and standard Desperados, do at least add interesting things to the syrup; this doesn't. Its USP is that it's pink. I'm not impressed.

In for a penny, in for a pounding. The same supermarket also sells Kopparberg's Orange Ginger Beer, and what with ginger beer having a bit of a moment in these parts lately, I thought I ought to give it a whirl. 4% ABV seems to be standard for this sort of thing, likewise the pale Golden-Delicious yellow colour. To taste, it's sweet, which is hardly surprising given Kopparberg's form with cider-adjacent products. You don't get much ginger, just a tiny pinch of spice; a spritz of heat in the back of the throat. In front of that is masses of sugar, which is mostly cleanly syrupy but includes a fun element of boozy orange, like a cheeky dash of triple sec. Half a litre of this was hard work. While it's light on alcohol, there's so much sugar here that I found it difficult, and I'm pretty tolerant of sweetness in beers. The orange gives it something of an interesting twist, but ginger beer fans would be much better off sticking to the examples from Smithfield Brewing and Kinnegar. Add your own orange to taste.

Well, I'm glad that's over. If you've ever hovered at the colourful, ultra-sweet, not-quite-beer section of the supermarket, consider this your cue to walk on.